Consumer choice in political news

Marc Trussler

Master’s Thesis

Department of Political Science

McGill University Montreal,Quebec May 2013

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree Master’s of Arts c Marc Trussler 2013 Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the role that consumer demand for news plays in political behaviour. While a great deal of study has been done to examine media supply, very little has looked into the other side of the equation. If we are interested in the distortions media creates, than part of that equation must be a concern with what types of news individuals select – particularly in the 21st century context of a “high-choice” media-environment. I examine this problem through a new experimental method designed to overcome shortcomings in the existing research. Previous studies have focused their methodologies primarily on achieving generalizability, while the method here seeks to find a better balance with internal validity. I use this method to tackle two different areas: demand for negative and strategic news (Experiment One); and demand for news that confirms test-subjects ideological and partisan biases (Experiment Two). Both studies produce significant results that bolster confidence in this new methodology.

ii R´esum´e

Ce m´emoiretraite du rˆoledes demandes des consommateurs au niveau des nouvelles et la relation avec le comportement politique. Alors que plusieurs tudes ont trait´ede loffre m´ediatique,peu se sont int´eress´ees`alautre cˆot´ede la m´edaille. Si nous sommes int´eresssaux distorsions cr´e´eespar les m´edias,il faut ´evidemment ´etudierle type de nou- velles que les individus s´electionnent. Cela est dautant plus justifi´eque nous vivons dans une ´ereo`ulenvironnement m´ediatiqueoffre plusieurs choix de nouvelles aux consommateurs. J´etudiecette probl´ematiquetravers les m´ethodes exp´erimentales afin de surmonter les failles m´ethodologiques des ´etudesexistantes. Les recherches pr´ec´edentes se sont concentr´eessur le fait davoir des r´esultatsg´en´eralisables,alors que la pr´esente recherche tente de trouver un meilleur ´equilibreavec la validit´einterne. Jutilise cette m´ethode afin de pr´eciserdeux diff´erents champs : la demande pour des nouvelles strate´giqueset n´egatives (Exp´erience 1); et, la demande pour des nouvelles satisfaisant lid´eologieet l’identification partisane des sujets-tests (Exp´erience2). Les deux exp´eriences produisent des r´esultatssignificatifs qui renforcent la confiance `aavoir en cette nouvelle m´ethode.

iii Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible, first and foremost, without the guidance of my supervisor, Dr. Stuart Soroka. His help and encouragement were vital throughout the process. It is a joy and a privileged to have a mentor who trusts and believes in you. Several colleagues were involved in coding articles for this experiment: Quinn Albaugh, Clare Devereux, and Jessica Behnke. I thank them for their patience with a tedious process. The data for these experiments could not have been collected without the tireless work of lab assistants Tea Rosic and Matthias Heilke – thank you for deferring to my neuroses. Merci ´aEva Falk Pedersen de l’aide avec mon r´esum´een francais. To all my friends, thank you for your help and encouragement along the way. To my parents, thank you for always being there to boost my drive and fortitude; I’ll never forget, “Being a brave boy means doing things you don’t want to do.” Finally, thank you to the late George Carlin, whose astute insights into supply and demand sparked this research.

iv Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii R´esum´e ...... iii List of Tables ...... vi 1 Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Why Demand? ...... 2 1.2 What do consumers want? ...... 8 2 Methodology ...... 11 3 Experiment One: Negative and Strategic News ...... 19 3.1 The Cynical Media and their Audience ...... 20 3.2 Specific Methodology ...... 28 3.3 Results ...... 30 3.4 Discussion ...... 39 4 Experiment Two: Selective Exposure ...... 48 4.1 Selective Exposure ...... 49 4.2 Specific Methodology ...... 57 4.3 Results ...... 61 4.4 Discussion ...... 70 5 Conclusion ...... 78 5.1 Extension One: Uncovering Motivations ...... 79 5.2 Extension Two: Untangling Effects ...... 80 5.3 A Day in the Life ...... 81

v List of Tables Table page 3–1 Article Selection ...... 30 3–2 Aggregate Story Selection ...... 31 3–3 Modelling Story Selection I ...... 33 3–4 Modelling Story Selection II ...... 37 4–1 Amended Headlines ...... 58 4–2 Aggregate Story Selection ...... 62 4–3 Modelling Story Selection I: Full Sample ...... 63 4–4 Modelling Story Selection II: Canadians ...... 64 4–5 Attention to Article ...... 69

vi CHAPTER 1 Introduction From your perspective, what is the nature of politics? For example, you presumably have an idea of what politicians are like: how they talk, how much they tell the truth, how much they care about their constituents – but how do you really know that this image you hold is true? More specifically, how much of that image is based on actual experience with politics, and how much is simply a reflection of the information you have received in your media environment? Our limited real experience with politics means that a large portion of what we consider to be ‘reality’ is, in fact, an image we’ve constructed from the mediated experience of watching and viewing news. This is not a new concept – indeed the idea of the press creating “images in our head” has been a prominent line of thought for nearly a century (e.g. Lippmann 1922). What I mean to add here is a refinement on this notion, one which helps square it with the modern reality of news consumption. Below, I hope to make the case that an individual’s ‘media environment’ – and thus their belief about the reality of politics – is derived through some combination of what news organizations supply, and what individuals demand. While the issue of supply has been studied extensively in political science, the study of demand is still in its infancy. The advent of new technologies that give consumers a great degree of control of the content they view makes the study of this half of the equation increasingly important. Previous work has been done in this area on an aggregate level – in particular Marcus Prior’s excellent Post Broadcast Democracy(2007). The present thesis brings the study of high-choice media to the individual level through the implementation of an experimental

1 method specifically designed to test consumer demand in news. I will proceed by first outlining why it is so important to study individual demand, and discuss the small body of previous studies that have looked at this problem. Based on the shortcomings of those studies, I propose a new methodology that more effectively manages the trade-offs between internal and external validity inherent in any experimental method. The results of two separate studies – one on the propensity for individuals to read negative and strategic news, the other on the self-selection of bias-confirming news – will be presented. Both studies produced significant results that bolster confidence in this new experimental method. 1.1 Why Demand?

Work in political communication has long been concerned with the way in which the media structure our perceptions. More specifically, the field has has asked the broad question: what do we see, and what do we not see? The media is, in a sense, the filter that stands in between us and reality: they quite literally ‘mediate’ our experience. The idea of a ‘mediated reality’ should be familiar to anyone who has attended introductory philosophy lectures: the denizens of Plato’s cave experienced just this phenomenon. Chained in place from birth and forced to view the mere shadows of human artifacts passing in front of them, they have no choice but to call these shadows ‘reality’. Now certainly, the gap between our perceptions of politics and the true reality is not as wide as that between the shadows in Plato’s cave and the blinding Forms – but there is still a need to question how media affects our perception. Indeed, there is a long history of such academic thought. In Lippmann’s (1922) influential Public Opinion, he spoke of this in the chapter “The World Outside and the Picture in our Heads”. For Lippmann, the objective reality of the world comes to us only in small bits through the media, such that we are left with an incomplete picture of the ‘World Outside’. The important step is what we do with this incomplete information. Like Plato’s cave dwellers, instead of realizing the incomplete

2 nature of our information, we abstract that information to be a true picture of the world beyond ourselves (Lippmann 1922, 4). The hypothesis posited by Lippmann has been borne out by empirical work more re- cently in the areas of agenda-setting (e.g. Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Iyengar et al. 1984; Iyengar, Peters and Kinder 1982; Krosnick and Kinder 1990; McCombs and Shaw 1972; Miller and Krosnick 2000) and cultivation effects (e.g. Gerbner and Gross 1976; Gerbner et al. 1978; Hawkins and Pingree 1982; Potter 1994). Both of these critical areas – part of the “minimal effects” school of communications research – examine how the content of media structures the viewer’s perceptions of the real world. The seminal example of agenda setting is found in Iyengar, Peters and Kinder (1982), who found that items frequently mentioned by news media were deemed by the viewer to be the most important issues facing the county. In other words, citizens shifted their perceptions about the relative importance of issues to fall in line with what news organizations talked about, not the other way around. In this way, the media is seen to set the agenda on public discourse through its attention to some pieces of information over others. The cultivation effect is more concerned with how the distortions of reality found in media become the truth for the viewers. This was classically found to be the case in the area of crime – with viewers perceptions of violence increasing with exposure to news broadcasts that feature violent crime (Gerbner and Gross 1976; Holbrook and Hill 2005).1 This helps explain, for example, the gap that exists between the reality of declining crime rates, and the

1 Note that individual’s perceptions of the level of crime in their own neighborhoods are generally accurate. This is in line with the majority of findings on the impact of media, which generally find that we are affected by media most strongly in areas that are beyond our immediate perception – such as national crime and foreign policy. It is my contention that politics exists almost entirely beyond our everyday experiences, and as such is primed to be ‘mediated.

3 image most citizens have of an increasingly violent world (Romer, Jamieson and Aday 2003). More generally, the literature on cultivation has strongly laid out the case that individuals abstract information about the world beyond themselves to be the true picture of that world. In this way, any difference between reality and the media’s portrayal of that reality will result in a gap between reality and the viewers image of reality. All of this clearly begs the question: what do our media environments look like? In answering this, the vast majority of research has looked at the problem from the supply of media supply. That is, researchers were primarily interested in the process that the media uses to turn a vast reality into a digestible news product. In other words, they took the question of: what do we see and do not see?; and changed it to: what does the media print, and what does it not print? Take for example, the classic piece by White (1950) on a small town newspaper editor’s decision making process regarding what makes it in to the newspaper, and what stays out. Closer to the present, work that is concerned with the way that media distorts reality focuses much of its attention on the news-making process (e.g. Ericson, Baranek and Chan 1987; Sabato 1991; Meyrowitz 1994; Patterson 1994; Lichter and Noyes 1995; Bennett 1997; Farnsworth and Lichter 2007; Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn 2004; Capella and Jamieson 1997). While I do not discount these studies that look at the process of making news, it must be acknowledged that these studies remain largely agnostic about the role that demand might play in structuring media environments. Indeed, this change in focus is increasingly critical, due to the fact that the media landscape has been rapidly changing over the last few decades – a shift scholars have categorized as being from low choice to high choice (e.g. Graber 1984; Negroponte 1995; Mutz and Martin 2001; Sunstein 2001; Prior 2005, 2007). The media environment that we exist in today exists on an arc of change that began in the early 1980s. Previous to this shift was a period dominated by network news broadcasts and high-circulation newspapers. Due to their high operating costs, these traditional media

4 outlets could only operate with a profit if they garnered a relatively large viewership. As a consequence, they had a strong incentive to appeal to a very wide range of the public, and as a consequence, an incentive to include a very wide spectrum of information (Sunstein 2001). By trying to please as many people as possible, the editors of these programs and papers inadvertently created sources of news that gave consumers a strong appreciation of the topics that are important to society as a whole. As such, Sunstein (2001) labels these traditional media“General Interest Intermediaries”, in that viewing these sources would give an individual a strong appreciation of what was important to society in general. But over time technology began to change, and the cost of disseminating information began to progressively decline. The dominance of General Interest Intermediaries began to recede in the 1980s and 1990s with an explosion of new, cheaper, news sources. The pre- eminence of network news gave way to hundreds of cable channels offering 24 hour news coverage. Talk radio stations with national reach saturated the market. Local news sources that were previously only able to cover regional developments moved aggressively towards covering national political events (West 2001, 85). In the American case, for example, the major networks share of the viewing audience declined from 90% in 1976 to 43% in 1999, with viewers being displaced to the multitude of cable sources (West 2001; Baldwin, Barrett and Bates 1992). As news sources get smaller, the ability to cater the content they provide to a specific group of people increases. Approached from the opposite direction, smaller sources can afford to ignore, or even antagonize, whole segments of the population (the example of American talk-radio is indicative here). In other words, a source can come to produce content designated to meet the specific demands of a more homogeneous audience. Put simply, as sources become smaller, the congruence between supply and demand increases. It is the internet that allows for the highest degree of choice – and not just at the level of source, but on an article to article basis. Negroponte opined in his 1995 book, Being Digital,

5 that the internet would allow for the creation of a“Daily Me” – an agglomeration of news that fits perfectly to each individual. In his words “Instead of reading what other people think is news and what other people justify as worthy of the space it takes, being digital will change the economic model of news selections, make your interests play a bigger role, and, in fact, use pieces from the cutting room floor that did not make the cut on popular demand.” (Negroponte 1995, 153) The modern reality of news selection from seems not far from this prediction (Sunstein 2001). The internet allows for a huge range of choice in both source and articles when compared to the previous media environments. The proliferation of ideologically motivated blogs is an example of alternative sources individuals can now turn to for their information (Turrow 1997; Adamic and Glance 2005; Hargittai, Zehnder and Gallo 2005). Furthermore, tools like RSS feeds and customizable link aggregating sites (Reddit.com being the most prominent as of 2012), allow for individual choice to shape which articles one is exposed to. Even the simple fact that headlines must be clicked in order to gain information online is important. The act of motivated selection of a particular story is much different than the old-style newspaper format where all the information is laid out in front of you. Other online tools beyond our immediate control shape our media environment as well. Pariser (2011) documents how online algorithms, used by companies like Google, filter the information provided to you in a way that reinforces the choices you make. Indeed, Pariser’s work is particularly important, as it shows how this process can occur even in the absence of technological sophistication on the part the user. This reality of choice has become increasingly mainstream over the last decade. Consider that from 2000 to 2010, the percentage of Canadians using the internet rose from 51% to 81% (WorldBank 2011) – and all evidence suggests this usage is increasingly crowding out more traditional news sources (Nie et al. 2005; Pew 2011; Liebowitz and Zentner 2012).

6 If political communication is still to be concerned with how an individual’s media- environment affects their view of reality, then focusing on the types of choices people make is clearly important. The original question of: what do we see, and what do we not see?; must be modified a third time to ask: what do we choose to view, and what do we choose not to view? It is critically important to understand what kind of choices individuals make in this environment, and how these decisions produce content that is different‘ from what their neighbours may choose, and what the mainstream media provides.We know from the literature on agenda setting and cultivation that systematic biases in news content can affect the way consumers view the world. However, instead of looking at the ways that the media distort reality, we’re interested here in the ways that our own idiosyncratic choice creates bias. If individuals prefer negative and strategic news over positive and policy focused news (Experiment One), or prefer news that matches their partisan and ideological biases (Experiment Two), clearly their media environments (and resulting view of reality), will be affected in ways not predicted by models that only consider media supply. In addition, the new nature of news broadcasting not only lets consumers exercise more choice, but it also gives providers better opportunities and incentives to produce content that matches those choices. In other words, identifying what consumers want from media is crucial to understanding the products that profit-driven media produce. In a sense this concern is not at all new, as we can imagine that news content has always been, at least in part, driven by a desire to sell a product. However, it also true that as news sources get smaller, so increases their ability to tailor to more specific audiences. In this way, the effect of a particular demand is likely much greater in the modern news environment. This is particularly salient in the first experiment, which studies demand for negative and strategic news, which many scholars have posited as being normatively bad for democracy. If an unconscious, and unstudied, demand exists for these news areas, it may help account for their high popularity with the providers of media content.

7 Ultimately, the skewed balance of media that idiosyncratic choice produces may result in an equally skewed image of reality. In this way, the effects of media on politics are not limited to the process of electoral decision making – an area that dominates most of the literature.2 Instead, unconscious and idiosyncratic biases in selection – even in a low- status non-election environment – can directly influence political behaviour. To stretch the Platonic analogy from the beginning of this section further: the possibility exists that we are in ‘caves’ of our own making: chaining ourselves to limited media perspectives, unconsciously ignoring information that challenges our perceptions, and creating images of the world beyond ourselves that are dependent on our individual cognitive biases. 1.2 What do consumers want?

