New Era of Minimal Effects 1
A New Era of Minimal Effects?
The Changing Foundations of Political Communication
W. Lance Bennett1
& Shanto Iyengar2
Journal of Communication, Forthcoming
The authors thank Stefaan Walgrave and Peter Van Aelst for their comments.
1
Departments of Communication and Political Science, University of Washington,
Seattle, WA 98195
2
Departments of Communication and Political Science, Stanford University, Palo Alto
CA
New Era of Minimal Effects 2
The great thinkers who influenced the contemporary field of political communication
were preoccupied with understanding the political, social, psychological, and economic
transformations at the dawn of modern industrial society. But societies have changed so
dramatically since the time of these landmark contributions that one must question the
continuing relevance of paradigms drawn from them. To cite but a few examples,
people have become increasingly detached from overarching institutions such as public
schools, political parties and civic groups which at one time provided a shared context for
receiving and interpreting messages. What are the implications of this detachment on
how people respond to media messages? Information channels have proliferated and
simultaneously become more individualized. Is it still relevant to conceive of “mass
media,” or has that concept been made obsolete by audience fragmentation and isolation
from the public sphere? Does this new environment foreshadow a return to a time of
minimal effects? If we are looking at a new minimal effects era, how can we distinguish
it from the last such period?
Retracing some of the intellectual origins of the field may help us identify the
fundamental changes in society and communication technologies that are affecting the
composition of audiences, the delivery of information, and the experience of politics
itself. In particular, we are concerned with the growing disjuncture between prevailing
research strategies and the socio-technological context of political communication, which
may give rise to unproductive battles over findings (Donsbach, 2006). To the extent that
New Era of Minimal Effects 3
research paradigms fail to reflect prevailing social and technological patterns, the validity
of results will be in serious question.
Consider just one case in point: the famous earlier era of “minimal effects” that
emerged from studies done in the 1940s and early 1950s (Klapper, 1960). The
underlying context for this scholarship consisted of a pre- mass communication media
system and relatively dense memberships in a group-based society networked through
political parties, churches, unions, and service organizations (Putnam, 2000). At this
time, scholars concluded that media messages were filtered through social reference
processes as described in the two-step flow model proposed by Katz and Lazarsfeld
(1955; Bennett & Manheim, 2006). Although the classic study by Lang & Lang (1953)
suggested the importance of television, it did not shake the rising paradigm. As Gitlin
(1978) pointed out, the data in the classic Columbia studies of Lazarsfeld, Katz and
others only partially supported the minimal effects, two-step flow interpretation. The
chance to incorporate changing social structures and technologies in a more
comprehensive model was lost in the scholarly embrace of the new paradigm. Later
communication researchers began to find more substantial evidence of direct effects, and
ways to incorporate social cueing with mass communication models (Zaller, 1992). This
long-standing debate illustrates the decreasing relevance over time of Tarde’s turn of the
century social model. The upshot of such under-theorizing was a protracted and
unproductive controversy about direct vs. socially cued media effects that lasted several
decades.
Interestingly, the transition from the minimal effects to strong effects era was
marked by remarkably little awareness of or effort to track underlying social changes
New Era of Minimal Effects 4
such as the rapid disconnection of individuals from group-based civil society or the rise
of greater message saturation through common mass media channels or to identify them
as plausible contingencies for media influence in the 1980s and 1990s. In any event, a
new consensus seemed to emerge that the news does tell people both what to think about
(e.g., Iyengar & Kinder, 1987), and also how to think about it (e.g., Iyengar, 1991).
Looking ahead, we see another time of unsettled findings accompanied by the risk
of under-theorized socio-technological conditions. Indeed, with the continued
detachment of individuals from the group-based society, and the increased capacity of
consumers to choose from a multitude of media channels (many of which enable userproduced
content), the effects picture may be changing again. As receivers exercise
greater choice over both the content of messages and media sources, effects become
increasingly difficult to produce or measure in the aggregate, while creating new
challenges for theory and research.
