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 r^oledes 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 c^ot´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.