If idiosyncratic choice creates these perverse effects, then understanding what individuals demand is the logical next step. The question is how to accomplish this goal. The simple and most common solution is to simply ask individuals what they want from media. Take, for example, the question of whether people demand media that monitors the error of politicians (also investigated in the first experiment below). The PEW center has asked the following question on the topic 16 times from 1985-2011: “Some people think that by criticizing political leaders, news organizations keep political leaders from doing their job. Others think that such criticism is worth it because it keeps political leaders from doing things that should not be done. Which position is closer to your opinion?”. West (2001,

2 This is not to say that there aren’t important areas where media choice could have an impact on voting behaviour specifically. Consider the attention Althaus et al. (2011) draw to the problem of “assumed transmission” by media. Many of our theories of voting behaviour assume that full information is transmitted to each citizen on important matters (e.g. Nadeau and Lewis-Beck 2001), when the reality is that all events are mediated by the press. While Althaus et al. were mainly concerned with supply side problems of transmissions, it is not a stretch to say that the distortions individual choices create can also generate transmission failure that may further exacerbate existing problems in voting behaviour (e.g. low-info individuals in referenda voting Magleby 1984; Lupia 1994; Gastil, Reedy and Wells 2007).

8 104) uses these data to suggest that support for the so called “watchdog” roll of the press declined from the mid 1980’s to the mid-1990’s. Looking over the entire 25 year period that the question was asked, we see that the low point of support for the mass media appears to be in the late 90’s when West was writing. At the start of the period, 1985, 67% of Americans selected “keep political leaders from doing things that should not be done”, and 17% selected “keep political leaders from doing their job”, the rest selected “don’t know”. These numbers declined to a low of 55% and 39% in 1999, and in 2011 were back up to 58% and 25%. There seems to be some evidence for West’s claim, then, that individuals modify their views about what media ought to be as media alters it’s tone of coverage. However, there is reason to be wary of the survey evidence. Consider the step West has made from concept to indicator – does the question listed above really capture attitudes towards the media and only attitudes towards the media? Asking about an individual’s feelings about news coverage is likely highly influenced by the current tone of politics and the media. The particularly vitriolic political climate surrounding the Clinton Presidency – for example the Federal government shutdown of 1995 and the Lewinski scandal of 1998 – may be what is driving the shift observed by West. In other words, increased response rates to the statement “the media keep political leaders from doing their job”, may be picking up people who are simply fed up with politicians not doing their jobs. Alternatively, the responses could be driven by simple partisanship. Those who support the president may think that the scandal driven media is out to get ‘their man’. While those opposing the president may cheer a press that aggressively pursues scandal. Ultimately, the confounding nature of history means that accessing underlying values on news-selection is impossible without also capturing other values.

9 Additionally, there is evidence that attitudinal responses to survey items about media run counter to actual behaviour. Graber (1984) found in her panel-research that individ- uals “frequently grumbled about oversimplified treatment of all news”, while being unwill- ing in their actual habits to view more complex coverage (Graber 1984, 105). Individuals in her study, “preferred simple stories, and stories that readily fit into their conceptual schema”(106). Similarly, Neuman (1991) made the observation that those who called for public-affairs programming tended not to watch it when it was actually made available Neu- man (1991, 95). It seems that individuals may be more than capable to say one thing and do another. In this way, simply asking individuals what they want in media is not sufficient. Clearly, a method that is able to separate behavioural and attitudinal responses is needed to derive what it is consumers will demand in this high-choice media environment. The next section describes the method designed to reach this goal.

10 CHAPTER 2 Methodology A small number of studies have actively attempted to examine political media prefer- ences on a behavioural level. These can be split into two groups: those that study individuals in the field, and those which occur in a laboratory setting. Indicative of the first is the work by Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn (2004), and two articles by David Tewksbury (Tewksbury 2003, 2005). The method in these articles is characterized by large, nationally representative samples of individuals who take part in the experiment on their home computers. In each case, individuals were provided with CD’s or software which tracked their consumption behaviour. Based on categorizations made by the researchers, the respondents’ activity could be analyzed for patterns of behaviour. For example, Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn (2004) examined the relative propensity to view articles of different topics concerning the ongoing 2000 US election, with the goal of studying the relative importance of ’horserace’ news frames. Tewksbury (2005) instead took the level of analysis to be individual news websites, and examined the homogeneity of readership of various outlets. Key to this methodology is that the participant takes part in the experiment on their computer at home. This “at-home” method has some clear benefits and downfalls. On the one hand, having a respondent make selections in regards to news consumption in a ‘natural environment’ generates external validity. Our ultimate goal, after all, is understanding how people act when reading the news as they normally would. It seems logical, then, to have an experiment which replicates that condition. However, the participant is unobservable and uncontrollable in this situation, leading to a lack of experimental control; and this lack of experimental control means that we cannot be confident in the validity of our results (for

11 example the authors above could not be confident that the respondent is only getting their news from the test CD or software). Perhaps a more troubling factor is that for all of the above studies, individuals had to actively “turn on” the tracking software (by accessing a CD in Iyengar et al., and signing into a proprietary browser in Tewksbury’s studies). As such, the fact that they were being studied was present in the individual’s mind as they began to make news consumption choices. If the original intent was to replicate the experience of simply reading the news as one normally would, than certainly this latter condition seriously harms the effort. We are dealing with nuanced effects (split second decisions between different articles and sources), that have a clear potential for social desirability to work its way in. The probability that individuals would act differently than they normally would – say by selecting a less sensationalist website that is known to contain more reputable journalism – is high enough to warrant concern. The second type of study - the experimental method – is typified by the “dynamic information board”, primarily used and popularized by Lau and Redlawsk (2006), (for an example more proximate to this thesis see Meffert et al. (2006)). This method – pioneered for use in consumer research (e.g. Carroll 1990) – has the purpose of exposing the participant to a variety of preselected information and tracking which decisions are made. In its original conception, participants would be presented with a matrix of information from which to make selections: for example, a variety of household cleaning products in rows, sorted by their environmental friendliness across the columns. Lau and Redlawsk (2006) use a variation on this where the information is not labeled and organized, which causes individuals to make active decisions between alternatives in a natural way. This process requires “motivated information processing”, a type of cognitive activity utilized by individuals when attempting to make preferential, or ranked, decisions. For Lau and Redlawsk and Meffert et al. the experiment centers around a fake “election cycle”, which respondents are to participate in. They are presented over the course of the experiment with campaign material – news

12 headlines, candidate information, and poll numbers – concurrent to what would be occurring during a real-life campaign cycle (on a much shorter time span, obviously). By analysing what information is viewed, the researchers hope to uncover what types of information have utility in the creation or solidification of vote choices. This method has the benefit of analysing consumer choices in a “motivated” environment, while controlling for the biases individuals may have about the real-world of politics. The dynamic-information-board method of analysing choice in media is a direct offshoot of voting-behavior literature. Due to this, the experiments like Lau and Relawsk and Meffert et al. are more concerned with what types of information individuals use to formulate a voting decision, rather than the the information they view on a day-to-day basis. The difference is important. The experimental method presented in this thesis is interested in making more general claims about how individuals read the news, with the broader goal of understanding how individual demand generates perverse outcomes. With this in mind, introducing motivated reasoning through a fake election-cycle introduces a level of artificiality that seriously undermines claims of external validity. Instead, this experiment relies on the normal political motivation that people ought to feel when presented with political information. Considering our goal to focus on people’s everyday news-reading habits, it would be detrimental to add in artificial motivation structures. In addition, the method of Lau and Redlawsk still suffers from the problem of experimental effects; that is, the knowledge of being studied systematically affecting selection choices. With these studies in mind, we can begin to think about how to build a better method of understanding consumer choice in news selection. On the one hand, the at-home studies are strong as they maximize external validity by placing the individual in a natural environment; however, they lack experimental control and have problems of experimental effects. On the other hand, the information-board method has much better control, such that very specific articles can be presented to the test-subjects so that they have to make active and direct

13 choices; however, the fake-election cycle aspect harms claims of external validity in regards to the goals of this thesis, and this method also has the problem of experimental effects biasing the outcome. Certainly one option for an improved method would be to devise an at-home experiment in which the participant did not know that their choices were being tracked. However the problem of experimental control remains; and further, the ethicality of tracking individuals website usage without their explicit consent is problematic.1 Instead, this thesis attempts to derive a laboratory method that minimizes the problems found in the information-board method, and successfully manages the conflict between inter- nal and external validity. Along these lines, the following section on methodology proceeds on the premise of meeting four, admittedly contradictory, goals: 1. Maximize the external validity of the experiment by creating as “natural” a news- reading environment as possible; 2. Minimize the effects of social desirability on news selection by making respondents believe that their news selections are not the object of study; 3. Use an experimental setting that allows for a high degree of control over the presented material so participants have to make choices between alternatives; 4. Match news selection decisions (behavioural data) with survey questions on partici- pants stated preferences on news content (attitudinal data), so that implicit preferences for media content can be directly compared with explicitly-stated preferences. The experimental method derived to meet these goals consisted of three segments. First, the subjects accessed an artificial news website with a variety of stories they could choose to read. Second, they watched a number of Global TV news stories that they were led to

1 I return to the potential usefulness of this research design in the Conclusion chapter of this thesis.

14 believe were the main focus of the study. They then answered a brief questionnaire. The research used undergraduate students at McGill University as test subjects. As this experiment is looking at a cognitive process, rather than trying to create a population estimate, using a non-representative sample with respect to education, age, and income is not as large of a problem (particularly with the addition of survey data that allows for ex-post facto controls). There is no reason to believe that the cognitive processes of University undergraduates are different than the more general population. Further, Mor- ton and Williams (2008) discuss how external validity for experimentation is not as much about comparing the conditions of the experiment or makeup of a sample to reality, but rather a process of iteration with different samples that eventually satisfies the conditions of generalizability (Morton and Williams 2008, 345). This experiment is therefore a first step in demonstrating that unconscious cognitive processes are relevant to everyday news consumption – but repeating this experiment across different samples and times would be necessary for a full claim of generalizability. The main component of this experiment was the test-subject accessing an artificial news page coded in html and run in the MediaLab program available in the Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship’s McGill media laboratory. Thirty news articles – chosen at random by the computer from a batch of fifty – were presented on the page. The software is able to track which news articles are clicked, in what order, and the length of time an individual stays on the page. In this way, it is possible to determine to what proportion, and in what order, individuals view articles. The pool of fifty news articles were selected from the weeks directly preceding the exper- iment from the Globe and Mail for Experiment One, and both the Globe and the National Post for Experiment Two. They were then coded for the desired attributes by a team of expert coders. The causal theory for both experiments requires that the stories be relevant to the expected utility of political choices for the individuals participating. For this reason, the

15 stories had to be recent, and about Canadian politics specifically. Headlines and articles were coded for both tone (positive/negative/neutral), as well as topic (policy/strategy/neither) in Experiment One. In Experiment Two, the headlines and articles were coded for partisanship (pro/anti Conservative Party) and ideology (left/center/right).2 In comparison to the “at home” experiments of Tewksbury (Tewksbury 2003, 2005), having control over all of the articles in the experiment allowed each to be coded individually. The subjects in Tewksburys experiments were able to view any article on the internet, so his analysis is limited to looking at, for example, the propensity for an individual to use a certain website. More specifically, having codes for both tone and topic in experiment one, and ideology and partisanship in experiment two, allowed the separation of these effects. By classifying each story on two levels, each type of article can be looked at while controlling for the variation in the other category. For example, the hypothesis of experiment one asserts that the most disproportionately popular articles will be negative/strategic articles. However, it may be that negative articles – regardless of their topic – are simply more popular. This system of coding was derived to meet goal (3) above. Individuals were informed that the purpose of the experiment was to track their eye movements as they watch a number of Global TV news stories. For this purpose, the webcam light on the experimental computer was turned on (no video was recorded), and the test- subjects were given, as part of the briefing, an explanation of how the (fictional) eye-tracking software operates. They were told that, in order to obtain a base-line measurement on their eye-movements, we would have them browse some news articles for a specified amount of time. This should have been a sufficient condition to allow them to act in a relatively normal

2 More on coding can be found in the “Specific Methodology” section of each experiment.

16 manner when browsing the news-content, as they would believe their responses are not the object of study. McDermott (2002) discusses the possible confounding effects of experimental bias in political science experiments. Implicit cues can be given regarding what sort of behaviour the study is looking to find by simple acts such as reading the briefing in a certain manner (McDermott 2002, 340). As such, the briefing document was written in such a manner to emphasize the eye-tracking portion of the study, while presenting the news selection “base- line measurement” as almost an afterthought. Test-subjects were likely to concentrate on their actions in the fictional experiment, while acting in a more natural manner in the news- selection section of the experiment. This deception is the method which has been selected to meet criteria (1) and (2). It is felt that this misdirection will result in less social-desirability bias in news selection, then that which occurred in the studies by Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn (2004), Meffert et al. (2006) and the studies by (Tewksbury 2003, 2005). A survey was administered after the fictional eye-tracking study to determine what the test-subjects think the media ought to be like (along with providing the opportunity to ask about a number of other possible control variables). It is here that we can meet criteria (4). When the respondents are taking the survey, they are still under the impression that the news-selection portion of the experiment was a baseline measurement. For this reason, we can get them to answer questions about, for example, their interest in negative over positive news, and compare those answers to their actual behaviour. The question may be raised about whether this lab-based news-selection environment accurately reflects reality, and can thus ever attain external validity. McDermott (2002) points out that many critiques of the experimental method are based on its failure to achieve a “mundane” realism – when really we should be striving for “experimental realism”. In her words:

17 “Experimental realism refers to impact in its most important sense: Do subjects believe the situation, problem or issue they confront? Does it engage and interest them? Does it capture their attention? If so, then experimental realism has been achieved...” (McDermott 2002, 333) I believe that this experiment does achieve experimental realism. The deception present sufficiently distracts the test-subjects in a way that would induce them to act in a normal manner when selecting news articles. In addition, the artificiality imposed was done so to increase the internal validity of the experiment, and does not impair experimental realism. It is clear that the four criteria set out in the introduction pull in two separate directions, in that experimental control and internal validity – such as setting up the news articles to present direct alternatives – comes at a cost to having a natural news-reading environment and external validity. I believe that this experiment has done the best job of balancing these two countervailing goals in a way that brings the best possible outcome for both external and internal validity. The next two sections present the two set of experiments performed for this thesis: the first, conducted March of 2012, dealing with negative and “strategy” news coverage; and the second, conducted in December and January of 2012/2013, which deals with selective exposure to partisan and ideological information. Each section will lay out the background research on the type of media content it is concerned with, provide hypothesis for behavior, and lay out the specific methodology to be used. The goal of each section is primarily to look at what sort of demands people make of the news, and how this may affect both the content of news, and individual’s perceptions of politics.

18 CHAPTER 3 Experiment One: Negative and Strategic News1 This first experiment is concerned with the presence in media of two related frames: (a) negative news frames that generally cast politicians and politics in an unfavourable light; and (b) cynical strategy2 coverage that focuses on the ‘horserace’ and conflictual aspects of politics – thus implying that politicians are motivated by power, not the common good (Sabato 1991; Patterson 1994; Lichter and Noyes 1995; Farnsworth and Lichter 2007; Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn 2004; Capella and Jamieson 1997). Both of these frames are said to be increasingly pervasive in news content, while at the same time, they are also derided as being detrimental to the functioning of democratic society, and ought not be demanded by consumers. As such, probing why they are supplied has been a topic of much writing. The goal of this thesis is to discuss how individual demand creates peculiarities in individual’s media environments. The current literature on negative and strategic news frames, however, is predominantly interested in the supply side. It purports that the paradox

1 This chapter has also been produced as a stand-alone manuscript – on which I am the lead author – with Dr. Stuart Soroka. I alone woked on the content for both these pieces until July 2012, at which time I created two copies of that work: one which I began to work on collaboratively with Dr. Soroka; and the other – this chapter – which I continued to work on solely. 2 I defer here to Capella and Jamieson’s (1997) definition of strategy coverage: ”(1) win- ning and losing as the central concern; (2) the language of wars, games, and competition; (3) a story with performers, critics and audience (voters); (4) centrality of performance, style, and perception of the candidate; (5) heavy weighting of polls and the candidates” (31). In this way it includes both the ”game” schema and ”horserace” coverage – which often become muddled in the literature.