One of the few scholarly efforts to alert the field to this coming possibility was a
paper by Chaffee and Metzger (2001), in which the authors offered this startling
prediction about a core research area in the field: “the key problem for agenda-setting
theory will change from what issues the media tell people to think about to what issues
people tell the media they want to think about.” (p. 375). It is interesting to note that this
article received some modest attention (14 citations according to a Google Scholar search
in early 2008). Two scholars who cited it in support of similar arguments also received
some attention: Schulz (2004) received 22 citations, and Tewksbury (2003) received 30
citations. However, the citation trails -- measured by articles that cited these articles
being cited, in turn -- quickly died out within a single search page. By contrast, the ever-
New Era of Minimal Effects 5
popular agenda-setting subfield produced 567,000 topical hits on Google Scholar, led, not
surprisingly, by the classic McCombs and Shaw (1972) article that began this scholarly
wave.
Let’s compare the agenda-setting juggernaut with the still faint, but emerging
discussion about the need to rethink both theory and method underlying agenda setting as
a viable concept. We begin by noting that the original McCombs and Shaw article, alone,
had a Google Scholar citation count of 997, recorded at the same time we checked the
above references. More importantly, one had to go 10 pages deep (more than 100
articles) in the McCombs - Shaw citation trail to find articles that received less then 20
follow-on citations themselves. The comparable follow-on citation trail ended after two
articles in the Chaffee-Metzger “end of mass media” lineage. Finally, it was fully 51
pages into Google Scholar before follow-on citations from articles citing the original
McCombs - Shaw article finally dropped to zero, contrasted with citation trails that both
ended in less than one page following from the two most cited “end of mass media”
articles.
One does not have to do the math to realize how easily agenda setting tops the
half million mark in scholarly approval. The point here is not that might makes right.
Indeed, most scholars understand that conditions in the media – society firmament are
changing. Rather, using citation counts as indicators of the correspondence of theory and
research to empirical conditions, it may make more sense in this case to suggest that
scholarly importance bears little resemblance to reality. Just as the minimal effects
paradigm may have strained against the realities of its own time, and surely lasted many
years beyond the shift in communication realities, so, too, the agenda setting paradigm
New Era of Minimal Effects 6
reflects the capacity of ideas to motor on, unimpeded by inconvenient realities to the
contrary. The question is: what will it take to realign this research tradition with current
social and media conditions?
In short, transformations of society and technology need to be included more
explicitly in communication models in order to avoid a repetition of earlier unproductive
debates over “minimal effects,” “agenda-setting,” and other findings-driven controversies
in political communication. Even if we may be heading into another era of minimal
effects, it will not look like the earlier one in terms of the nature of communication
processes or the implications for democracy. We urge greater attention to the underlying
social and technological context in models of communication processes and their effects
so that research findings become more interpretable, cumulative, and socially significant.
Intellectual Origins of Political Communication
There are few interdisciplinary fields sustained by as wide a range of intellectual
traditions as political communication. Indeed, unlike political sociology, which can trace
much of its conceptual framework and subject matter to the grand sociological tradition
of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Tarde, Simmel, and, later, to the Chicago and Columbia
schools, political communication owes relatively little to early political science. It is
more accurate to say that the pioneers of the field such as Harold Lasswell, and later,
Murray Edelman adapted perspectives from thinkers in sociology, anthropology,
psychology, linguistics, journalism, public relations and economics.
Consider the early research in voting choice and opinion formation. The landmark
political science work The American Voter (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960)
New Era of Minimal Effects 7
represented a synthesis of the sociological tradition of voting according to group identity
(e.g., Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1948) and the psychological tradition of “who said
what” (e.g., Hovland, Janis & Kelly, 1953).
