Media Effects

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the media on audiences and society from two perspectives. The traditional approach examines how different media outlets (e.g., newspapers, radio, and television) impact on how audiences perceive the information contained in the outlet or how the audiences use a particular outlet through the media. The contemporary approach examines how the media are used by others to change attitudes and beliefs. Both traditional and contemporary approaches to media effects help to better understand how the media -and those who use it -influence people and society.The question of whether the media really have an effect on some group of people has been studied for some time. Trying to define what 'media effects' are is not simple in today's increasingly complex media milieu, but typically definitions are focused on either what the media does to an audience or how that audience uses the media. One of the earliest media effects models was the 'hypodermic' model that posited that the media could affect changes in attitudes, beliefs, and ultimately behavior. The model, however, failed to take into account individual beliefs and uses of media. Later models have focused on how dependent people are on the media for either information or specific uses of the media. We classify these models as 'traditional.'A second approach to media effect models, with a more persuasive and less passive overtone, has come into play. This phase, which we classify as 'contemporary,' focuses on specific models that help to understand how the audience can be persuaded into changes in attitude, belief, or action. While the traditional models have focused on the outlets -newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and now the social media -the contemporary models focus on mediating factors in the outcome of the media effects (Stacks, 2010;Stacks and Michaelson, 2011). Traditional Media Effects Models Agenda SettingThe idea of agenda setting can be traced back in the 1920s when Water Lippmann (1992), journalist and social commentator, argued in his Public Opinion that people were not capable of directly experiencing the bigger world, thus had to rely on the images and messages constructed by news media to form perceptions. Bernard Cohen (1963) refined Lippmann's ideas by pointing out that the media do not tell people what to think, but what to think about. Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (1972) first put this idea to empirical test by comparing news media agenda and public agenda during the 1968 US presidential election. Their study found strong correlations between the prominent issues of the news media and the leading public issues. This initial effort established what is known as the agenda setting theory, since which more than 400 empirical investigations have been conducted and published.Although agenda setting originated as political communication studies, its research scopes and applications extend beyond political settings to a wide range of public issues. Furthermore, researchers have examined the agenda-setting role ...

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