Dave’s Book Club

For today’s review, News That Matters: Television and American Opinion by Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder

I found this book a pretty interesting read. The premise of the study in the book is that the news we watch on television can have profound impacts on our different judgments. Whether it be on issues facing us or our political leaders, television news media can help (or hurt depending on the way you look at it) in the formation of our perceptions of society. To study this, a number of experiments are conducted to see whether the audience’s perceptions of different events, stories or politicians were affected by the timing of the news story, the delivery (audibly or visually) and/or the source. Overall, the studies conducted found that the news media has a profound impact on the public perception of politics and its players and settings. While the book is dated (copyright 1987) and can't take into account new media sources like the internet, with it’s 24 hour access to news and video, as well as the impact of blogs on news media, Iyengar and Kinder arguments are still, for the most part, valid today. Even some hypothesizes that they tested and were unable to prove can be validated, in my mind, by incorporating today’s technologies and stories into the argument and experiments.

One experiment I found particularly interesting was their attempt to test the “vividness hypothesis,” which formulates that that “agenda-setting is enhanced by stories that illustrate and personalize national problems” (Iyengar, 34). To test this, they tried two different sub-experiments, whereby individual were shown news programs with filtered content (some were shown impersonal stories about national problems and some were shown very personal and emotional stories for example) to see how the tone and presentation of the news would affect the participants perceptions of the story/political actors. They concluded that “vivid cases fail to enhance the influence of the evening news…but rather that, under certain circumstances, vivid cases may actually diminish the capacity of the news to influence the public’s political priorities” (Iyengar, 39).

I found this hard to believe. Any maybe it is because 20 years of technology advances have shaped my perception, but I couldn't believe that visual cues and the tone of a story couldn't affect the perceived out come of a news story (at least not in today's society). The first example that came to mind to counter this conclusion was last year’s big news story about Senator George Allen’s 'comment' at a campaign rally in Virginia. Of course, I am referring to the now infamous “macaca comment.” Here’s where I feel that this example validates the vividness hypothesis. The story when it first happened didn’t make any big splashes in the news media. All the media had to go by was text of his comment, which when shown to viewers wasn’t deemed as anything of note. That was until video of the moment began to pop-up. When the video and news media stories started showing it, it spread around the internets to where millions of people saw Sen. Allen make his comment. Public opinion then began to sway against him in Virginia. That moment and the uproar that it caused, more than anything else in my opinion, was the main source to his eventual election defeat. This in my opinion contradicts the results from the experiment from 20 + years ago because it shows that the visual cues in the story were much more powerful and effective the just the audio or text of the speech as it was presented immediately, and helped change public opinion on the Senator.

To sum it all up, this was an interesting, albeit dated presentation of how the news media effects the public’s perceptions through different elements in their broadcasts. This is the first example I can find of any type of comprehensive study of the media and its affects on public perceptions. I would be truly interested if these authors did a follow up to this study some twenty years later, to see how the many facets of the internet, news on demand and 24 hour news cycles, have changed their previous findings.


Citation for the book:

Iyengar, Shanto and Kinder, Donald R. News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press. 1987