The classic voting studies in sociology can also be traced to earlier
interdisciplinary influences. For example, Tarde’s (1903) theories of diffusion, imitation,
and interpersonal influence clearly shaped the work of Lazarsfeld, Berelson, Merton and
Katz. These pioneers promoted the notion that ordinary citizens had little capacity to
reason or decide independently about politics (or other matters, such as fashion). Instead,
their views were shaped by their group memberships and experiences, and were thus less
susceptible to direct influence from the media. Media influence was understood as
contingent on social filters and interpersonal cues, as exemplified by the aforementioned
“two step flow” model of Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) and the accompanying minimal
effects school of media sociology (Klapper, 1960).
Further evidence of the origins of political communication in classic modernist
schools of social science is revealed in the symbolic politics tradition. For example,
political scientist Murray Edelman (1964) derived a good deal of his early thinking from
language theory and semiotics, including the writings of Sapir, Whorf, and Wittgenstein.
It is intriguing that as Edelman (1988) later began to see politics less as elitist
institutional politics in popular disguise and more as an institutionally regulated
communication spectacle, he incorporated post modernists such as Foucault, Baudrillard,
and Derrida into his thinking.
Edelman’s early ideas of categorization and category errors (definitions of issues
that produce systematic misunderstandings of problems and dysfunctional policy results)
New Era of Minimal Effects 8
resonated with an emerging interest in framing, which was also heavily influenced by
earlier sociologists. Among the main figures at the headwaters of framing analysis were
symbolic interactionists such as Herbert Blumer (1969) and George Herbert Mead
(1934), whose name appeared on Edelman’s endowed chair at Wisconsin. The later
contributions of sociologist Erving Goffmann (1959, 1961) helped bridge those
sociological traditions to the work of more recent scholars such as George Lakoff (1987),
Robert Entman (1993), Shanto Iyengar (1991), and many others.
A related intellectual line of political communication research drew on early
modernist theory in psychology to study identifications between leaders and followers
that set the stage for much of the field’s focus on persuasion and propaganda. Freud’s
discussion of the pathological aspects of personality (1921) influenced early political
communication scholars such as Harold Lasswell (1927, 1930) and spawned a large
literature on leadership, personality and national character (Erikson, 1958; Fromm, 1941;
George & George, 1956). The Freudian perspective on the stresses that modern
institutional life presented for healthy ego formation, as delineated in the 1930 classic
Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud, 1989), influenced subsequent thinking about
mass movements, religion and political zealotry, and the emotional foundations of
consumer society as explored by the Frankfurt school. This critical tradition
(Horkheimer, 1937) incorporated theoretical elements of Marx and Freud, and runs more
recently through the work of Habermas (1989), whose theories of the public sphere have
influenced more critical wings of political communication and media studies. Another
important strand of this subfield runs through the British critical cultural studies tradition
of Raymond Williams (1974) and Stuart Hall (1977).
New Era of Minimal Effects 9
The clinical approach to the psychology of political communication has long
since been supplanted by information-processing and cognitive perspectives (McGuire,
1993). Yet, assumptions about emotional dispositions and how they are engaged by
stimuli in social context are fixtures in the entire lineage of attitude change theories from
Festinger (1957), Hovland, Janis and Kelley (1953) and Zajonc (2001) to Petty and
Cacioppo (1982), and on through information processing and learning theorists such as
Zaller (1992), Graber (1988), and Neuman, Crigler, and Just (1992), among many others.
Affective components of information processing continue to be important in
thinking about how people respond to communication (Marcus, Neuman & MacKuen,
2000), and how communication content shapes and aggregates political outcomes
(Westin, 2007). As we suggest later, however, the lack of attention to how emotions are
engaged in increasingly isolated individuals who are reached through fragmented media
channels (to which they may contribute important aspects of the cueing process) may
limit the correspondence between experimental findings and actual communication
conditions.
A very different set of ideas derived from the sociology of news and public
relations (e.g., Bernays, 1923, 1928; Lippmann, 1922) led to the development of a more
macro-oriented or institutional approach to communication. Scholars working in this
tradition treat the media as part of the political governing process (Bennett 1990; Cook,
1998). Variations in the structure, organization and regulation of the media are thought to
be significant influences on the ability of citizens to cast informed votes or, conversely,
the ability of elites to shape public opinion through the news (Bennett, 1990; Bennett,
Lawrence, & Livingston, 2007; Curran et al., 2008; Zaller, 1992).
