Print vs Print

There's been a rash of recent studies to help us understand how people learn from television versus print news.  Basically, those with less education tend to learn more from TV news than other media, in part because of the way television tells stories is more easily digested by those with less knowledge or motivation to keep up with public affairs.

But what about print versus print?

Earlier studies looked at reading the news in print paper form versus online and tended to find paper worked better than pixels.  I've even blogged about one aspect of this.  How do we explain the difference?  Isn't print like print, regardless of whether it's ink smushed on paper or pixels painted on a screen?  My own hunch is it has to do with the way we approach the medium. Paper is seen, unconsciously perhaps, as more serious or more deserving of attention, thus we tend to process news in that form better and, hence, do better on tests of political knowledge.

And so comes this new study (abstract only, sorry), published in the latest New Media & Society.  It finds that among higher education subjects, the kind of print (paper vs pixels) makes no difference in comprehension.  But for those of less education, paper works better as a source of information, at least when measuring comprehension.  The medium, then, is part of the message, but only in that we approach different media in different ways, with different expectations and different consequences of that exposure.

Less education can mean a lot of things -- cognitive ability, for example, but never underestimate the power of motivation.  Folks with less education tend to be less motivated to keep up with public affairs, in part because they fail to see how fairly abstract stories are linked to their daily lives.  If I was to try and explain the results above, I'd say less educated respondents somehow view print as more deserving of their attention than a screen, while those of greater education are equally able to glean useful information regardless of the kind of medium they are confronted with.  It fits the earlier television news stuff discussed above and adds another brick in the wall of what we know about how people choose their news source, how expectations color the way they process information, and what the consequences of these trends may be in the long run.

Driven to Distraction

Sexy News Babes
Drive Male Viewers
to Distraction

Okay, I wrote the above to grab the attention of those all-important bots that surf the net and end up driving people this direction.  But apparently it's true, at least according to this news story about research published in Communication Research (a fine journal because, if for no other reason, I've never appeared in it).  An experiment used two primary conditions: one in which a broadcast female news reader wore a tight jacket and skirt that, and I'm not making this up, "accented her waist-to-hip ratio."  In the alternate version, the same woman wore "a shapeless and loose-fitting" jacket and skirt.  In the previous, lipstick and a necklace, in the latter, neither of them.

According to the story (I've not read the journal article):

The researchers found the men recalled “significantly more information watching the unsexualized anchor deliver news than her sexualized version.” For women, the opposite was true, but the effect was far less pronounced.

And yet again, research I wish I had done.

We've all heard about news babes, which demeans hard-working women struggling to make it in journalism, but there's a significant grain of truth to it as well.  You don't see a lot of ugly women -- or men -- reading the news.  But apparently this gets in the way of learning, which isn't surprising.  We've known since research in the 1950s that humor or other factors can get in the way of learning.  We can only process so much.  There was even the infamous Reagan case in which his PR folks didn't care what the TV reporters said, as long as their visuals got on the screen. 

Attractiveness does have positives: it makes a person seem more believable and may even aid in persuasion, or so suggests persuasion models such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model. 

So our takeaway?  The story says it best:  "The study provides evidence for a basic theory of evolutionary psychology: When it comes to processing information, visual tends to trump verbal."

Trusted News Sources

A June Gallup poll includes numbers in trust in newspapers and television news from 2006 through 2009. The findings?

• Trust in Television News has dropped slowly from 71 percent giving some positive comment to 64 percent in the latest survey.
• Trust in Newspapers has inched down but well within the margin of error, from 70 percent to 68 percent.

Meaning what?

A Pew Center report (scroll down a bit to "falling favorability" for the table) looks from 1985 to 2007. It's more specific (cable news, broadcast tv news, etc.). Most media outlets drop here, from newspapers to local tv news. The biggest drops are by national newspapers and cable news.

How do we reconcile the two? In part they ask somewhat different questions, in part the Pew breaks TV news down to its various parts such as cable (CNN, Fox, etc.), in part it may even be time (Pew goes from 1985 to 2007, Gallup from 2006 to 2009). Maybe something has changed recently, a frustration with cable TV news now become somewhat more partisan due to a fragmenting audience -- that's a pretty good bet, but it hard to say, and I didn't have time to scour Pew for newer media favorability numbers.

And then there's the question as to whether "believability" or "credibility" or "favorability" matter for news organizations. As a former journalist I used to believe that if I wasn't pissing someone off, I wasn't doing my job right. And I tell my own reporting students that if they want to be loved, be a kindergarten teacher, not a journalist. Those who dislike the news the most are often those who consume it the greatest, a love-hate relationship that at times makes absolutely no sense, at least on the surface.

The Inflated News Audience

Interesting article in the just-off-the-press Public Opinion Quarterly by Markus Prior in which he finds significant overreporting of news exposure by the public. Yes, there's a duh moment here since we know people overestimate how often they vote, how often they attend religious services, and how good their gas mileage is (correlates with gas prices, the higher the gas prices, the better they lie about their mileage). They always overestimate their viewing of "highbrow" content too, like PBS, as compared to actual viewing of stuff like reruns of Gilligan's Island or Sponge Bob.

So the notion that people overestimate their news exposure, no real surprise. The degree of that overestimation, that's a surprise -- at least to me. Prior reports a range of a factor of three to a factor of eight, depending on demographics, on overreporting of news exposure. He also fusses about some survey wording that mass comm types have been bitching about for decades, especially those of us with a history in the actual news business, but that's beside the point here.

Who overreports the most? Young people. By far -- if you buy into his comparison of Nielsen people meters and data from the National Annenberg Election Survey. There's a bit of apples and oranges here, but not enough to challenge his basic finding that people overestimate their consumption of news on television. Families with kids and households with higher incomes, they also overestimate as compared to all viewers.

