The Engaging Effect of Exemplars: How an Emotional Reaction to (Dis)Similar People in the News Media Affects Political Participation

Abstract

Journalists use ordinary people as exemplars in their news stories to make their reports more interesting and understandable for the audience. This journalistic practice has often been discussed as a potential democratic problem because of its effects on perceptions of and attitudes toward political issues. Taking exemplification theory as our starting point and drawing on research from decision-making and social psychology literature, we add to this discussion by examining how exemplars in news reports affect intentions to participate in political activities. Using an experimental design, we randomly exposed respondents to a news report with or without exemplars or no news report at all. We found that for respondents who were similar to the exemplars, exposure to a news report with exemplars triggered an empathic concern and increased political participation intentions. For dissimilar respondents, exposure to a news report with exemplars decreased empathic concern, which in turn decreased political participation intentions. By highlighting these differential effects of exemplars in the news media on political participation, the study shows how a common journalistic practice potentially engages some citizens in democracy and disengages others.

Episodic and Thematic Framing Effects on the Attribution of Responsibility: The Effects of Personalized and Contextualized News on Perceptions of Individual and Political Responsibility for Causing the Economic Crisis

“…Thus, it is especially episodic framing that may function as a counterweight to the increasingly dominant neoliberal discourse of elite policymakers who put blame on individual citizens rather than on system failure (Guetzkow 2010), whereas thematic framing on itself does not affect attributions of individual responsibility. A decreasing attribution of responsibility to individual citizens as the outcome of more exposure to episodic framing aligns with the conclusions of previous experiments in the North-European context (Aarøe 2011;Andersen et al 2017;Boukes et al 2015). However, it conflicts with U.S.-based studies and Iyengar's (1991) prediction that episodic framing restricts citizens' ability to place public issues in a more general or abstract context and, therefore, would make the individual a more likely target for responsibility attributions.…”

Association of online political participation with social media usage, perceived information quality, political interest and political knowledge among Malaysian youth: Structural equation model analysis

“…Social media has also been identified as the antecedent to PK apart from political participation. It has a positive relationship with knowledge levels by helping youth on seeking information on political activities (Adamu & Mohamad, 2019;Andersen et al, 2017;Gottfried et al, 2017;Ohme, 2020;Schafer, 2020;Weeks et al, 2017). The association between PK and media consumption also is found in online platforms (Lee & Xenos, 2019) which suggests the feasibility of this relationship on the social channels.…”

Whose stories are told and who is made responsible? Human-interest framing in health journalism in Norway, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.

“…On the other hand, more recent studies within exemplar theory have demonstrated that human-interest stories actually might increase attribution of responsibility to government and support for political intervention (Boukes et al, 2015; Ostfeld and Mutz, 2014), particularly when the individuals featured are similar to the audience (Andersen et al, 2017); are portrayed as deserving and innocent (Hopmann et al, 2017) and when the story resonates with deep-seated values and prior beliefs (Chong and Druckman, 2007). As revealed by experiments, who is chosen to represent or illustrate an issue impacts how it is understood and where blame is directed.…”