New Era of Minimal Effects 10
Others in the broad subfield of press-politics have documented the increasing
intervention of the media in modern electoral processes (Bartels, 1988; Patterson, 1993),
and the ways in which news coverage shapes public concerns and voting choices (Iyengar
& Kinder, 1987; McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Another important strain of work involves
the way in which democratic policy processes affect programming content (e.g.,
McChesney, 2000). These foundations have made it possible to begin important crossnational
work on comparative analysis of the interface between media regimes and
political systems (Curran et al, 2008; Esser & Pfetsch, 2004; Hallin & Mancini, 2004).
In press-politics, as with many other subfields of political communication,
changes in social structure and media delivery channels raise the need to rethink what
kinds of effects we want to measure and how we might go about measuring them.
Consider, for example, the possibility that the increasingly managed communication
routines that define contemporary elections and governance processes (Blumler &
Gurevitch, 1995; Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999) are producing high levels of cynicism
(Cappella & Jamieson, 1997) and diminishing confidence in the press. Rather than
continue to tease out marginal, short-term attitude or behavior shifts associated with
strategic communication campaigns, we might instead want to bring currently exogenous
factors into our models. Such factors might include: growing distrust of official
communication, declining confidence in the political leaders who rely on managed public
performances, and the widening disconnect between citizens and government. Since
such factors are more cumulative than campaign specific in nature, they require thinking
differently about process and measurement.
New Era of Minimal Effects 11
Yet another school of thought -- derived from social choice theory (Arrow, 1951;
Cyert & March, 1963; Olsen, 1971; Simon, 1955) -- helped develop a signaling approach
to political communication (Lupia & McCubbins, 1998; Popkin, 1991). Olsen’s The
Logic of Collective Action has more recently been challenged as new technologies have
changed both the costs and processes of political organization (Flanagin, Stohl, &
Bimber, 2006; Lupia & McCubbins, 1998). Such rethinking of the theoretical
underpinnings of communication processes (in this case, the logic of collective action in
an era of new social technology and organization) is precisely what we need more of if
we are to develop research that is in touch with changing patterns of content distribution
on converging platforms, new audience consumption habits, and the exploding
technology that shapes consumption, distribution and content production.
In light of these developments, it is not surprising that media economics has
emerged as one of the hottest subfields in economics, with important spillover into
political communication. We note here the growing literatures on bias (Baron, 2006),
market segmentation based on consumers’ political preferences (Mullainathan &
Schleifer, 2005), the fashioning of news content to targeted consumer segments
(Hamilton, 2004), the impact of media competition on policy outcomes (Stromberg,
2004), and the idea that the long tail and open networks of the Internet may change the
basis of exchange relationships toward open source and creative copyright (Benkler,
2006). While a few pioneers in political communication such as Ithiel de Sola Pool
(1983) signaled the coming of these trends, the uptake in the core of the field has been
slow.
New Era of Minimal Effects 12
A Brief Look at the State of the Field
Other clusters of interdisciplinary thought could be added to our account, but these brief
historical tracings are sufficient to illustrate several general points.
First, political communication is rather less about political science and more about
how sociology, psychology, and economics have helped illuminate the role of
communication in shaping the conduct of politics.
Second, and related to this point, the grand theoretical foundations of the field
arose at the dawn of modern society when industrial era social structures and
communication technologies were glimmers in the eyes of visionary theorists. As the post
industrial democracies are now well into what might be called a late modern twilight,
changing social, psychological, technological, and economic conditions require new
theoretical perspectives to guide and reformulate a good deal of our research.