19 of negative and strategic news is explained by particular processes and norms inherent in the news-making process which generate these frames (Sabato 1991; Patterson 1994; Lichter and Noyes 1995; Farnsworth and Lichter 2007; Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn 2004; Capella and Jamieson 1997). I do not mean to dismiss these studies here, but rather add clarification to the role that demand plays in the provision of these frames. If there is a previously un- studied bias towards negative and strategic news on the part of the consumers, this could have important ramifications for how their image of politics is generated. In other words, an unconscious preference for negative information could be a key ingredient in cynicism towards the larger political system. I hypothesize that subconscious processes lead consumers to rationally desire negative and strategic news frames in a way that is unrelated to their conscious demand for such news. The theoretical underpinning of this hypothesis is based on work in psychology, biology, economics, and political science on the ’negativity-bias’ – essentially a human propensity to weight negative over positive information in our evaluations (Baumeister et al. 2001; Cacioppo and Gardner 1999; Rozin and Royzman 2001). The results of the experiment show that negative stories are far more likely than positive stories to be selected in an experimental setting – a result heightened when looking only at Canadians (the country of study). While policy stories are more popular than strategy stories (a result contrary to expectations) Canadians are significantly more likely than non-Canadians to read strategy stories. These processes are found to be subconscious – having no relationship to respondent’s explicitly stated preferences about media. 3.1 The Cynical Media and their Audience

That the media are negative and cynical about politics and politicians is widely agreed upon in the literature. Most scholars see this trend as an outgrowth, or mutation, of the media’s role as the watch-dog “fourth-estate”. For example, Patterson (1994, 79) claims that journalists understanding of what this role entails has evolved in a way that has caused

20 them to shift from “silent skeptics” to “vocal cynics”. Indeed, the great deal of literature surrounding negativity in political news discusses how – in the American case – journalists have become hyper-critical of politicians and electoral campaigns. Calling political journal- ists, “sharks in a feeding frenzy”, Sabato (1991, 2) deduces in his major work on the subject that journalists are “more interested in finding sleaze and achieving fame and fortune than in serving as an honest broker of information between citizens and government”. These find- ings of a negative-centric press have been confirmed by numerous other studies (Lang and Lang 1966, 1968; Robinson and Sheehan 1983; Edelman 1987; Blumer and Gurevitch 1995; Lichter and Noyes 1995; Capella and Jamieson 1997; West 2001; Newton 2006; Farnsworth and Lichter 2007). Furthermore, Pickup et al. (2010) found that negative coverage was also predominant in the Canadian context, drawing evidence from both the 2004 and 2006 elections. In addition to the focus on negative coverage by the press, there is a related and overlap- ping area of research focusing on what Capella and Jamieson (1997) call ‘strategy’ coverage, which in their definition includes, “(1) winning and losing as the central concern; (2) the language of wars, games, and competition; (3) a story with performers, critics and audience (voters); (4) centrality of performance, style, and perception of the candidate; (5) heavy weighting of polls and the candidates” (Capella and Jamieson 1997, 31). It is the opinion of those authors that strategy coverage increases cynicism in the viewer by calling into question the motivation of politicians. If the actions of those in politics is painted in a strategic light, then the viewer ascribes a motivation of power, rather than a concern for the common good, to that politician (Capella and Jamieson 1997, 34). The work of Patterson (1994) mirrors this concern with the press ascribing cynical motivations to politicians. This type of strategy coverage was seen to be dramatically on the rise by Capella and Jamieson (1997); a finding echoed in Patterson (1994); Robinson (1976); Bennett (2003). In addition, strategy coverage

21 has been found to be wide-spread in the Canadian context (Mendelsohn 1993; Pickup et al. 2010). Why?: Supply Side Explanations

Most existing work places the blame for strategic and negative political coverage on journalistic norms of cynicism towards public officials stemming from the general decline of trust towards public figures in the United States (Sabato 1991; Patterson 1994; Lichter and Noyes 1995; Capella and Jamieson 1997; West 2001; Farnsworth and Lichter 2007). For many, the twin-scandals of Watergate and Vietnam had an indelible and long lasting effect on both the American public and the journalistic culture. It is contended that it was, in particular, the nature of the deceit surrounding Watergate – the press being systematically shut out – that spurred the frustrations of journalists, and led to a feeling that they “won’t get fooled again”. According to Farnsworth and Lichter (2007, 115) , it is this inherent distrust of politicians which pushes the media to create negative and strategic news frames: “Reporters...view government pronouncements with suspicion and governmental figures with contempt” – a process which extends to politicians and candidates for elected office more generally. Patterson (1994, 59) has a similar argument: “The voters possess a different schematic outlook [than do reporters]. They view politics primarily as a means of choosing leaders and solving their problems” while reporters, it is asserted, are more interested in the “game” of politics. This difference for Patterson stems from the journalist’s desire for celebrity gained primarily through filling the role of cynics in the Bernstein and Woodward mould – leading to a situation of one-upmanship that progressively increases the level of rhetoric, and moves journalists from “silent sceptics” to “vocal cynics”(73-74). The theory that certain historical events – and the resulting journalistic norms – cre- ates negative and strategic news frames appears tenuous in its specificity to the American

22 case. Certainly the pervasiveness of strategy coverage in the media of other nations under- cuts explanations that revolve around particular American processes. For example, both Mendelsohn (1993) and Pickup et al. (2010) found that horse-race coverage was pervasive in Canada, while Andrew et al. (2006) found a similar result for negatively toned coverage. While the effects of Watergate may have rubbed off on journalists in Canada and other western countries, a more generalizable theory is needed to explain the cross-national nature of strategic and negative news frames. Farnsworth and Lichter (2007), as well as Patterson (1994), also put forward an alter- native argument concerning the process of making news as a further impetus for strategic and negative news frames. Primarily, this argument revolves around the need for media to present new and exciting things to their audience. Examining the literal process of creating news items, Patterson states that, for a story to make the cut, it must have something to make it stand out. Framing politics as a horserace, a conflict between politicians, or on errors made by individuals in the system, are all methods of accomplishing this (Patterson 1994, 57-61). Consider the campaign trail, where politicians move around each day and largely make the same stump-speech to various audiences. A journalist covering these events with an eye for policy-reporting would have little new to say each day. What does change is the candidate’s position in the horse-race, for example, and thus simply by virtue of being new, it makes the news. This news-process explanation for strategic and negative frames is far more generalizable than the journalistic norms theory. While not tested here, it is not unreasonable to assume such a process of favouring these types of coverage for their “newness” is a factor in the observed phenomena. Why?: Demand Side Explanations

Deciphering how consumers themselves feel about this type of coverage is somewhat difficult when examining the literature. There have been very few survey type questions

23 examining the conscious beliefs of news consumers regarding these frames. One such survey was done by the PEW center in 1995, and asked respondents whether the statement “the press is too cynical” was a valid criticism of the news or not. 56% of the public agreed that it was indeed valid, while 38% disagreed. This finding was enough for Lichter and Noyes (1995) to state that the public “didn’t agree” with journalists who said cynicism was in the best interest of the public discourse. Similarly, West (2001) found that between the 1980’s and 1990’s support for the so called “watchdog” role of the press declined significantly, taking as evidence a PEW survey that asked Americans for their views on an aggressive watchdog press (104). We should be wary, however, of generalizing these results. As discussed in Section I, asking about how news coverage is and ought to be is clearly influenced by the current tone of politics and the media. The particularly vitriolic political climate surrounding the first Clinton presidency may be what is driving these results – rather than longer term trends into cynicism by the press.3 However, the public’s feelings about strategic and negative news coverage are rarely discussed in the prominent literature. Indeed, opinions on the matter seem to balance somewhere between assumptions of a low level of support, and agnosticism. None of the major works on the matter (Robinson and Sheehan 1983; Sabato 1991; Lichter and Noyes 1995; Capella and Jamieson 1997; Farnsworth and Lichter 2007) spend more than a few pages on the matter of consumer demand. Where they do, they most often take as evidence the overall declining scores the public gives to media in surveys as evidence of a distaste towards the increasing prominence of negative and strategic frames (e.g. Farnsworth and

3 In fact, looking at the results of the PEW question West relied on, we’ve seen a rebound in scores for the watchdog role of the press when examining the data up until 2011 (see data at http://www.people-press.org/).

24 Lichter 2007, 7). This low-attention to the demand side is understandable, given the aims of these works to discuss peculiarities of the news-making process and not consumer demand. Patterson (1994, 37), however, takes a much stronger stand on the issue. Stating that the press is not “politically accountable”, he reasons: “The vote... offers citizens an opportunity to boot from office anyone they feel has failed them. Thousands of elected officials have lost their jobs this way. The public has no comparable hold on the press”. While he admits that citizens do have the power to opt out of coverage, this power is very weak as “no [media source] has ever gone out of business as a result”(37). Patterson’s assertion that market forces do not sway a media organization – as those threats are not existential – is now outdated. We can assume that, in the 21st century media-marketplace of declining revenue streams, a great number of decisions are made by news organizations to maximize readership and profits. Two studies have examined more seriously the role demand might play in the provision of strategic and negative news frames. Meffert et al. (2006) looked at whether there exists a demand for negative information about political candidates in an election. Using the dynamic information-board method (previously discussed in the above methodology section), they found evidence that there was a significant preference for negative information about political candidates. The hypothesis put forward was based in the “negativity-bias”, a concept with a rich history of literature in multiple fields which asserts that humans have an innate preference for negative over positive information. As such, the authors concluded that negative information has more utility to individuals in a motivated-reasoning environment. Demand for strategic news was examined by Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn (2004). They tested the possibility of consumer demand by sending out to test subjects a CD containing an extensive collection of articles on the ongoing 2000 United States presidential election. Their

25 data showed that the ’horserace’ frame – similar to our strategy frame – received a dispro- portionately high level of viewership compared to the other categories. They hypothesized that this finding was caused by consumer’s desire for “exciting” news content, as opposed to “drab” policy discussions. In their words, “the uncertainty and suspense associated with the depiction of the candidates as strategic players is more likely to boost audience share than more ’substantive’ aspects of the campaign” (Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn 2004, 159). An Alternative Demand Side Explanation

The objective of this project is to not simply show the existence of an individual con- sumer demand for strategic and negative news frames, but to do so in a way that can test causality in a way that Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn (2004) and Meffert et al. (2006) could not. Namely, whether there is a rational bias towards negative information. There is a substantial amount of literature, in fact, that would support the notion that consumers are attracted to some combination of negative and strategic news. This propo- sition stems from the work being done in biology and psychology on the “negativity-bias”. To put the hypothesis simply, individuals have a propensity to weight negative information more heavily than positive information. This propensity has been found in many areas: in psychology work on impression formation (e.g. der Pligt, Joop and Eiser 1980; Vonk 1996); in work in economics on loss aversion(Kahneman and Tversky 1979); and more proximate to this thesis, in work on political behaviour and communication (e.g. Altheide 1997; Diag- nault, Soroka and Giasson 2012; Harrington 1989; Iyengar and Reeves 1997; Patterson 1994; Shoemaker, Change and Bredlinger 1987). Recent work has begun to link the negativity bias to evolutionary processes (e.g. Shoemaker 1996; Soroka and McAdams 2012) The notion that there is a potential usefulness to deviant/negative information is echoed in other works. Consider both, (a) Downs’s (1957) argument that individuals are rationally detached from politics given the low potential impact of their voting decisions on electoral outcomes; and (b) Fiske’s (1984) notion of individuals as “cognitive misers,” that is, inclined

26 to take “rapid adequate solutions, rather than slow articulate solutions” (Fiske 1984, 12). These conditions result in citizens who – if not outright apathetic – are certainly limited in their desire to heavily investigate the content of politics presented in media. Thus voters are expected to pay only a minimal amount of attention to political news, and seek “rapid adequate solutions”, to use Fiske’s terminology. The question then becomes: what are the nature of these rapid solutions? Zaller (1999, 11) asserts that a focus on political conflict can be such a solution. When politicians form a consensus around a policy, that policy is likely to be implemented whomever wins an election or political fight. However, where there is controversy or two opposing viewpoints, political support for one side may determine what is implemented, thus giving the individual an incentive to pay attention. In addition to this, voters want to be able to make an informed decision that maximizes their utility, and thus want to see both sides of the debate (16). Zaller sums up his observations in saying “The rational voter is engaged by political conflict and bored by political consensus” (16). The work of Downs and Zaller, combined with the theories of the negativity-bias and loss aversion, create the theoretical framework for the main hypothesis of this paper. From Downs and Zaller, it is hypothesized that, given citizen’s limited time to think about politics, they will limit their consumption of politics to areas where political elites disagree – mapping more broadly onto the conception of strategy-focused news. Adding to this the theory of loss aversion, attention to politics may be coloured by a general preference for more negative news that emphasizes the errors politicians make. To put the hypothesis simply – if you only have a little bit of time to think about politics, focusing on where politicians conflict and make mistakes maximizes your utility. To improve upon the design of the two previously mentioned studies of consumer de- mand (Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn 2004; Meffert et al. 2006), individuals selection’s will be interacted with an experimental condition – time – that will help determine causality. Given that the selection of strategic and negative news frames is predicted to be driven by rational

27 time-saving processes, there is an expectation that the less time an individual has to read on the news page, the more likely they will be to select strategic and negative news frames. If just entertainment is driving the selection of these frames – as proposed by Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn (2004) – than there would be an equal propensity for individuals to select negative and strategic news frames no matter how long they have to read. In addition, this process is expected to happen in a sub-conscious manner. Work on the biology of the negativity-bias has shown that these processes operate on a subconscious level and are largely the result of evolutionary biology (Rozin and Royzman 2001; Soroka N.d.). In this way, it is quite possible that individuals will have firm beliefs about what media ought to be like, while behaving in a very different way. The presence of survey responses that decry negative and strategic frames in media are likely to be the result of conscious beliefs about media and social desirability bias. Thus the proportion of negative and strategic news stories that individuals view was expected to be unrelated to their views on whether media has too much negative or strategic news. This hypothesis is also in line with findings by Graber (1984, 105) that individuals “frequently grumbled about oversimplified treatment of all news”, while being unwilling in their actual habits to view more complex coverage. Additionally Neuman (1991, 95) made a similar observation that those who called for public-affairs programming tended to not watch it when it was actually made available. Thus previous research has supported the hypothesis that individuals conscious signalling of what news ought to be does not necessarily match their patterns of behaviour. 3.2 Specific Methodology

This experiment was run in March of 2012 using 112 McGill undergraduate students. Up to six participants participated at a time at the McGill Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship media lab.

