Stories that Count

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of using narratives to frame a political issue on individuals’ attitudes. In an experiment, we asked participants to read either narrative or informational news articles that emphasized the potential economic benefits or environmental consequences associated with shale gas drilling. Results indicated both news formats (narrative vs. informational) and frames (environmental vs. economic) had significant immediate effects on issue attitudes and other responses; narrative environmental news had a significantly greater impact than informational environmental news. Cognitive responses and empathy were significant partial mediators of narrative impact. Environmental narratives also had a more significant impact on individuals’ delayed issue attitudes.

Truthful or Engaging?

“…167 attitude) (Knobloch et al 2004;Machill et al 2007;Oliver et al 2012;Shen, Ahern, and Baker 2014;Yaros 2006Yaros , 2011. Yet, the "audience demands good storytelling" repertoire seems to automatically evoke the "facts not stories" repertoire.…”

Audience Reactions to Climate Change and Science in Disaster Cli-fi Films: A Qualitative Analysis

“…701) define transportation as being "absorbed in a story or lost in a narrative world." When audiences feel transported, they become more open to incorporating new facts, attitudes, and beliefs presented in the narrative into their own worldviews (Moyer-Guse, 2008;Shen, Ahern, & Baker, 2014).…”

Measuring the Effects of Interpretive Journalism on Trust and Credibility Perceptions in the Context of Political News Coverage

“…Scholars have examined media distrust from various points of view central to the aims of this study. These include the effects of different types of framing (Becker, 2011;Cole, & Greer, 2013;Hopmann et al, 2015;Shen, Ahern, & Backer, 2014), political affiliation (Jones, 2004;Lin, Haridakis, & Hanson, 2016;Swift, 2016), media credibility (Appelman & Sundar, 2016;Cole & Greer 2013;Johnson & Kaye, 2009;Stroud & Lee, 2013) and interpretive journalism included within reporting (Barthel & Gottfried, 2016). Although scholars have long discussed distrust in the media, there has been less emphasis on the factors that lead to trust in political news coverage.…”

“…A second important area of scholarship related to trust in political news is the content of coverage. In particular, scholars have examined at length the effects of framing on distrust in political news coverage (Becker, 2011;Hopmann et al, 2015;Shen et al, 2014). For example, studies exploring the use of comedy in political news coverage (Becker, 2011;Guggenheim, Kwak, & Campbell 2011;Hoffman & Young, 2011) have found a positive correlation between comedic framing and increased trust (Becker, 2011).…”

“…Findings from Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy found that during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the "horse-race" topic accounted for 42 percent of campaign coverage (Patterson, 2017), which serves as a prevalent example of strategic game framing in the U.S. Further, results from a study conducted in Europe showed that "exposure to media framing of politics as a strategic game leads to decreasing media trust, a pattern that holds for all media except the tabloids" (Hopmann et al, 2015, p. 792). Additional work related to the content of political news coverage has examined the impacts of narrative usage within reporting on specific issues (Shen et al, 2014). While the impacts of framing on media trust have been subject to a variety of research, the role of interpretive journalism and its effect on content within political news coverage is in need of further empirical investigation.…”