Third, with some notable exceptions mentioned above, contemporary work
typically gives only passing thought to necessary theoretical, conceptual and
methodological adjustments. The general focus remains on adding new findings to
established categories of study such as the ever popular sub-subfields of framing,
priming, agenda setting, and so on. The inevitable result is that the field is adrift
theoretically, seldom looking back to see where foundational modern theory needs to be
adapted and, in some cases, overthrown, in order to keep pace with the orientations of
late modern audiences, and new modes of content production and information delivery. It
is noteworthy in this regard that Everett Rogers’ (1997) magisterial history of
communication study has received a mere 163 citations according to Google Scholar at
the time of our writing, compared to a stunning 13,769 subsequent citations for his classic
New Era of Minimal Effects 13
work Diffusion of Innovations. Moreover, the citation trails flowing from these references
to Rogers’ history of communication die out within the first few dozen citations. By
contrast, a sturdy scholarly tree continues to grow (or diffuse) from the diffusion book.
The point here is not to make sweeping generalizations about the degree of theoretical
innovation in the diffusion field. Indeed, given the intersection of so many different
disciplines and practitioners, we suspect that it is less insular than most fields. The point,
rather, is to note the many orders of magnitude less attention that have been paid to an
important effort to trace the theoretical origins of the modern field of communication by
the same prominent scholar.
This general slowness to address, justify, and revise many of the underlying
historical foundations of research may mean that much contemporary work is guided by
the echoes of a fading modernist tradition that may not account for a good deal of
contemporary political experience. One result of this disjuncture among theory, social
change, and research is that we are beset with new puzzles and paradoxes in
communication processes that seem to elude explanation, and often remain outside of
scholarly discussions entirely. Consider just a few problems and paradoxes for which
there appear to be no solid theoretical or empirical grip.
At a time when many scholars have come to regard the media as in integral
institution of governance (Cook, 1998; Political Communication special issue, 2006),
public confidence in media, journalism, and information is alarmingly low. Even worse,
younger generations in many nations are breaking away from consuming news
(Hamilton, 2004) and knowing much about government and public affairs (Delli Carpini
& Keeter, 1997). Some scholars (e.g., Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999) have suggested that
New Era of Minimal Effects 14
we look to the negative effects on citizens of increasingly professionalized public
communication characterized by managed messages, targeted audiences, proliferating
delivery channels, and new message construction technologies. Others have noted the
ways in which mass media news has exposed the contrived and staged aspects of politics
(Moy & Pfau, 2000). Yet relatively few efforts have been made to incorporate such
perspectives into comprehensive theories or research agendas that may reconcile the
paradox between the growing centrality of media in governance processes and its
shrinking credibility and attention focus in the lives of citizens, particularly given the
waning of mass media influence in the lives of most citizens.
Turning the focus to another central area of the field, volumes of research on
electoral communication in recent years have produced precious little evidence of large
effects. Cases can be made that marginal effects can make a difference in the outcomes of
close elections (Johnston, Hagen & Jamieson, 2004). Yet the small effects that can be
teased out of massive electoral communication campaigns are not so large as to persuade
many conventional political scientists that advertising accomplishes little beyond
catching up inattentive citizens on otherwise available information (Ansolabehere &
Iyengar, 1996; Stimson, 2004). While similar debates are repeated each election cycle,
few scholars seem interested in asking whether the bombardment of elusive audiences
with mind numbing messages may have far different and more sizeable effects than the
ones currently being measured. Such under-theorized effects might include: mistrust of
politicians in general; a sense that the electoral process is overly manipulated by
consultants and handlers leading to feelings of being manipulated rather than empowered,
the sense of being left out of the democratic process altogether among demographics
New Era of Minimal Effects 15
excluded from targeted communications, and the resulting political ennui among younger
generations. Indeed, we suspect that the remarkable success of the Obama campaign in
2008 -- especially with previously disengaged voters such as youth -- can be attributed in
part to years of pent-up revulsion with conventional strategies of campaign
communication such as negative advertising and “gotcha” journalism. Here again, some
scholars have attended to some of these issues in broader theoretical terms (Coleman &
Blumler, forthcoming; Entman, 1989), but there seems little sign of a paradigm shift to
better reconcile the categories of normal political communication research with these
important aspects of lived political experience.