28 The newspaper articles used in the experiment were all from recent issues of The Globe and Mail. They were selected by myself in coordination with Dr. Stuart Soroka. Care was taken to ensure balance between different parties, individuals, and issue areas. A full list of articles can be found at the end of this chapter. The headline of the articles were then coded for both tone (positive/neutral/negative) and topic (strategy/policy/neither) by a team of 3 expert coders. Tone was coded broadly; where negative stories were defined as those in which, overall, the tone was negative; and positive were those which, overall, the tone was positive. Policy stories were defined as those which discussed the policies and proposals of govern- ment or opposition members in an in-depth way. Making the distinction with the strategy category – these articles don’t focus on competition, but rather the substance of politics. Strategy stories were defined as those which discuss politics and policies as a “game” with winners and losers, or emphasize the political conflict element in a given situation. Further, they would often include poll numbers or discuss how politics and policies may affect future poll numbers. While the coders gave codes for both the headline and story, we are primarily interested in the headline codes, as selection of a story from the homepage is what we are looking for. Both measures had high inter-coder reliability: headline topic scored an alpha of .86, while headline tone had an alpha score of .81. For topic, the modal category was used, which in the vast majority cases was a consensus between the three coders. For tone, there was not an expectation of inter-coder reliability per-se, rather, inter-coder differences were treated as ambiguity. Thus, if two coders saw an article as negative, and the other as neutral, than that article would be coded as being less negative as one where the coders were unanimous. Table 3–1 presents the different categories, the number of times stories of each type were presented over the course of the experiment, and a sample headline.

29 Table 3–1: Article Selection

Unclear Policy Strategy

Negative null n=598; Budget cuts re- n=885; Mulcair’s left- quire a scalpel, not an ist credentials under axe, executives argue fire in Montreal debate Neutral n=73; Canada’s n=444; Flaherty taps n=84; Political fates promise needs to be Conservative riding tied to pipeline kept president as port progress authority Positive n=59; Layton named n=540; Shrinking fed- n=677; Poll shows Lib- 2011’s top newsmaker eral deficit gives Fla- eral rebound herty breathing room for budget

For this experiment, the test-subjects were split into three treatment groups based on time to read the news: a 9 minute group, a 7 minute group, and a 5 minute group. Recall that it is hypothesized that individuals with less time to read news will be more likely to select the strategic/negative articles in order to maximize their ability to monitor error in the political system. Put simply, if you have only a little time to read about politics, you will read the items of the maximum use to you as a loss-averse individual. This research design gives some test subjects less time to read the news, and thus more impetus to select strategic and negative stories. 3.3 Results

Preliminary results are presented in Table 3–2 below. Reported for each cell is P - the number of stories in that category presented to all respondents over the course of the experiment; S – the number of stories in that category selected to be read by respondents; and finally the percentage of stories read out of those presented. As such, this gives a first blush to the propensities of the overall sample (logit models in Tables 3–3 and 3–4 allow for individual level controls). It should be noted that after coding the sample, only two articles ended up in the “unclear” category for topic . As is clear from Table 3–2, these two news articles were disproportionately popular for the amount of times they were presented. As

30 the results are driven by a sample of two – this category will be omitted from analysis in this paper.4

Table 3–2: Aggregate Story Selection

Unclear Policy Strategy Total

— P:598 S:63 P:885 S:78 P:1483 S:141 Negative 10.5% 8.8% 10.5% P:73 S:16 P:444 S:44 P:84 S:6 P:601 S:66 Neutral 22% 9.9% 7.3% 9.1% P:59 S:9 P:540 S:59 P:677 S:40 P:1275 S:108 Positive 15.2% 10.9% 6.0% 8.5% P:132 S:25 P:1582 S:166 P:1646 S:124 — Total 18.9% 10.5% 7.6%

Looking across the “total” rows and columns allows us to compare the relative per- formance of articles on tone and topic. The results for tone are in the expected direction. Negative stories were chosen 10.5% of the time, compared to 9.1% of the time for neutral stories and 8.5% for positive stories. The results for topic, however, run contrary to expec- tations. Strategy stories were selected 7.6% of the time, while policy stories were selected 10.5% of the time. Note that while the differences between categories seem small, they are quite significant given the small range of possible values the percentage of stories read out of stories selected can be. Each respondent was presented with 30 stories, of which the indi- viduals read approximately 3 stories on average (min=1, max=10). In aggregate terms, 315 out of the total 3360 stories presented were actually read (9.6%). Thus, if these categories had no effect on the respondents, we would expect the frequency of each cell to be 9.6%. The significant deviation from this expectation allows the conclusion that tone and topic are having effects on readership rates.

4 The headlines of the two unclear articles were ”Canada’s promise needs to be kept”, and ”Layton named 2011’s top newsmaker”

31 However, we are primarily interested in the individual level data. As such, a more complex logit model is presented in Tables 3–3 and 3–4.5 The odds ratios presented in the table describe the probability of each story presented to an individual being read . It allows us to see the effect that multiple independent variables have on individuals decisions to read – or not read – the stories they are presented with. The first three rows in the table are important control variables for each model, as they control for the effects of where each story was located on the page (column and row), and how long each individual had to read the news page (the time-based experimental condition). Across the board we see that the row an article is presented in has a significant effect on its likelihood of being read. Respondents are approximately 4% less likely to read an article for every additional row. Predictably, the time respondents had to read the news page also mattered, with each additional minute making individuals approximately 10% more likely to read any given story. To examine the main hypothesis, we must look at the variables topic and tone. Both of these represent the coding of the article headlines, as we are merely interested in whether an article was selected from the home page. Tone was coded as either -1 for negative headlines, 0 for neutral headlines, and +1 for positive headlines. The codes across the three coders were averaged (mean) to produce the tone variable.6 Topic was coded either 1 for policy stories or 2 for strategic stories (recall unclear stories, of which there were two, are dropped

5 A random effects logit model was used that took into account that each individual is present in the model 30 times (once for each story presented to them). A more complex cross-nested hierarchical model, which allowed for heteroskedasticity both within respondents and stories was also tested. Results did not change dramatically with this more complex estimation, though the statistical significance of story-level factors is of course reduced when estimating 111(respondents) times 30(stories) random effects. 6 The objective here is not to create inter-coder reliability, but rather use differences in opinion as a sign of ambiguity. For a discussion of this approach see Young and Soroka (2012)

32 Table 3–3: Modelling Story Selection I

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 Column 0.856 0.857 0.857 0.846 0.843 0.850 0.857 (0.107) (0.108) (0.107) (0.107) (0.106) (0.107) (0.108)

Row 0.961∗∗∗ 0.961∗∗∗ 0.961∗∗∗ 0.962∗∗∗ 0.962∗∗∗ 0.962∗∗∗ 0.962∗∗∗ (0.0140) (0.0140) (0.0140) (0.0140) (0.0140) (0.0140) (0.0140)

Time 1.110∗∗ 1.080 1.104∗∗ 1.117∗∗ 1.119∗∗ 1.119∗∗ 1.119∗∗ (0.0523) (0.0625) (0.0529) (0.0530) (0.0532) (0.0530) (0.0530)

Topic 0.679∗∗∗ 0.449+ 0.678∗∗∗ 0.673∗∗∗ 0.462∗∗∗ 0.672∗∗∗ 0.602∗∗∗ (0.0864) (0.232) (0.0863) (0.0860) (0.0957) (0.0857) (0.0999)

Tone 0.844∗∗ 0.845∗∗ 1.036 1.032 0.833∗∗ 0.816 0.836∗∗ (0.0703) (0.0703) (0.348) (0.134) (0.0696) (0.139) (0.0698)

Topic*Time 1.064 (0.0806)

Tone*Time 0.969 (0.0480)

Country 0.882 0.714∗ (0.143) (0.138)

Tone*Country 0.701∗∗ (0.119)

Topic*Country 1.855∗∗ (0.488)

Tone Country=1 0.72∗∗∗ (0.08)

Topic Country=1 0.86 (0.14)

Negative 0.990 (0.110)

Tone*Negative 1.020 (0.119)

Strategy Pref 0.748 (0.236)

Topic*Strategy Pref 1.548 (0.639)

cons 0.0914∗∗∗ 0.110∗∗∗ 0.0943∗∗∗ 0.0962∗∗∗ 0.109∗∗∗ 0.0897∗∗∗ 0.0937∗∗∗ (0.0353) (0.0485) (0.0367) (0.0383) (0.0437) (0.0368) (0.0368) lnsig2u cons 0.231∗∗∗ 0.230∗∗∗ 0.232∗∗∗ 0.227∗∗∗ 0.227∗∗∗ 0.226∗∗∗ 0.225∗∗∗ (0.0850) (0.0849) (0.0853) (0.0849) (0.0848) (0.0845) (0.0846) N 3228 3228 3228 3200 3200 3200 3200 Odds ratios from random effects logistic regression; Standard errors in parentheses + p < 0.15, ∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

33 for this analysis). The modal code was selected from the four coders to produce the topic variable. Model 1 presents the basic hypothesis. The results largely confirm those found in the aggregate analysis (Table 3–2). Individuals are 16% less likely to choose a story for each category of the tone variable. As such, we can say that positive stories are 32% less likely to be selected than are negative stories (a two-point jump on the scale). On the other hand, strategic stories are 33% less likely to be selected than are policy stories. This basic model results in the same conclusions as the aggregate model – our expectations for tone are confirmed, and rejected for topic. Models 2 and 3 interact the experimental condition – time – with the tone and topic variable. The expectation was that propensities to read negative and strategic stories would become stronger as individuals had less time to read the news – evidence of a time-saving process. However, we can see that both interactions (for tone and topic) have odds ratios proximate to 1 and are non-significant. As such, this explanation for the causal hypothesis is rejected. It may be the case that the manipulations in time (five, seven, and nine min- utes) were not of a large enough magnitude to produce a significant effect. However, the significance of the direct effect of time tells us that individuals who had more time do read more articles – but the composition of those extra articles are not significantly different. It is more likely that this experimental condition did not replicate the real world conditions of feeling more or less constrained in time to read the news. The data offer one further test of this hypothesis. The McGill campus has a good number of international students, and the experiment accordingly includes a significant subsample

34 that is not Canadian7 .We can imagine that citizens of a country read news about their politics in a much different way than individuals from other nations. Put precisely, we might expect that Canadians may see a greater utility in negative and strategic news. Looking at Model 4, which interacts country (coded 0 for non-Canadian and 1 for Canadian) with tone, we find that this hypothesis holds. The odds ratio for tone in this model represents the probability of non-Canadians selecting an article based on its headline’s tone. With a non-significant odds-ratio close to 1 for this value, we can say that non-Canadians select positive and negative stories in equal amounts. The interaction term between tone and country, being negative and significant, tells us that being Canadian significantly increases your probability of selecting a story based on a negative headline. Indeed, Canadians are 56% more likely to choose negative over positive stories.8 Model 5 interacts country with topic. Here the odds ratio for topic tells us that non-Canadians are far less likely – 54% – to choose strategic stories than policy stories. Looking at the interaction term, we see that being Canadian makes you increasingly likely to select strategic stories over policy based stories. However, combining the variables to produce an odds ratio for Canadians reveals that group to have no significant relationship between the topic of the headline and the choice to read a story. Thus this relationship is only partially confirmed. While Canadians choose policy and strategic stories in equal amounts, they do choose strategy stories at a much higher rate than do non-Canadians.

7 The other countries represented are (n in brackets): Albania (1), Bangladesh(1), China (2), France(10), India(1), Pakistan(1), Sri Lanka(1), Trinidad and Tobago (1), USA (18), UK(1). 8 The odds ratios for topic and tone for Canadians (Country=1) were found by calculating the linear combination of the base level effect for topic/tone plus the respective interaction term.

35 The above gives credibility to both (a) the original hypothesis concerning the propensity for individuals to read both negative and strategic news, and (b) the causal hypothesis that these selections are rational, and not for entertainment purposes. If Iyengar et al.’s entertainment hypothesis was plausible, we would expect there to be an equal probability of individuals from all countries to choose strategic and negative stories. However, we see that individuals from Canada react quite differently to Canadian news than do subjects from elsewhere – being drawn more to negative and strategic stories. This suggests that the patterns of news readership are a consequence of heuristic processes used to interpret political news – proposed here as a desire to monitor error in the political system. Models 6 and 7, investigate the effects of explicit survey responses to questions regarding preferences on media. Recall that we are interested in the possible gap between behavioural and attitudinal responses concerning negative and strategic news. Negativity preference was measured by having subjects respond on a 4-point strongly agree(0) to strongly disagree(3) scale on the statement “The media is too negative and cynical about politicians and politics”. It was expected that this question would have no effect on how individuals selected news, as the processes underlying preferences is subconscious. Model 6, confirms this hypothesis. When interacting the negativity preference variable with tone, no relationship is found. In other words, people’s feelings about whether media is too negative have no effect on the articles they selected only five minutes before. Strategy preference was measured with the question, “Would you like to see more or less horserace coverage, that is, coverage focused on polls and political competition?” – where respondents could answer: more coverage (0), the same amount of coverage (1), or less coverage (2). Again, we expect to see no relationship between this explicitly stated preference and individuals actual behaviour. Model 7 confirms this hypothesis, finding no relationship when interacting strategy preference with the topic of the article headline.

36 Table 3–4: Modelling Story Selection II

Model 8 Model 9 Model 10 Model 11 Column 0.852 0.848 0.846 0.845 (0.107) (0.107) (0.107) (0.107)

Row 0.962∗∗∗ 0.962∗∗∗ 0.959∗∗∗ 0.959∗∗∗ (0.0140) (0.0140) (0.0141) (0.0141)

Time 1.121∗∗ 1.121∗∗ 1.115∗∗ 1.115∗∗ (0.0532) (0.0535) (0.0532) (0.0533)

Topic 0.672∗∗∗ 0.249∗∗∗ 0.680∗∗∗ 0.569∗∗ (0.0857) (0.110) (0.0873) (0.135)

Tone 0.934 0.836∗∗ 0.864 0.837∗∗ (0.254) (0.0699) (0.133) (0.0703)

General Interest 1.020 0.966 (0.0363) (0.0405)

Tone*General Interest 0.984 (0.0362)

Topic*General Interest 1.150∗∗ (0.0678)

Partisan 0.947 0.901 (0.0833) (0.0948)

Tone*Partisan 0.979 (0.0886)

Topic*Partisan 1.132 (0.157) cons 0.0759∗∗∗ 0.110∗∗∗ 0.0993∗∗∗ 0.107∗∗∗ (0.0358) (0.0543) (0.0413) (0.0452) lnsig2u cons 0.225∗∗∗ 0.229∗∗∗ 0.228∗∗∗ 0.231∗∗∗ (0.0844) (0.0853) (0.0854) (0.0858) N 3200 3200 3172 3172 Odds ratios from random effects logistic regression Standard errors in parentheses + p < 0.15, ∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

Models 8 through 11 investigate the effects of both general interest in politics and partisanship. There is the possibility the above results are driven by having an abnormally politically interested sample of undergraduate students. While effects on tone are expected to be minimal, the above results for topic may be the result of this sample selection. General interest in politics was measured by the question “How interested in politics are you generally, on a scale where 0 means ‘no interest at all’, and 10 means ‘a great deal of interest?”’. Responses to this question had a mean score of 7 and a standard deviation

37 of 2.25. Partisanship was measured in two stages, first with a statement inquiring, “ In federal politics, do you usually think of yourself as a...” with the options consisting of the main Canadian political parties, as well as an option for ’none’. Following this, respondents were asked on a 3 point scale how strongly [their party choice] they felt. Respondents who answered ‘none’ on the first question were coded as 0 for the combined partisanship scale, while people not strongly attached to their stated party were coded as 1, fairly strongly attached individuals were coded as 2, and very strongly attached individuals were coded as 3. Model 8 presents the results for interacting general interest with tone. The odds ratios show that there is no relationship between these variables driving readership of news stories. High interest and low interest individuals have an equal preference for negative over positive news. Model 10 interacts partisanship with tone, and similarly finds no relationship. Model 9 interacts general interest with topic. The results show that people with no interest in politics are a full 75% less likely to read strategic over policy stories, while the positive odds ratio for the interaction indicates that higher interest people are more likely to read strategy stories than lower interested individuals. As it turns out, interest in politics does matter a great deal. The politically interested seem to be drawn more to strategy coverage – perhaps a result of their previously existing knowledge about policy issues.9 Alternatively, perhaps partisanship drives the topic results, with individuals keen to see how ‘their team’ is faring in the horse-race. Model 11 looks at the role of partisanship in driving news selection. However, it is clear that partisanship has no effect whatsoever on readership. The interaction term fails to reach statistical significance.