If you buy into this analysis it raises an interesting methodological question: should we correct statistically for estimates of news exposure? Should be reduce to some degree the news exposure estimates of younger versus older respondents? Prior suggests scholars "would do well to assess media effects with research designs that do not rely on self-reported exposure at all." Damned unlikely, especially if you rely on secondary analysis of archival data, and I'm not sure exactly how to get at this unless we preface our media exposure items in much the same way we do political knowledge questions in which we tell respondents it's okay, really it's okay, if you don't know this (or watch or read the news). Someone needs to test that approach and see if it really does deflate the overinflated numbers.

Study Specs
Markus Prior, "The immensely inflated news audience: Assessing bias in self-reported news exposure," Public Opinion Quarterly 73 (Spring 2009), 130-143.

Education has always been a powerful predictor of what people know about public affairs. A study I missed somehow from a couple of years ago probes this relation ship and find some interesting stuff. As the authors note:

Our analysis has shown that the relationship between education and knowledge varies along with changes in the information environment. Increases in newspaper coverage primarily benefit the highly educated, thereby reinforcing the relationship between education and knowledge. By contrast, increases in the volume of television coverage benefit the least educated, in absolute terms, almost as much as the most educated.

We've known this from other studies, that TV helps most those who know little about politics and public affairs. But the above study, from a 2006 issue of American Journal of Political Science (volume 50, 266-282), goes into great detail, the kind that suggests we may now have a growing information underclass.

How do we fix this? How about providing more information? Nope. The authors write:

Simply providing more information is likely to reinforce the knowledge gap that exists between people with low and high levels of education.

In other words, no help there. The less educated -- those who have little motivation to keep up with public affairs or little ability to do so -- gravitate toward the spoonful of sugar of TV news, if they consume any news at all. Many use TV as a means of escaping any news content, thanks to hundreds of channels available via cable and satellite. And any TV news they do get, especially the crap on local tv news, won't do them much good when it comes to having a clue about politics and public affairs.

Cable news, CNN and Fox and all the rest, aren't much better. As newspapers die, I'm afraid for many, so will political knowledge.

Prediction Time

My prediction, for what it's worth:

Obama wins with 53 percent of the
popular vote and 315 electoral votes.

In the What People Know category, by sometime tonight we'll know because the networks and various political web sites are trying to decide when to "call" the election. CBS may go earlier than other networks, relying heavily (too heavily?) on exit poll and other data. CNN may report when other networks make the call but play it a little more conservatively when it comes to their own projections. No word yet from Comedy Central and their strategy, other than to be really really funny.

Watch for code words from analysts who already know the numbers but aren't sharing them. "John McCain looks to have a really long night" or something like that, or "The Obama campaign can't help but be happy." Code phrases that really say the analyst has seen the numbers and wants to look particularly smart when he or she gets around to sharing them with the unwashed.

It's always been done this way, but average viewers never knew it until fairly recently. Another layer, another curtain, pulled away. The result ain't pretty, but then again neither is making sausage.

Learned Helplessness and the News

People sometimes get a sense of powerlessness, of learned helplessness, from consuming the news. The issues seem so big. The actors seem so distant. And the journalistic routine of providing competing sides on an issue, or even competing solutions, can make things even worse.

If I were measuring learned helplessness or a sense of powerlessness or self efficacy right now, I'd tie it to the economic issues of the day. Dow drops. Dow climbs. Banks fail. Government acts, kinda. And it all seems so beyond the control of everyday people. TV is a factor. The "rendering of the story," according to one study, helps create learned helplessness in the viewers.

The good news? There's an election. Maybe ya heard about it.

If the news media can provide "mobilizing information" then people, theoretically, should learn more and as a consequence, act on that information. So a crisis timed with a presidential election is not necessarily a bad thing. We should see more participation, more political learning.

Okay, so that's the theory, but some of this is based on previous research. One study found that citizen apathy about topics in the news "results from a profound sense of powerlessness." Give "mobilizing information," they argue, and this provides a sense of self efficacy. People learn. People act. They feel more a part of the democratic process. A spiral of sorts is created, a good one, as they get a taste for being informed and involved.

But there is something in the nature of television news that helps promote learned helplessness, and yet there is something about really good candidates who can bridge this aspect of the medium by connecting, ironically through television, to tell people they really do matter. Whether this campaign, tied as it is to a financial crisis, results in more political knowledge is something many scholars will be asking. I can't wait to hear the answer.

Grazing

Grazing gets a bad rap. Let's face it, we all graze certain content: the TV news, dull conversations with family, memos from our boss. A couple of scholars looked specifically at news grazers, who they defined as people who watch the TV news with a remote in hand, ready to switch around when a story of little interest appears on the screen.

Yeah -- been there, changed that channel.

(btw: I didn't know the first remote, from Zenith, was called Lazy Bones. That's funny.)

Men graze more than women. Grazers are less likely to read the newspaper and, indeed, they are more likely to avoid any hard news of any type: local, national, international. As is now kinda obvious, grazers tend to know less about public affairs, at least as measured in the study. This makes sense. Inadvertent, haphazard exposure to news is simply not enough to be informed. What is not measured here is the difference between recall and recognition. Theoretically (yeah, I used the T-word), we would expect grazers to do better at recognition questions because they would have the answer on the tip of their tongue. Reading or carefully attending to the news would lead to higher recall scores (as is the case here).

The so what? Seventy percent of young people are grazers. They may feel informed through picking up bits and pieces here and there, from TV news or Jon Stewart or the web, but grazing doesn't lead to actually being informed. Grazing works well only for cows.