Another paradox of political communication in need of refreshed attention is that
the costs of producing even minimal media effects in elections have soared
astronomically (at least in the US), again raising questions about the effects of
conventionally conceived persuasion campaigns. While advertisers and corporations have
already shifted to new models of branding and consumer relationships (Jenkins, 2006),
both practitioners and scholars of political communication seem behind the curve of
social and technological change that has already swept popular culture. It is not clear that
democracy can prosper by becoming even more corrupted by principles of commercial
branding and marketing. Indeed, where new communication technologies are emerging,
they seem less than democratically desirable (Howard, 2006). Addressing both the
problem of diminishing effects and spiraling costs of producing them might lead to fuller
discussion of the distortions of democratic values in that communication bargain. Yet, the
spiraling costs of communication (and how that bends the representation process) seem to
be generally regarded as exogenous factors in effects studies, rather than as clues about
New Era of Minimal Effects 16
the need for more comprehensive models of growing turbulence in public
communication.
These and other paradoxes that continue to escape theoretical and methodological
integration lead us to the following brief sketch of the elements of a new agenda for
studying political communication in changing social and technological contexts.
Toward An Agenda for Studying Political Communication in Late Modern Societies
To return to the grand thinkers who inspired the origins of political communication, one
interesting thread runs through all of them. Every one was grappling with social forces
associated with the rise of modern society -- the transition from traditional to modern,
public institution-based, legal rational orders. Emerging modern social structures led
Tarde to understand the flow of influence through groups and status systems that cued
how people learn from others what ideas and fashions to adopt. Freud struggled in
Civilization and Its Discontents with the problem of how the conformist pull of external
roles and distant symbols of allegiance in modern society inhibited the formation of
independent egos, creating the modern pandemic of neurosis, and the propensity toward
mass movements. Following Freud’s prescient mass diagnosis, a generation of scholars
later discovered the perils of conformity (The Organization Man, The Lonely Crowd) that
were the foundation for the mass society in which mass communication processes later
flourished for several decades. Lippmann, who flirted with socialism under the mentoring
of the great muckraking journalists, soon came to a very different understanding of the
relations among press, publics, and government that landed him in the inner circle of
Woodrow Wilson (and many of the next presidents through Kennedy), with the
perspective that popular opinion and consent had to be engineered in order to govern
New Era of Minimal Effects 17
effectively. This perspective has been documented in the later work of Jacobs, Shapiro
and others (Jacobs, Druckman & Ostermeier, 2004; Jacobs & Shapiro, 2000).
These and other early thinkers all helped position the field of political
communication to address the rise of mass society and to grapple with the related
understanding of mass media communication processes and effects. In this context, the
minimal effects and two-step flow models can be explained in retrospect as the result of
studies conducted before the conditions defining mass media and mass society were fully
in place. It does not seem particularly surprising that research dating from the 1940s -- a
time of high social cohesion, before television swept the land, or advertising and polling
had become sophisticated -- would have produced mixed results about direct attitude
change through media messages. Even so, evidence for relatively strong direct effects of
political messages in those studies might have warranted more probing analysis (Gitlin,
1978). The ensuing confusions about media effects persisted for decades, until the scales
were tipped by a large volume of countervailing findings, along with several perspective
building efforts to better theorize the conditions underlying direct, mass mediated,
“impersonal” influence processes (Mutz, 1998; Zaller, 1992).
The stage is again set for confusion about findings, given that the social and
technological contexts of contemporary political communication are changing as rapidly
as they did in that earlier era between the 1960s and 1990s in which strong media effects
can be traced to conditions of declining group memberships and the rise of broadcast
technologies that made vast audiences accessible via relatively few channels. To
foreshadow our coming discussion, we note the following comparison between the mass
media era and the current period: “In the 1960s, an advertiser could reach 80 percent of
New Era of Minimal Effects 18
U.S. women with a prime-time spot on the three networks. Today, it has been estimated
that the same spot would have to run on one hundred TV channels to reach the same
number of viewers” (Jenkins, 2006, 66).