9 It can be asked whether this relationship for political interest is simply a function of nationality – that is, this effect we are seeing may not survive when taking into account participants geographic origins. This is not the case. Political interest affects readership regardless of whether the participant is from Canada or not.

38 It seems that general interest in politics is the key factor here in determining the results for topic. The result that higher interest individuals are more interested in strategic news is in line with the findings of Iyengar et al. (2004) that more interested individuals selected horse- race stories more frequently. While the above explanation – that higher interest individuals are more likely to read strategy news due to it being, in a sense, new for them – is plausible, there is unfortunately no way to test for that here. Another possibility is that we are seeing a reflection of Kuklinski and Quirk (2000) findings that higher knowledge individuals are more likely to use heuristic processes in gathering political information. A further thing to keep in mind is that this research design has the potential of creating perverse outcomes, as we are effectively forcing low interest people to read about politics; an activity that they are likely not keen on doing in their day to day lives (e.g. Prior 2005). As such, it might be more accurate to say that low interest individuals will choose to read about policy when given the choice between the two, but might not be so keen if there is the possibility of avoiding it all together. 3.4 Discussion

The motivating question behind this chapter was whether there exists an unconscious demand for negative and strategic news frames that helps explains their lasting popularity despite their purported detrimental effects on democracy. It has not been the purpose of this section to discount the supply side explanations that are prominent in the literature; but rather to add to that a theory that these frames are rationally demanded by consumers. The experiment presented here showed mixed results for this hypothesis. On the one hand, individuals were far more likely to choose negative over positive news in our experiment. However, contrary to expectations, policy news proved to be more popular than strategy stories for our respondents. These results must be tempered by the differential outcomes of Canadians and non-Canadians. Citizens of the test country were far more likely to read negative and strategy news when compared to non-Canadians. This, at the very

39 least, calls into question the hypothesis that entertainment is the driver of news selection for these categories. We cannot confidently conclude that loss-aversion is driving these results for Canadians – particularly in the case of topic. However we can at least conclude that Canadians see a different utility in negative and strategy news compared to non-Canadians. Importantly, the main relationships were not affected by conscious preferences about the news. Whatever is driving news selection is happening at a sub-conscious level. A further plausible alternative hypothesis for these findings is that Canadians, having had a great deal of exposure to these types of news frames, are simply more accustomed to them, and thus demand them. However, if this was to be true, we would expect to see significant differences within the Canadian sample for people who consume various degrees of media. However, interacting a variable for overall media consumption with both tone and topic of article headlines produces non-significant results.10 In other words, these data suggests that being exposed to news of a certain type doesn’t necessarily predispose you towards that media. In terms of general interest and partisanship, the only relationship of note is between general interest and topic. Our expectations were confirmed that higher interest people are more attracted to strategy news than individuals of lower interest. This confirms the result of Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn (2004) who found a similar result in their data pool. A clear caveat to be addressed for this experiment is its timing. Taking place of March in 2012 – nearly a year after the previous federal election, and with no provincial election on the near horizon – this was a decidedly ’non-election’ context. It is not unreasonable to assume that individuals change their news consumption habits when elections become more proximate. The disparity between the results of this experiment and that of Iyengar et al.

10 Results available upon request.

40 – implemented during the 2000 US Presidential election – may be explained by this shift in context. Perhaps it is the case that individuals become more interested in the horserace of politics as the vote becomes more proximate – but in the long term, they shift their selections more heavily towards policy, scanning the horizon for possibly useful information. In other words, motivated processing – the cognitive functions related to decision making – may activate a need for more strategic information. These questions could easily be answered by replicating this study with a similar sample in an election time. I return to this potential research design in the conclusion of this Thesis. Returning to the initial motivations of this thesis: how can we say this underlying demand is affecting individuals media environments? On an aggregate level, the existence of an unconscious demand can help explain the existence of these frames in media generally. We of course expect their to be some congruence between supply and demand in terms of what our media products look like. An unconscious (on the part of the news consumer) negativity bias that is acknowledged by the suppliers of media content could help explain the existence of these frames on an aggregate level. While this is a plausible hypothesis, I have no way to test it here. It would be my inclination to say that journalists would be resistant to the suggestion that they cater to the publics clamouring for negative information. However, given the environment of declining profits for media sources, it is quite likely that they are aware of the tastes of media consumers, and modify their behaviour to meet these tastes. On an individual level, regardless of the amount of negativity that exists in the press, the demand we see for negative news will result in citizens having a more negative view about politics than they would under media regimes with less choice. More-so, knowing what we know about the structure of news content – in particular, that news organizations over-report negative information (perhaps, in part, because of the demand we see here)(e.g. Soroka 2012) – consumer demand for negative news intensifies an already strong negativity

41 bias in the press. We don’t have to make any assumptions here about the motivations behind this selection of negative news for it to be troubling. While I have argued that this is a rational heuristic process, even if the attraction is one of ‘entertainment’, citizens are still left with an image of politics that is significantly more negative than the reality of politics. There is at least some evidence that this last proposition is true; that is, that citizens’ image of politics is more negative than the reality of politics. Consider the work of Naurin (2011) and the Comparative Party Pledge Group. This work primarily looks at whether politicians and political parties keep their election promises when they turn to actual gov- erning. Naurin relates the number of promises kept to citizens perceptions of how many promises are kept. Critically, citizens routinely and systematically overestimate how often politicians break their promises. While research shows that parties in western democracies keep their promises upwards of 65% of the time (USA 65%, Canada 72%, New Zealand 73%, UK 85%), very few citizens in these countries were of the belief that MP’s try to keep their promises (USA 22%, Canada 26%, New Zealand 29%, Great Britain 23%)(Naurin 2011, 40,71). This critique is clearly related to the broad literature on political cynicism and the so- called “videomalaise” (e.g. Mann and Ornstein 1994; Capella and Jamieson 1997; Mutz and Reeves 2005; De Vreese 2004). These works make the claim that: (a) trust in governance is on the decline and political cynicism is on the rise; and (b) this is related to an increase in strategy and conflict-based news reporting. This is true both in the aggregate and the level of the individual, with experimental data showing increased exposure to these frames bringing increased cynicism.11 Like much of the work discussed above, authors such as

11 This is not to say that there is a consensus on this issue. For example see Norris (2000), who posits that increased media consumption can actually decrease political cynicism. I only highlight the more pessimistic findings of this research field here to elucidate alleged links between media and cynicism.

42 Capella and Jamieson (1997) believe this to be the result of media supply of these frames. The results found through this experiment regarding a preference for negative news coverage quite clearly questions this assumption. Regardless, the existence of a negativity-bias amongst the participants in this exper- iment serves to confirm the premise of this paper – that the study of demand matters. Whether this demand creates, in turn, systemic distortions in perceptions of news, or sys- temic distortions of news content itself, is speculation at this stage.

43 Article Headlines

The news headlines used in Experiment One are as follows. Both Topic and Tone are listed after each headline, where Topic is the modal code from three expert coders, and Tone is the mean code from three expert coders on a scale of -1 to 1. • Budget cuts require a scalpel, not an axe, executives argue; Policy; -0.5 • Call was a low-down trick,’ says Guelph voter; From Pierre Poutine,’ an unprecedented attempt to disrupt an election; Strategy; -1 • Canada’s F-35 project hits pricing turbulence; Policy; -1 • Canada’s promise needs to be kept; Neither; 0 • Candidates press wedge issues in NDP debate; Strategy; -0.5 • Celil case full of missteps, government records reveal; Bureaucratic wrangling behind the scenes as Canadian citizen extradited from Uzbekistan held in Chinese jail; Policy; -1 • CPI retooling could affect pensions, wages; If Statscan finds that consumer price infla- tion is overestimated, hikes in wages, pensions tied to CPI could drop; Policy; -0.5 • Dirty political game gets dirtier; Scale of the voter-suppression scheme alleged in Guelph has never been seen before in Canada; Strategy; -1 • Federal immigration policies hurt Ontario, minister says; Charles Sousa responds by creating province’s first immigration strategy; Policy; -0.75 • Feds warn provinces: Get in line; Tensions rise as Ottawa insists only less business tax, more spending cuts will deliver fiscal prosperity; Policy; -0.75 • Flaherty taps Conservative riding president as port authority; Policy; 0 • Glimmer of hope’ for Cape Breton seawall; Policy; 1 • Government to close loophole threatening gay marriages; Policy; 0.25

44 • Immigration overhaul to let employers choose prospects; Kenney wants a more flexible system that emphasizes language skills and youth, with a view to creating a new stream for tradespeople; Policy; 0.5 • LAW AND DISORDER; This week, an Ontario judge rebelled against mandatory- minimum sentencing; Policy; -1 • Leaders, not genders, for a better world; Key choices made by any sex must combine hard- and soft-power skills to produce smart strategies, argues Joseph Nye; Policy; 1 • Mobilicity calls for U.S.-style spectrum screen’ in auction; Policy; 0 • Montreal builds its cultural brand; The city doesn’t have pots of money, but it’s got a plan to intensify its already vibrant culture one building at a time; Policy; 1 • Mulcair’s leftist credentials under fire in Montreal debate; Strategy; -1 • Native leaders wary of Ottawa relationship; Manitoba joins Saskatchewan saying action plan between AFN and federal government did not have their input; Strategy; -1 • Ottawa set to lift entry ban on ANC members; Long-standing ban, which has kept some of the heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle out of Canada, will be addressed, Kenney says; Policy; 0.5 • Putting a face on underfunding of reserve schools; Policy; -0.5 • Redford, McGuinty square off over oil sands benefits; Strategy; -0.75 • Robo-calls worse than Watergate, dirty trickster says; Strategy; -1 • Safe-injection plans divide Montreal; The city wants to move ahead with life-saving program, but there is much disagreement about where sites should be located; Policy; -1 • Shrinking federal deficit gives Flaherty breathing room for budget; Policy; 1 • The bullies, the bill and the bystanders; As Ontario examines anti-bullying laws, a legal adviser weighs the merits of getting silent witnesses to stop empowering the abusers; Policy; -0.25

45 • The other age issue; Policy; -0.25 • Topp battles to regain lead in NDP race; The party strategist takes aim at Dewar’s French and Mulcair’s centrist policies as the gloves come off in the leadership contest; Strategy; -1 • Tories accuse NDP of playing dirty, sleazy Internet game’ over cybercrime bill; Strat- egy; -1 • Tories clear hurdle in bid to uphold Wheat Board abolition; Policy; 0.25 • Tories downplay timing for OAS reform; Finance Minister’s comment that pension reform is years away quickly reinterpreted to mean it just isn’t imminent; Policy; -0.25 • Tories stung by e-privacy backlash; Strategy; -1 • NDP winning Toronto-Danforth riding a safe bet, poll predicts; Byelection candidate Craig Scott leads in race for Layton’s old seat with 61 per cent support; Strategy; 0.75 • NDP’s support in Quebec eroding: Poll; Down from 42 in May to 33; Strategy; -1 • Tories surge ahead of rivals; Redford PCs grab 53% of support as election looms; Strategy; 0.75 • Poll shows Liberal rebound; Strategy; 1 • Peggy Nash, a pit bull who is always there for her ’hood; What makes Parkdale-High Park’s MP run: ’It matters who is actually there’; Strategy; 0.75 • Tide could still turn for Charest; Strategy; 0.75 • Layton named 2011’s top newsmaker; Neither; 1 • Ottawa to seek innovative business migrants; Policy; 1 • Rebuilding Ontario: A plan for the way forward; Policy; 0.75 • The Bob Rae Bounce: Liberals continue to gain steaml New polls shows the liberas have increased their support by three points, led in part by Bob Rae’s increasing popularity.; Strategy; 1

46 • Liberals reach post election high, but Tories rule the polls; Trudeau gains support for Liberal leader, Mulcair tops NDP; Strategy; 0.5 • Dewar’s not a man to be ruffled by polls; Strategy; 0.5 • With elections over, who’s still popular? Saskatchewan’s Brad Wal continues to top; Strategy; 0.75 • Opportunity (finally) knocks for the Liberals; Paul Martin’s former strategic advisor explains how changing regional dynamics could allow a chastened party to restore itself.; Strategy; 1 • NDP fears Tories won’t act on pledge to strengthen elections watchdog; For two days running, Conservatives fail to give direct answer when asked if they’ll follow through on non-binding motion with six months; Strategy; -1 • Political fates tied to pipeline progress; Strategy; 0 • Fault lines will soon be exposed; Tory budget, new NDP leader set the tone; Strategy; -0.5

47 CHAPTER 4 Experiment Two: Selective Exposure The second experiment looks at the potential problem of political polarization being caused by the modern media environment. If we are concerned with idiosyncratic choice creating pockets of differentiated news consumption among groups of the population, a key cleavage would be on partisan and ideological lines. Indeed, fears about an increasingly polarized voting population in much of the western world should naturally result in a con- sideration of the role played by self selection into ideologically consistent media. As in the first section, it is not entirely clear how much this problem of selective exposure is related to media supply, and how much is generated by consumer demand. This section thus asks the question – do individuals select consonant information in our experimental setting; and inversely, do they avoid dissonant information? In simpler terms – do individuals demand a media product that is consistent with their points of view? I examine this using the same method as in experiment one – only the articles presented will change. I precede in this analysis by briefly summarizing the research on selective exposure to date. While there has been a great deal more research on this area when compared to selective exposure to negative information, there remains a distinct lack of consensus. I will further explain the specific methodology used for this round of the study. In presenting the results, I conclude that there is some evidence of systematic biases in information selection, but not to such a degree that would fully confirm the selective-exposure hypothesis.