In addition to the proliferation of channels and fragmentation of the audience, it
also makes sense to address in our new political communication models the decline of
socially conformist identity processes that formerly defined individuals as message
receptors in the group membership society that some observers lament losing (Putnam,
2000), along with the decline of the mass audience of “impersonal” social cue takers that
defined the mass media social structure (Mutz, 1998; Zaller, 1992). What we find today,
particularly among younger audience demographics, are shifting and far more flexible
identity formations that require considerable self-reflexivity and identity management, as
described in the work of Giddens (1991), Inglehart (1997), and Bennett (1998), among
others. The kind of communication that reaches such personalized audiences tends to
travel through multiple channels and may require interactive shaping in order to be
credible and authentic. Witness the rise of branded fan community reality programs such
as American Idol and The Apprentice that shape perceptions and emotional commitment
through content consumption and production on multiple media platforms beyond TV:
texting, interactive fan websites, entertainment news sites, friend network sites, and
games (Jenkins, 2006).
In short, it is clear we are entering another important turning point not just in
communication technologies, but in social structure and identity formation that affects the
behaviors of audiences. Several scholars have alerted us to the transition of our present
moment. Bimber (2003) has described the role of changing information technologies for
New Era of Minimal Effects 19
message delivery and social organization that affect the balance of power in society.
Schudson (1998) has examined the broad interactions of political processes,
communication systems, and emerging citizen styles that affect consumption and
response to communication. More theoretical work at this level is needed, and it should
include broader democratic perspectives in which to understand the larger “effect of
effects.” Otherwise, we are headed for a renewed era of confusing debates over findings
similar to those in past eras. In the following section, we suggest some considerations for
rethinking the nature of audiences, messages, and delivery technologies in political
communication processes.
The Impact of Audience Structure and Communication Technology
The principal impact of the revolution in technology has been to exponentially increase
the supply of information. Today, citizens interested in the presidential election have
access to thousands of online sources ranging from well-established news organizations
to the candidates themselves, and from the political parties to unknown individual
bloggers. Given the imminent prospects of information overload, just how do consumers
sort through this array of news sources? This is particularly challenging in light of the
conflation of information consumption with the identity preferences that lead many
(particularly younger) demographics to seek co-production of information so that they
become part of the mediated experience itself (Graber, 2001). Indeed, many of the most
important segments of younger audience demographics are no longer found in
conventional communication channels (e.g., TV) at all, as they are absorbed in gaming
environments that become ever more like movies once were for their parents -- with the
exception that the audiences are now in the movie.
New Era of Minimal Effects 20
The Fragmented Audience in an Era of Selective Exposure
Fifty years ago, voters depended primarily on the evening newscasts broadcast by
ABC, CBS, and NBC to keep abreast of the world of public affairs. The norms of
journalism meant that no matter which network voters tuned in to, they encountered the
same set of news reports, according balanced attention to parties, candidates, or points of
view. In the era of “old media,” accordingly, it made little difference where voters got
their news. The offerings of all news organizations were sufficiently homogeneous and
standardized to represent an “information commons.” Americans of all walks of life and
political inclination were exposed to the same information.
The development of cable television and the explosion of media outlets on the
Internet have created a more fragmented information environment in which cable news,
talk radio, and twenty-four hour news outlets compete for attention. Consumers can
access -- with minimal effort -- newspapers, radio and television stations the world over.
The rapid diffusion of new media has transformed the supply of information. There is a
much wider range of media choices on offer, providing much greater variability in the
content of available information. This means that something approaching information
“stratamentation” (stratification and fragmentation at the same time) is going on. The
mainstream media continue to matter for governing and a semblance of legitimation and
news-driven polling (Bennett, Lawrence & Livingston, 2007; Moore, 2008) even as more
people drift away. And more people are drifting away. People uninterested in politics can
avoid news programming altogether by tuning into ESPN or the Food Network. And for
political junkies, the sheer multiplicity of news sources demands they exercise
discretionary or selective exposure to political information.