48 4.1 Selective Exposure

The literature on selective exposure is broadly concerned with the possibility that indi- viduals self-select information that matches and reinforces their previously existing biases. It remains a fascinating area of study; both because of its clear implications to political behaviour, but also due to the large gap between an inherent belief that this ought to be true, and the rather ambivalent evidence for the effect in the literature. Indeed, the research on selective exposure can be separated temporally into research before and after Sears and Freedman’s (1967) seminal literature-review article, with the former period being charac- terised by optimism about the phenomenon, and the latter characterised by a high degree of skepticism. Pre-1967 Literature: Distinguishing Active from De-Facto Selective Exposure

The concern with a preference for consonant information has been a topic of interest from the inception of political behaviour research. In Lazarsfeld’s (1948) foundational The People’s Choice , the citizens studied in Elmira, New York self-reported being exposed more to “their own side’s propaganda” than that of the alternative political party. Indeed, the authors from Columbia found that the more partisan individuals reported themselves being, the more likely they were to report selective exposure to their own side. This notion – that partisans had a tendency to seek out bias-confirming information – was formalized some years later in Festinger’s (1957) influential Theory of Cognitive Disso- nance, which posited that internal consistency of beliefs was an important driver of human behaviour. A key factor in the reduction of dissonance for Festinger was selective exposure. It was hypothesized by Festinger that individuals both avoid information that is likely to create dissonance (53), and seek out new sources of information that are likely to increase consonance (129-130). Note here the possibilities for asymmetry – which is a common theme in the literature, and is quite important for the analysis in this paper. There are two pro- cesses at work in selective exposure: avoidance of dissonant information, and motivated

49 exposure to consonant information. While in a sense two sides to the same coin, research on the subject must allow them to operate independently. These two pieces – Lazarsfeld (1948) et al. and Festinger (1957) – sparked a wave of research into the notion of selective exposure. Most notable in this first wave was the work of Klapper (1949, 1960) who contended that exposure to the mass media did not cause attitude change in the audience, but rather reinforced existing beliefs. As such, selective exposure was seen as a key part of the ‘limited-effects’ school of communications research (Graf and Aday 2008, 87). Much of this early research is well summarized in Sears and Freedman (1967). While calling selective exposure, “One of the most widely accepted principles in sociology and social psychology” (194), Sears and Freedman do much to question the validity of the phenomenon. To begin with, Sears and Freedman (1967) separate the type of selective exposure hy- pothesized by Festinger (1957) (that is, a more active motivated selection towards consonant information and away from dissonant information), from de facto selectivity – which they define as, “the correlation of positions on an attitude dimension with an act, or series of acts, of exposure to mass communications” (198). In other words, individuals may sort themselves into different sources based on some characteristic (say ideology or partisanship), and con- sequently, receive consonant information through that source. A prime example of this form of selectivity is the existence of a partisan viewership for a political telethon featuring a candidate from a particular party (Schramm and Carter 1959). The difference between this and more active selective exposure is that, in the latter, individuals make a direct choice between alternative pieces of information because of the content of that information, not because of their partisanship or ideology. While the end result may be the same – exposure to consonant information – the process of arriving there is much different. This type of selectivity was covered most significantly by Lazarsfeld (1948) in their voting study – but

50 also appears in several other studies from the time period which all confirmed the finding (Lipset 1953; Ehrlich et al. 1957; Schramm and Carter 1959; Wolfinger et al. 1964). Sears and Freedman (1967) question whether this de facto selectivity should be consid- ered alongside more direct forms of selection and avoidance, not just because of the different route that individuals take to consonant information, but also on the grounds of an omitted variable bias. The prominent research largely doesn’t account for other variables beyond partisanship or ideology that could also predict attendance or viewership of these partisan events. They take as an example attendance to a Christian Anti-Communist Crusade meet- ing in the Bay area (Wolfinger et al. 1964). While conservative political attitudes were indeed highly correlated with attendance, so was religiosity, race, and education. In the words of Sears and Freedman, we “quite arbitrarily give ideology the major credit for exposure” (201). This critique is particularly important, given the modern media environment. As was discussed in the introduction to this paper, the economic structure of the modern media environment means that news organizations are able to tailor information more specifically to select sub-groups of people (Negroponte 1995; Sunstein 2001). There is little disagreement that this specialization has led to more partisan news outlets (Turrow 1997; Adamic and Glance 2005). Therefore we must ask whether selective exposure is simply the result of a de-facto sorting of individuals into news sources on latent variables. Put in other terms, it’s not entirely clear that individuals partake in active selective exposure, which involves making direct decisions between alternative news sources or articles on the basis of partisan or ideological beliefs, or whether people simply tune in to sources of consonant information due to other factors (such as family or religious pressure, for example). In real world terms: it is not controversial to state that Republicans in the United States are more likely to watch Fox News, and that they receive consonant information when watching that news. That being said, we cannot automatically infer from this that these individuals have ended

51 up with Fox News because they actively selected it for the purposes of dissonance-reduction – there are many other possible reasons. To uncover the truth, we must look at the research that examines more active selec- tive exposure, which usually occurs in an experimental setting. Sears and Freedman also reviewed the literature on this type of exposure, that is, articles and studies that examine direct preferences for materials that are either bias-confirming or bias-disaffirming for a par- ticular known issue area. The article does well to summarize the research to date on this more cognitive dimension of selective exposure, and comes to the conclusion that there is a lack of consistency in the findings. They found five studies that showed participants having a preference for consonant information (Ehrlich et al. 1957; Freedman and Sears 1963; Adams 1961; Mills, Aronson and Robinson 1959; Rosen 1961). Eight concluded that citizens had no preference (Mills, Aronson and Robinson 1959; Feather 1962; Mills and Ross 1964; Jecker 1964; Sears 1966; Sears and Freedman 1963; Sears 1965). Finally, five showed a citizens ac- tually having preference for dissonant material (Rosen 1961; Brodbeck 1956; Feather 1962; Sears 1965; Freedman and Sears 1965). This summation of equivocal results are further collaborated by Donohew and Palmgreen (1971, 412) saying, “Both supporters and oppo- nents of the hypothesis are able to marshal impressive empirical evidence in support of their positions”. Post-1967 Literature: Continued Equivocal Support

Despite the early evidence on selective exposure being decidedly equivocal, interest in the phenomenon has grown in recent decades. This is largely due to the changes in the media environment posited by this thesis; that is, an increase in the role choice plays in the makeup in an individual’s media choices. McGuire wrote in 1968 that it was, “often difficult to get information even on one’s own side and... almost inevitably more demanding to find information on the opposite side should one ever be motivated to look for it”(799). The same certainly could not be said with today’s more expansive media environment. Mutz and

52 Martin were of the belief in 2001 that, “As the number of potential news sources multiplies, consumers must choose among them, and that exercise of choice may lead to less diversity of political exposure”(111). While there has been a resurgence in interest, the inconclusive results of the 1960’s have largely continued into the present day – with a seemingly equal number of studies disconfirming the phenomenon compared to those that confirm it. Mutz and Young (2011, 1036) produce a strong summary of the work to date in saying that while, “new media options provide audiences with the potential to expose themselves to purely homogeneous content, there is not yet much evidence of its impact”.1 Both Kinder (2003) and Zaller (1992) believe that selective exposure is not a com- mon phenomenon. (Kinder 2003, 369) argues that, “despite all of the early confidence, the evidence for selective exposure turns out to be thin. We now know that people do not, for the most part, seek out mass communications that reinforce their political predisposi- tions”. While Zaller (1992, 139) notes that “Most people... are simply not so rigid in their information-seeing behavior that they will expose themselves only to ideas that they find congenial. To the extent that selective exposure occurs at all, it appears to do so under special conditions that do not typically arise in situations of mass persuasion”. This all being said, there are still several studies that do find support for the notion of motivated selective exposure. Redlawsk (2002, 1021) for example, ran an experiment

1 Mutz and Young also produce an updated version of Sears and Freedman’s dichotomy of de facto exposure and selective exposure by splitting the phenomenon between passive and active selective exposure. For Mutz and Young, a great deal of selective exposure in the modern media environment can be explained by the former. Take, for example, the work of Pariser (2011) on ”filter bubbles” automated online algorithms that tailor search results based on search history and personal characteristics. Certainly this taps into the central concern of this paper the creation of heterogeneous media environments but at the same time does not involve active selections between alternatives.

53 using the fake-election dynamic-information-board method, and found that individual’s were more likely to seek out candidates for whom they felt greater affect. Natalie Stroud’s work also stands out in terms of supporting selective exposure (Stroud 2006, 2008, 2010). For example her 2008 article, which tested whether partisanship had a relationship to selection between sources with known ideological biases, found confirming results (see also Tewksbury 2005). Taber and Lodge (2006) produce convincing evidence that individuals both self-select consonant information, and use motivated reasoning to bolster themselves against dissonant information. Interestingly, Taber and Lodge (2006) received these results through using particularly contentious political issues (affirmative action and gun control)(755). We’re largely left here with the same conclusion as the many literature reviews on selective exposure that have come before. The notion that individuals will select articles that are consonant with their prior beliefs seems like common sense – yet there simply isn’t the evidence to support that claim. While the problem of people receiving more homogenous news is certainly a problem in the modern media environment, it is not clear how much of this is due to de facto selective exposure, and how much is due to actual active selections between alternatives. Consider the opinion of Prior in Post-Broadcast Democracy (2007, 214-249), that increased media exposure is related to increased political polarization – but as a result of de facto selective exposure , not individual avoidance of dissonant information.2 Hypotheses

Through Experiment One, we found that the experimental method used in this paper is sensitive enough to detect decisions between alternative types of articles on the part of the participants. Experiment Two applies this method to the problem of selective exposure.

2 Prior’s argument is somewhat different than either Mutz and Young (2011) Or Sears and Freedman (1967) in that he views aggregate polarization as the result of a systematic ”dropping out” of moderates from the electorate.

54 Several broad hypotheses are to be tested. The first is simply testing for selective ex- posure. It is expected that individuals will both: select at a higher rate information that is consonant with their political points of view; and, avoid information that is dissonant with their points of view. Note the separation of: a)avoidance of dissonance, and b) attrac- tion to consonance, here. As mentioned previously, while selection and avoidance can be considered to be two parts of the same phenomenon (one has to avoid something to select another thing), they are addressed in my analysis in an asymmetric fashion. That being said, the strongest confirmation of selective exposure would be a symmetrical result on these factors – that is, a finding showing both avoidance of dissonant material, and selection of consonant material. Selective exposure is, after all, concerned about individual’s having a skewed content environment. While avoidance of dissonant information, or attraction to con- sonant information, certainly produces a skewed environment, both of those forces operating simultaneously would clearly be far more disconcerting. Further, time spent reading articles is also important to this round of the experiment. Redlawsk (2002) discusses the breadth of research on motivated information processing (seealso Lodge and Taber 2000; Lodge, Taber and Galonsky 1999; Kunda 1990). Redlawsk hypothesised that motivated reasoning – the process which individuals go through when updating their affect towards a candidate – would result in longer exposure times when confronted with dissonant information (1024). This is due to the time an individual will spend counter-arguing against the information, and bolstering existing affect by straining to remember the reasons for it (1024). As such, it is hypothesised that when individuals do choose to read information that is incongruent with their existing beliefs, they will read that information for longer when compared to information that is consistent with their previously existing biases.

55 It should be pointed out that, in these hypotheses, I am making the assumption that individuals in the experiment will use similar decision making processes to those in experi- ments like Redlawsk’s (2002), who used the simulated-election dynamic information board method described above in the main methodology section. As was discussed there, these studies are primarily concerned with how electoral decisions are made, and thus place indi- viduals in an environment where they must seek out information in order to make a candidate selection. My experiment has none of this motivation, as it is designed to simulate a normal, low-stakes, news reading environment. It is quite possible that in this passive environment, these expectations about cognitive processes will not hold. But a null finding would provide an interesting point of comparison to the robust results of Redlawsk and others. Both of these phenomena – selective exposure and reading time based on consonant/dissonant information – are measured on two axes: both ideology and partisanship. In other words, I look at whether information is consonant with an individuals left/right placement, and their partisanship. More specifics on the measurement of these factors can be found in the methodology section below. It is expected that selection will be influenced by the degree of attachment of an in- dividual to their political points of view. In other words, I expect stronger partisans and more extreme ideologues to produce more robust results in terms of selective exposure. In addition, general interest in politics will also be interacted with the main effect. Finally – as in the first experiment, I am interested in matching behavioural data col- lected by the experiment with attitudinal data collected in the survey. As such, questions were asked regarding a self-reported propensity to engage in selective exposure. Answers on this question will be compared to significant results found in the analysis, in order to determine congruence.

56 4.2 Specific Methodology

The second round of the experiment took place in December and January of 2012/2013, and included testing 66 individuals, primarily undergraduate students at McGill University. Experiment Two was set up in an identical fashion to Experiment One. All that sub- stantively changed was to replace the newspaper articles with ones that give better choices in terms of ideology and partisanship, and add additional questions to capture ideology. Again, fifty news articles were selected for the experiment. In this round, they were pulled from both The Globe and Mail and The National Post (a slightly more right-leaning source), although all were labeled as Globe articles in the experiment.3 The articles were selected to produce a balance of stories across both the partisan and ideological spectrum, including a number of neutral articles. Additionally, because a major objective was to see how the content of headlines affected selection of articles, some headlines were modified to make more clear their partisan or ideological slant. These modifications were done before the articles were coded. The headlines that were amended can be found in Table 4–1. a full list of article headlines can be found at the end of this chapter. The article headlines and bodies were coded by a team of three expert-coders for both ideology and partisanship. Ideology was coded on a five point scale from -2 (left wing) to +2 (right wing). Coders were simply told to use their best judgement on what constituted left and right wing in Canadian politics. Inter-coder reliability on this measure was high, with near complete agreement on direction of ideology, and minimal disagreement on magnitude. The codes for the three coders achieved a high Crohnbach’s Alpha score of .90. For the purposes of analysis, the scale was collapsed into a three point measure of simply -1(left wing),

3 This is an important step, as research has found that partisans trust information differ- ently given the source that it comes from. As such, having only one source available takes individual’s conception of source bias out of the selection equation Iyengar and Hahn (2009, see e.g.)

57 Table 4–1: Amended Headlines

Original Headline Amended Headline Rae calls for campaign spending probe; Elec- Rae calls for campaign spending probe on Tory tions Canada review shows Tory minister Pe- minister Peter Penashue ter Penashue spent more than the legal limit in last election Minister’s election expenses questioned Tory Minister’s election expenses questioned Politics tarnishes Queen’s medals; Don’t Abortion politics tarnishes Queen’s medals; blame recipients, but those who bestow Don’t blame recipients, but those who bestow Make welfare work again Make welfare work again; Recipients burdened by bureaucracy Confusion seen in campaign spending bill Confusion seen in government’s ‘toothless’ campaign spending bill Critics say budget bill hampers Fisheries Act Critics say Tory budget bill puts fish habitats in danger Harper takes a pension hit on new bill; Conser- Conservatives do an about-face on splitting vatives do an about-face on splitting omnibus omnibus budget bill, fast-tracking legislation budget bill, fast-tracking legislation on MPs’ on MPs’ benefit benefits The right emphasis The right emphasis; Rebranding the Canadian Museum of Civilization will renew focus on country’s “Grand Story” Kenney Backs Bill To Bar Hatemongers; Too Kenney Backs Bill To Bar Hatemongers ’Vague: ’ Ndp; Minister Points To Radical Imans Who Spoke In Canada Last Year How equalization hurts everybody How equalization payments hurt everybody Prospect of scrapping project leads to fears of Prospect of federal government scrapping homelessness project leads to fears of homelessness Feds spent millions to avoid trial Feds spent millions to avoid trial over First Nations child welfare shortage. Don’t wait for an emergency Arctic sea ice: Don’t wait for an emergency Time for a ’net harm’ test Time for a ’net harm’ test; The case for easing government restrictions on foreign takeovers. Climate hype via Hogwarts Lab Climate hype via Hogwarts Lab; The media clamor for environmental alarmism. A lost opportunity Defeat on motion to debate definition of a hu- man being a lost opportunity

58 0 (neutral), and +1(right wing), and the modal score was taken from the three coders. This ultimately produced a more sensible coding scheme for the measure of consonance/dissonance discussed below. An analysis that took full account of the magnitude of the original scores was also performed, but fared no better in predicting articles read. Due to the multiple party nature of Canadian politics, the partisanship measure was simply a three point scale where +1 indicated an article supportive of the government, 0 was neutral, and -1 an article that was critical of the government. This method of coding is con- sistent, in my opinion, with the tone and media coverage of a Westminster style government, with its clear Government and Opposition sides. In particular, as this was a non-election season, the majority of coverage fell along these lines. Again, inter-coder reliability was high, with an alpha score of .86. As with Ideology, the modal response category is used for the analysis. To achieve a measure of dissonance and consonance, the characteristic of the headline must be compared to the characteristic of the individual reading that article. In other words, there needs to be a comparison between the ideology or partisanship of the headline, and the ideology and partisanship of the individual. Ideology of participants was measured through the standard self-placement eleven point scale, with the question: “In Politics, some people talk of ’left’ and ’right’. Where would you put yourself on this scale?”. As would be expected (given the sample) responses for this category skewed to the left of the scale, with the mean response being 3.90, and a fairly small standard deviation of 2.2.4 For this analysis, it was less important to have a normal

4 An alternative measure of ideology, a factor analysis based approach that uses a battery of issue questions (see e.g. Ansolabehere, Rodden and Snyder 2008), was attempted and discarded. The low number of individuals in the study resulted in an inconclusive factor analysis which produced a variable even less normally distributed than the self-placement measure.

59 distribution on the ideology variable, as it was not directly being used as a predictor. As we are interested in the relationship between an individual’s ideological placement and the ide- ology of the headline, even having all left wing participants would result in a well distributed predictor variable, given a normal distribution of newspaper articles (although this extreme case would clearly hurt external validity). While ideological self-placement variables can be problematic in the sense that each individual is generating their own subjective judgement of what each number on the scale means, it’s less problematic here, when what we’re inter- ested in is the relationship between an individual’s perceived ideology and their propensity to select certain articles. Partisanship was measured simply, by asking “In federal politics, do you usually think of yourself as:”, with the major Canadian political parties representing the categories. 43% identified with the Liberal party, 18% with the NDP, 8% with the Conservative party, 6% with the Green Party, and 25% with no party (these non-identifiers are not included in this part of the analysis).5 This measure was recoded in the same fashion as the headlines, to simply represent Conservatives and non-Conservatives. This is obviously a very skewed mea- surement, with 5 individuals representing the Conservatives, and 55 individuals representing non-Conservatives. But again, this measure is not being used as a predictor on its own, only as a component of the dissonance/consonance measure described below. Creating the predictor measure for selective exposure meant generating a variable that compared an individual’s ideological and partisan self placement, to the characteristics of the articles that they read. The main predictor ranges from dissonant information (-1) to

5 If included, all of these non-identifiers would have been placed in the (0) category of the selective exposure predictor, as no article would be consonant or dissonant for these individuals. In other words, there would be 1/4 of the sample that did not vary on the independent variable. This would serve to severely understate the effect of selective exposure for the partisan individuals in the analysis.

60 consonant information (1). An article was coded dissonant for an individual if, for example, the article was coded on the right of the political spectrum, and the individual had placed themselves on the left of the political spectrum. Conversely, where these two measure were in agreement, an article for a particular individual would be coded as consonant. In addition to this main selective exposure variable, variables that allow for asymmetry were also created. These were dummy variables that – in the case of consonance – treated consonant articles as (1) and all other articles as (0). In this way, we are able to see whether people avoid dissonant information, select consonant information, or do both. Another goal of the analysis was to investigate whether the strength of an individual’s ideology or partisanship affects their propensity for self-selection of information. For partisan information, this entails interacting the main relationship with a variable for how strongly x they felt (where x is there stated party identification), on a three point scale from (0) (not very strongly) to (2)(very strongly). For ideological information, an additional variable was generated – extremism – which gave an individual a score from 0-5 based on their distance from the extremes of the 11-point ideological spectrum. In other words, individuals answering on the midpoint on the ideological spectrum would be given a (0), while individuals who answered at the extremes of the spectrum would be scored a (5). Again, this variable was interacted with the main predictor variable in the analysis. 4.3 Results

As in Experiment One, we begin with a look at the aggregate selection behaviour of the individuals in the experiment presented in Table 4–2. Each cell shows the number stories in a particular category that were presented, the total selected, and the percentage of stories selected out of those presented. This data does not take into account anything about the individuals making selections, but is a good first look at some of the broad trends in the data.

61 Table 4–2: Aggregate Story Selection

Anti-Conservative Neutral Pro-Conservative Total

P:231 S:22 P:227 S:38 — P:458 S:60 Left Wing 9.5% 16.7% 13.1% P:599 S:50 P:187 S:28 P:237 S:17 P:1023 S:95 Neutral 12.0% 14.5% 7.1% 10.7% — P:306 S:44 P:109 S:8 P:415 S:52 Right Wing 10.9% 7.3% 12.5% P:830 S:72 P:720 S:110 P:346 S:25 — Total 8.7% 15.3% 7.2%

First looking at ideology (down the last column), we see that left wing articles are the most popular, being selected 13.1% of the time, right wing articles are the second most popu- lar at 12.5%, and neutral articles are the least popular, with a selection rate of 10.7%. Given that our sample is heavily distributed on the left side of the political spectrum, it would be expected that the left wing articles would be the most popular. However, it should also true that the right wing articles be less popular – something we clearly don’t see in comparison to the neutral category. This result suggests that we likely won’t get a clean result from the symmetrical measure of selective exposure (one that aggregates avoidance of dissonant ma- terial and selection of consonant material into one measure). Similarly, the aggregate results for the selection of partisan information suggests asymmetry. Here, the neutral category is most popular by a significant amount, further suggesting that the symmetrical measure of selective exposure likely won’t do a good job of predicting the selection of articles. How- ever, anti-Conservative articles are selected at a higher level than pro-Conservative articles, suggesting some selective exposure is taking place. We must turn to individual level analysis, however, to really understand what is hap- pening in terms of selection. Once again, I use a clustered logit model to predict whether each story presented to each individual was read or not, based on a number of predictor variables. The model takes into account clustering by subject, as to not overestimate the coefficients. I’ve separated the analysis into two tables: Table 4–3, which includes the whole

62 sample of respondents, and Table 4–4 which includes only the Canadian participants. This separation of Canadians is necessary for studying partisanship, but also produces interesting results for ideology, as we shall see.6

Table 4–3: Modelling Story Selection I: Full Sample

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Column 0.720∗∗ 0.648∗∗∗ 0.664∗∗ (0.107) (0.105) (0.111)

Row 0.964∗∗ 0.946∗∗∗ 0.952∗∗ (0.0166) (0.0178) (0.0185)

Ideology SE 1.108 (0.138)

Ideology Dissonant 1.236 (0.258)

Ideology Consonant 1.476∗∗ 2.335∗∗ (0.285) (0.968)

Extreme 0.955 (0.0682)

Ideology Consonant*Extreme 0.826 (0.141)

Constant 0.234∗∗∗ 0.292∗∗∗ 0.299∗∗∗ (0.0689) (0.0852) (0.0973) lnsig2u Constant 0.0485∗∗ 0.00483 0.0162 (0.0704) (0.0829) (0.0854) N 1896 1700 1615 Odds ratios from random effects logistic regression; Standard errors in parenthesis + p < 0.15, ∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

As in Experiment One, it is clear that the column and row a story was placed in matters in a significant way. Individuals are less likely to read an article in the second column, and increasingly unlikely to read an article as it is placed further down the page

6 This experiment would have been better served by a fully Canadian sample. However, the decision was made to replicate the Experiment One sample, which had a mixture of Canadians and non-Canadians. Due to time and resource limitations, I was not unable to produce the number of Canadians needed for strong results. I regret the error, and hope to remedy it in the future.

63 Table 4–4: Modelling Story Selection II: Canadians

Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 Model 8 Model 9 Column 0.711∗ 0.600∗∗ 0.646∗∗ 0.759 0.870 0.869 (0.135) (0.125) (0.140) (0.148) (0.209) (0.209)

Row 0.955∗∗ 0.935∗∗∗ 0.933∗∗∗ 0.948∗∗ 0.959+ 0.958+ (0.0210) (0.0225) (0.0235) (0.0216) (0.0274) (0.0274)

Ideology SE 1.262+ (0.202)

Ideology Dissonant 0.803 (0.232)

Ideology Consonant 1.329 3.440∗∗ (0.325) (1.961)

Extreme 0.952 (0.0877)

Ideology Consonant*Extreme 0.704+ (0.165)

Partisan SE 0.940 (0.125)

Partisan Dissonant 0.475∗∗ 0.236∗∗ (0.147) (0.141)

Partisan Consonant 0.507 (0.537)

Partisan 0.998 (0.00352)

Partisan Dissonant*Partisan 1.897+ (0.806) cons 0.245∗∗∗ 0.432∗∗ 0.389∗∗ 0.332∗∗∗ 0.338∗∗ 0.345∗∗ (0.0914) (0.160) (0.162) (0.115) (0.143) (0.149) lnsig2u cons 0.0592∗ 0.0000439 0.0375 0.0206 0.0000200 0.0000676 (0.0899) (0.00138) (0.117) (0.0831) (0.000434) (0.00247) N 1091 974 917 969 586 586 Odds ratios from random effects logistic regression; Standard errors in parentheses + p < 0.15, ∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

64 (the randomization of the articles, however, served to negate the effect this had on the results). Model 1 represents the hypothesis at the most basic level. That is: do individuals engage in selective exposure by avoiding information that is contrary to their ideological beliefs, and actively select information that is consistent with their beliefs? The predictor Ideology SE ranges from (-1) dissonant information, to (1) consonant information. In this way, we can see whether a particular story for an individual is dissonant, consonant, or neutral, and concordantly, how that code effects the likelihood of that story being read. This variable’s form (along with its counterpart Partisan SE in Table 4–4) assumes symmetry between avoiding dissonant information and selecting consonant information – an assumption that we have reason to question. In line with this expectation – we see that there is no relationship between Ideology SE and a propensity to read an article. Both odds ratios are close to 1 and statistically insignificant. If there is a propensity to engage in selective exposure based on ideological information, than it does nt happen in a symmetrical fashion, with individuals avoiding dissonant information and selecting consonant information in equivalent ways. Model 2 uses an asymmetric measures of ideological selective exposure to better de- termine how individuals are acting in the experiment. These variables were generated by setting the category of interest (say ideologically consonant articles) as (1), and all other articles as (0). In this way, we can see whether, for example, individuals have a propensity to select consonant information (when compared to all other articles), or avoid dissonant information (when compared to all other articles). The non-significant odds ratio close to 1 for Ideology Dissonant tells us that this is not the case – individuals are no less likely to select bias-challenging articles when compared to other articles. In fact, the odds ratio (despite being non-significant) runs in the wrong direction; suggesting, if anything, that there is a small propensity to read dissonant information. However, the odds ratio for the Ideology

65 Consonant variable is significant, and shows that individuals are in fact 40% more likely to select an article when its headline contains ideologically consonant information. So while there is some evidence, then, that individuals participate in selective exposure by selecting a higher number of consonant articles, the corresponding value on the dissonance avoidance measure makes it hard to claim definitively that selective exposure is taking place. Perhaps the non-symmetrical results we are seeing are a result of the non-Canadians in our sample. Table 4–4 removes these individuals. Interestingly, we see that the symmetrical Ideology SE variable found in Model 4 is positive and correctly signed, with Canadians 26% more likely to move from dissonant to neutral articles, and from neutral to consonant articles. We can dissect this further in Model 5, which separates back out the symmetrical selective exposure measure into its two components and allows them to act independently. Here we see that they work in the correct direction, with the individuals systematically avoiding ide- ologically dissonant articles, and selecting in higher numbers ideologically consonant articles. The clear caveat is that these odds ratios are not statistically significant, although both have relatively low p-values (dissonance p=0.288; consonance p=0.159). Given the reduced sam- ple size when examining only Canadians (n=38), it can be expected that results would drop out of statistical significance. As such, it can only be concluded tentatively that selective exposure – that is, the avoidance of dissonant ideological material and selection of consonant ideological material – is present when looking at Canadians reading Canadian political news. Models 7 and 8 replicate the previous analysis for partisan information. To begin with, the odds ratio for Partisan SE fails to reach statistical significance, and is close to 1. This suggests that individuals do not select and avoid partisan information in a symmetrical way, a result confirmed by looking at Model 8. Here we see that individuals do strongly avoid dissonant information, being 53% less likely to select these articles when compared to all other articles. However, individuals do not have a corresponding desire to select in to

66 consonant articles: that odds ratio is not significant, and is, in fact, signed in the wrong direction. Thus, in both cases, while there are significant results that suggest selective exposure, the corresponding values on either dissonance avoidance (in the case of ideology), or conso- nance attention (in the case of partisanship), make it hard to claim definitively that selective exposure is taking place. A possible reason may be that individuals of lower interest in pol- itics may be reacting perversely to the ’biased’ (i.e. non-neutral) information. However interacting the above results with a variable that captures self-reported interest in politics produces no significant results, thus negating that explanation.7 We’re also interested in whether the degree of selective exposure is affected by how strongly ideological or partisan an individual is, with the hypothesis that selective exposure will increase the more intense an individual’s predisposition. It is found that, for the most part, interacting variables for extremism and partisanship does not change the non-significant results for both symmetrical selective exposure measures and the non-significant odds ratio’s for Ideology Dissonant and Partisan Consonant(not shown). However, interacting these variables with the Ideology Consonant variable and the Partisan Dissonant variable produces interesting results. Model 3 looks at the former. We can see here that individuals at the lowest end of the extremism scale actually select ideologically consonant articles over neutral and dissonant articles by a large margin, as evidenced by the 2.355 odds ratio for the Ideology Consonant variable. However the interaction term is non-significant. The relationship is somewhat clarified when we restrict the sample to just Canadians in Model 6. Here we see again that individuals who are less extreme expose themselves more to consonant information. The

7 results available upon request.

67 negatively signed interaction term, though weak, suggests that as individuals become more extreme, they become less likely to selectively expose themselves to consonant ideological information. In Model 9, we see through the odds ratio for the Partisan Dissonant variables that individuals with the lowest level of partisanship are highly unlikely to select information that challenges their partisan point of view. The positive odds ratio for the interaction suggests that the more partisan an individual, the less they engage in selective avoidance of dissonant political information. As such, in both cases results run contrary to expectations, with individuals who are less extreme and less partisan showing a smaller propensity for selective exposure. The final test, in terms of selection, is considering how the preceding significant results are affected by an interaction with individuals attitudes about selective exposure. This measure was captured by the question: “When I decide to watch or view news about politics, I often choose news sources and articles that agree with my point of view...”. Individuals answered on a four point scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. Interacting this variable with the models described above produces no significant results.8 This suggests that attitudes on selective exposure have no impact on an individual’s behaviour towards consonant and dissonant information. A separate test for this section involves whether individuals spend more time reading dissonant over consonant articles. It is predicted, based on work by Redlawsk (2002), that individuals will spend a longer time reading consonant articles – time which they use to bolster their own ideas against the contradictory information. However, the measure to be used is not a straight measure of the time an individual reads a story. Due to the widely varying length of stories, this has the possibility of systematically biasing the results. Instead,

8 results available upon request.

68 a measure was produced that divided the time an individual spent reading an article, divided by the length of that article.9 This instead gives us a measure that suggests an individual’s degree of attention to an article, no matter it’s length. This better captures the possibility of people feeling the need to gather more information in certain types of articles. Table 4–5: Attention to Article

Model 10 Model 11 Model 12 Model 13 Row 0.0155 0.186 -0.0705 0.00120 (0.147) (0.167) (0.153) (0.220)

Column -0.0309 0.113 -0.748 -0.298 (1.343) (1.509) (1.394) (1.968)

Ideology Selective Exposure 0.0855 (1.059)

Ideology Consonant -1.893 (1.879)

Ideology Dissonant -2.294 (1.984)

Partisan Selective Exposure -3.071∗∗∗ (1.112)

Partisan Consonant -1.095 (11.33)

Partisan Dissonant 5.454∗∗ (2.673)

cons 14.92∗∗∗ 14.92∗∗∗ 16.59∗∗∗ 13.88∗∗∗ (2.653) (2.761) (2.493) (3.631) N 207 177 193 133 Coefficients from OLS regression; Standard errors in parentheses + p < 0.15, ∗ p < 0.10, ∗∗ p < 0.05, ∗∗∗ p < 0.01

Table 4–5 shows these results. As the measure for attention is a continuous variable, we move here to a standard OLS regression. Model 10 and 12 show the results for symmetrical measures of selective exposure, ranging from (-1) dissonance, to (1) consonance. We see in Model 10 that the measure for Ideology has a low coefficient and is not statistically significant, suggesting that an individual’s attention is not affected by whether an article challenges or supports their ideology. In Model 12, we find that an article being consonant

9 The measure was then multiplied by 100, in order to produce more sensible results.

69 or dissonant on partisan information does affect attention, with individuals spending less time per word on articles as they become more consonant. Model 11 splits the ideology measure into two asymmetric variables, and as the null result in Model 10 would suggest, there is no significant relationship here. Model 13 does the same for partisan information. While the coefficient expressing attention toPartisan Consonantis non-significant, we find a strong and statistically significant relationship for attention to Partisan Dissonant. It would seem that dissonant partisan information induces individuals to spend more time per word reading articles, a relationship significant at the p¡0.05 level. This result is very interesting, as in Model 8 we found that individuals had a propensity to not read these articles. Thus we are left with a conclusion that, while individuals have a propensity to avoid articles whose headlines contain dissonant partisan material, when they do read these articles, they read them for a longer period. This is in line with the literature on motivated reasoning elaborated by Redlawsk (2002), which predicts that individuals will give more attention to dissonant articles, which they use to ’bolster’ their own beliefs against the onslaught of contradicting information. 4.4 Discussion

Where are we left, then, in terms of our initial question: do individuals partake in selective exposure? The answer to this question is quite dependent on where we put the goalposts. If selective exposure means systematically shutting out dissonant information, while simultaneously preferring consonant information, than the answer is equivocal. Cer- tainly, when analyzing the entire sample, there seems to be little evidence for such symmetry, even when accounting for differences in interest in politics. It is only when we move to a model with only Canadians that we find some evidence of symmetry when considering ide- ological headlines, but the weak relationship here (perhaps a result of a small n), gives us only some confirmation of this phenomena.

70 If instead we consider selective exposure to be any form of systemic bias in informa- tion gathering, then the results here are much more solid. There was a clear disposition to select consonant ideological information, and avoid dissonant partisan information, when comparing these categories to all other articles. This strongly suggests that an individual’s media environments can be skewed when compared to the distribution of information pre- sented to them – however not to the extent that some proponents of selective-exposure would claim. Additionally, interacting these results for Ideology Consonance and Partisan Disso- nance with variables for strength of ideology/partisanship found that it is the people who place themselves as the least extreme, and the least partisan, who most strongly practice these selection practices. This result is clearly contrary to expectations, and hypotheses as to why this relationship exists can only be speculation at this point. Perhaps the strongest partisans and the most extreme ideologues exhibit this curiosity towards the other side’s material for the purposes of internally slandering it. This last notion gets some measure of support from our results for attention to an article, once it’s being read. It was found that when individuals choose to read Partisan Dissonant articles, they do so for a longer period of time – which the literature on motivated reasoning suggests is because individuals spend time bolstering against the contradictory information. Quite reasonably, we’re left with the same result that has been found in the bulk of the literature on selective exposure: equivocal results. Once again, there is a gap between the supposed common-sense theory of selective exposure, and a lack of strong evidence for it when actually tested. This gap is particularly interesting when considering the literature on political polarization. While research on whether the public has indeed become more divided is equivocal (see, in particular, Nivola and Brady 2006), there is at least some inclination to believe that an increasingly partisan media is causing, or at least allowing for, polarization. It is clear, at the very least, that there is a correlation between the political point of view a news source, and the political points of view of that source’s viewers (Mutz 2006, 226).

71 However, returning to Sears and Freedman’s (1967) categorization of de facto versus active selective exposure, it’s not entirely clear whether these individuals made an active selection to view these news sources, or whether something like family or geography created a natural sorting mechanism. While some have found evidence that this source-bias can be the result of active selective exposure (Mutz 2006, 227), the possibility exists that the problem of selective exposure is actually a problem of de facto sorting, not active selection. A further possibility is that selective exposure can only function on a source-to-source level. That is, individuals are only able to make broad selections about news sources based on real and perceived differences between those sources (Tewksbury 2005; Stroud 2006). Put another way, individuals may lack the ability – or perhaps willingness – to parse the ideological and partisan cues in a headline, and subsequently make a decision to reduce dissonance. Selective exposure, in other words, may be a longer term process of learning and source selection, rather than an immediate article to article bias. What’s more, individuals may simply be using other frames present in the headlines to make selections between. Of course this is a testable proposition, as it is easy to recode the articles for other characteristics. In fact, coding these articles for tone10 (as per Experiment One), brings interesting results. Individuals in this round of the experiment were 38% less likely to read a positive article over a negative article – a near replication of the odds ratio from the first experiment. Much like Experiment One, the non-election context of this experiment is important. The theories surrounding motivated-reasoning, for example, require a direct motivation to make decisions between candidates in an election cycle. It was my implicit contention that individuals will still feel some level of pressure to differentiate between candidates and update

10 Note, due to time and resources, this coding was done solely by myself. As such, we should be accordingly cautious about the results.

72 affect (and thus engage in selective exposure) even in a non-election context. The relatively weak findings of this section might be, in part, a consequence of individuals not feeling that pressure. But that too is an interesting result. Far too much work on motivated reasoning concerns itself with how voters make electoral decisions. It is not my contention to question the validity of this research, rather, I simply wish to question its generalizability to times when individuals are not in the midst of an election campaign. Selective exposure has been over-generalized by some authors to be a phenomenon relevant to all time periods, when it may be the case that individuals are far more broad in their information seeking when in an un-motivated environment. A tentative research design to address this question can be found in the following section.

73 Article Headlines

The news headlines used in Experiment Two are as follows. Both Ideology and Partisan- ship are listed after each headline, where Topic both are the modal codes from three expert coders. Ideology is measured on a three point scale of Left, Neutral, Right, and partisnaship is measured on a three point scale of Anti-Conservative, Neutral, Pro-Conservative. • Rae calls for campaign spending probe on Tory minister Peter Penashue; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • Tory Minister’s election expenses questioned; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • Why personhood is beside the point; The abortion debate should focus less on the mysteries of embryonic life and more on the limits of governmental power; Left; Neutral • Opposition blows whistle on Oilers owner’s donation; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • Abortion politics tarnishes Queen’s medals; Don’t blame recipients, but those who bestow; Left; Neutral • Tory MP keeps Etobicoke riding; Court ruling; Neutral; Pro-Conservative • NDP’s new sense a threat to Tories; ‘Loony Left’ behaving loony no longer; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • Make welfare work again; Recipients burdened by bureaucracy; Right; Neutral • Ottawa’s long-term debt plans shelved; With debt up by $125-billion in recession, Flaherty says targets for balancing books put on hold; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • Multiculturalism in all its controversial glory; Is Canada a ’country without a core culture’?; Right; Neutral • Confusion seen in government’s ‘toothless’ campaign spending bill; Neutral; Anti- Conservative • Rae introduces bill to replace Indian Act; Left; Anti-Conservative • Tories press to dismiss suit over robo-call allegations; Woman who launched complaint wasn’t eligible to vote in contested riding of Don Valley East; Neutral; Neutral

74 • Study finds Canadians aren’t feeling economic growth in their daily lives; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • 8 things about Sacha Trudeau; Pierre Trudeau’s second son enters the family business alongside his brother; Neutral; Neutral • Defeat on motion to debate definition of a human being a lost opportunity; Right; Neutral • Critics say Tory budget bill puts fish habitats in danger; Left; Anti-Conservative • Conservatives do an about-face on splitting omnibus budget bill, fast-tracking legisla- tion on MPs’ benefits; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • Separation of church and plate; Nova Scotia refuses personalized licence plate referring to Christ; Left; Neutral • Don’t Let This Be The Justin Trudeau Show; The Liberals Need To Make This A Real Race - With More Than One Protagonist; Neutral; Neutral • Conservatives unveil a few surprises; parliamentary experts cry foul; Neutral; Anti- Conservative • The Right emphasis; Government’s rebranding the Canadian Museum of Civilization will renew focus on country’s “Grand Story”; Right; Pro-Conservative • Kenney Backs Bill To Bar Hatemongers; Right; Pro-Conservative • Ottawa’s effort to rebrand museum met with criticism; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • Unions decry influx of foreign workers; Right; Neutral • Don’t curate peacemaking out of our history; Left; Neutral • PM taking charge of civil service; Conservatives assign eight new department heads; Neutral; Pro-Conservative • PM wants summits held in democratic nations; Neutral; Pro-Conservative • A ‘total’ waste; Previously unreleased review blasts Canada’s Afghan aid; Left; Anti- Conservative

75 • How equalization payments hurt everybody; Right; Neutral • Faith finds a home in Conservative politics; Right; Pro-Conservative • Ottawa mum on which firms getting contracts; Security exemption; Neutral; Anti- Conservative • Prospect of federal government scrapping project leads to fears of homelessness; Left; Anti-Conservative • Trudeau’s fame earned or ‘pop’ fluff?; Campaign will dissipate aura of stardom; Neu- tral; Pro-Conservative • NDP ‘fails’ Nexen deal; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • Don’t let the military rust (again); Right; Neutral • Brian Mulroney’s lasting legacy; Neutral; Pro-Conservative • Trade minister criticizes ‘inward-looking’ NDP; Neutral; Pro-Conservative • Minister to visit idled meat plant; Neutral; Neutral • NDP argue against Nexen deal, foreign investment secrecy; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • National sensitivities spark embassy flag race; Neutral; Neutral • Who will end affirmative action?; Right; Neutral • Canada’s cold shoulder to the UN; Baird’s denunciation of international body as in- effectual comes on heels of PM’s decision to forgo addressing General Assembly; Left; Anti-Conservative • Tory MP apologizes for Mulcair comment; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • Feds spent millions to avoid trial over First Nations child welfare shortage.; Left; Anti- Conservative • Tories look to amend safety legislation; Under pressure over the latest E. coli outbreak, Ottawa says it will commit to an assessment of its resources every five years; Neutral; Anti-Conservative • Arctic sea ice: Don’t wait for an emergency; Left; Neutral

76 • New debate looms over sex-selective abortion motion; Left; Neutral • Time for a ’net harm’ test; The case for easing government restrictions on foreign takeovers; Right; Neutral • Climate hype via Hogwarts Lab; The media clamor for environmental alarmism; Right; Neutral

77 CHAPTER 5 Conclusion The motivating questions for this thesis centered around the role consumer demand for certain types of news plays in molding individual citizens views of political reality. I believe that the experimental work done here is a strong first step in that direction. The primary contribution to this question was the experimental method derived to test these hypotheses. I believe that the deviation from the standard at-home news study is quite important. There seems to be a pre-occupation in the literature with achieving “mundane- realism” – that is, a replication of the exact circumstances we would like to generalize about. I strongly believe that we will achieve stronger validity in our results if we focus more on internal validity and replication, rather than on realism. There are reasonable criticisms to make regarding my method – particularly my assertion that this experiment achieves some degree of external reliability through the use of deception. Certainly there will be detractors who claim that the loss of experimental control inherent in doing at-home news reading experiments is worth the gain in generalizability. I accept this line of thought, and look forward to further discussion on it in the future. Regardless, the experimental design chosen for this work has brought us interesting results. The first experiment was able to show an unconscious bias for negative political information. While results for policy versus strategy coverage were less conclusive, there is at least some evidence of strategy coverage having utility for Canadians. Experiment Two brought more inconclusive results. It was not found that individuals exhibit behaviour that would be called “classic” selective exposure. However, there were clearly systematic

78 preferences in some areas that would suggest individual choices create some sort of distortion mechanism. It is my hope that this work for my Master’s thesis is more of a point of departure than an end in itself. Considering that, I hope to push this work in two direction: first, probing deeper into the mechanisms that drive selection on the individual level; and second, examining more specifically how people’s images of political reality vary systematically through their media selections. 5.1 Extension One: Uncovering Motivations

While I’ve uncovered biases in the way that individuals select their news, it’s impossible for me to say what is driving these selections. Do people, for example, select more negative stories because they have utility; or are these stories simply more entertaining? While an attempt was made to answer this question through a time variable, it was not successful in producing any results. The first step in pushing this research forward is developing a method that can adequately test whether information biases are part of a heuristic process of motivated-reasoning, or whether something else drives them. Directly related to this is the concern of running these experiments in non-election con- texts – in other words, contexts where we cannot assume people feel pressure to make voting decisions, and thus act in the way motivated reasoning expects them to. One remedy for this would be to move this experiment in the direction of the fake election-cycle experiments done by Lau and Redlawsk (2006). However, as I’ve discussed previously, these experiments have the problem of both, (a) experimental effects influencing selections, and (b) not being generalizable to non-election news-reading. Instead, I believe it would be more beneficial to use the real world election cycle to stimulate the need for motivated-reasoning. Running this experiment in multiple iterations – both in non-election contexts and in one-month intervals leading up to an election – would allow us to see possible trends in the way that people view news content. Seeing,

79 for example, strategy news become more popular as an election becomes proximate, would allow us to better understand how behaviour changes over time, and thus how an individual’s aggregate media environment changes over time. In other words, running an experiment that maintains its relation to the “real-world” of politics, while naturally modulating the need for information which may help individuals in their electoral decisions. There would clearly be a need to have roughly equivalent samples in each round. As such, an undergraduate subject pool might be inappropriate, as the makeup of respondents may vary systematically with the order they sign-up to attend. This research design would be much more conducive to an online platform like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – which has been found to have a sample more representative than undergraduate populations, and to produce results with strong external validity (Kittur, Chi and Suh 2008; Buhrmester, Kwang and Gosling 2011; Mason and Suri 2012). Clearly running this experiment online presents some problems – chief among them is losing the ability to deceive respondents in the same way that was done in the lab-based experiment. The problem of social-desirability influencing individuals selection would remain, so some method of misdirection would need to be derived. 5.2 Extension Two: Untangling Effects

Having knowledge about what type of media people select is only half of the battle. There is also an interest on how the systematic differences in the news that people receive influences their beliefs about the world of politics that they live in. A great example of work in this vein is Naurin’s (2011) work on the gap between perception and reality in party pledges. However, her aggregate level data does not allow us to view individual differences in perceptions. A research program that is able to look at individual beliefs about the level of promise-breaking by politicians, and interact those attitudes with information about their news reading behaviour, would allow us to view the effect media environments are having on perceptions on politics.

80 Clearly this line of research does not have to be limited to the balance of negative and positive news. Taking cues from classic agenda-setting literature, a research project could be done on individual perceptions of what the important issues facing the country are, and how variations on those answers coincide to self-selection of consonant material on the individual level. Ultimately, this area of research is ripe for an approach that further considers the dis- junctures and links between individual behaviour and attitudes. The experiments presented in this thesis are a good first step in this methodological area, but much more can be done. I hope to do so in the coming years. 5.3 A Day in the Life

Ultimately, I hope this thesis helps to reconnect political behaviour researcher to the area of “minimal effects” in communication research. The field of voting behaviour is primarily focused on the process of “motivated-reasoning”, in other words creating ranked preferences in the time period proximate to the final voting decision. I understand this focus, and by all means there is a great deal of interesting work to be done in this area. However, this attention comes at the expense of more nuanced work on how individuals construct the political reality around them. Before motivated-reasoning takes hold, individuals must come to comprehend the world of politics: creating the baselines for things like issue-ownership, cynicism about the political world, or beliefs about opposing points of view of their fellow citizens. These are long term, and likely quite static, trends. Nevertheless, I believe their study to be important. This is particularly true given the modern media-environment we now live in. Perhaps in the past it was reasonable to assume, due to the widespread usage of general-interest- intermediaries, that most individuals lived in similar ‘political realities’. I don’t believe this assumption to still be true. The ability for individual’s to live in drastically different media- environments than their neighbors generates a great deal of potential problems in political

81 behaviour, and politics more generally. I’ve investigated a small corner of this research agenda in this thesis, but there is still much work to be done.

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