New Era of Minimal Effects 21
The Demise of the Inadvertent Audience
Political theorists and mass communication researchers agree that some minimal
level of information facilitates the exercise of citizenship. The acquisition of information
depends not only on availability or supply, but also on attentiveness or demand. It is the
demand side of the information function that is most affected by changes in the media
landscape.
During the heyday of network news, when the combined audience for the three
evening newscasts exceeded 70 million, many Americans were exposed to the news as a
simple byproduct of their loyalty to the sit/com or other entertainment program that
immediately followed the news (Prior, 2007; Robinson, 1976). These viewers may have
been watching television rather than television news. Although precise estimates are not
available, it is likely that this “inadvertent” audience may have accounted for half the
total audience for network news.
At the same time, the rise of more self-reflexive audience identities suggests that
the inadvertent audience today is further diminished by large numbers of active content
producers who surf their way through media consumption and seldom make
appointments with particular programs even when they can access them according to
personal schedules. The exceptions here prove the new audience rule: social networking
juggernauts such as American Idol are popular in part because they enable active coproduction
of content and empowerment through the meaningful selection of plot
outcomes (Jenkins, 2006). For the most part, flat one-way content is out, and the
demographics scale strongly by age. The news represents the sort of content least
interesting to the digital generation who may be practicing citizenship by other means,
New Era of Minimal Effects 22
but generally steer clear of the decidedly flat, one-way conventional news information
nexus with government and elections (with a few notable exceptions that promise more
interactive involvement).
In the high modern period of mass mediated politics, the combination of
identification patterns based in audience social structure and the reach of technology
itself resulted in the massive audience for broadcast news in the 1960s and 1970s. This
meant that television had a leveling effect on the distribution of information. The news
reached not only those motivated to tune in, but also people with generally low levels of
political interest, thus allowing the latter group to “catch up” with their more attentive
counterparts. But once the networks’ hold on the national audience was loosened, first
by the advent of cable, then by the profusion of local news programming, and eventually
by the Internet, exposure to news was no longer a given for the great majority of
Americans. This wider range of choice, combined with the absence of news features that
offer the appeal of reality TV, games, and other interactive content communities, meant
that younger audiences quickly found better things to do with their television time than
watch the news. Between 1968 and 2003, the total audience for network news fell by
more than 30 million viewers. As exposure to news programming became more closely
correlated with the demand for political information, the knowledge gap between the
“haves” and “have-nots” expanded. Paradoxically, just as technology has made possible
a flow of information hitherto unimaginable, the size of the total audience for news has
shrunk substantially.
The knowledge gap is mainly a reflection of differing levels of demand for
information. Demand for information, in turn, is contingent on basic cultural norms such
New Era of Minimal Effects 23
as a sense of community identity and civic pride or duty. As noted above, these norms
have weakened, so too have the psychological incentives for acquiring political
information. The principal implication is that under conditions of enhanced consumer
choice, the knowledge gap between more and less motivated citizens widens.
Interestingly, the increased knowledge gap does not appear to be a universal
phenomenon (see Curran et al., 2008); education, for instance, although a strong predictor
of political knowledge in the US, makes little difference in Finland or Denmark. In
Scandinavia, where “public service” requirements are still imposed even on commercial
broadcasters, the flow of news programming occurs at multiple points during the
programming day making it more likely that relatively apolitical viewers manage to
encounter public affairs information on at least a sporadic basis. Thus, it is the
interaction of technology, the media system, and cultural norms that drives exposure to
news. However, even in strong public service systems such as Germany, growing
commercial news competition has split the audience demographically so that younger
demographics tend to consume commercial news that resembles the mix of sports,
fashion, weather and mayhem in U.S. local TV (German market research data as yet
unpublished by Bennett).
Partisan Selective Exposure among Information Seekers
Ever since the development of consistency theories of persuasion and attitude
change in the 1950s, communications researchers have hypothesized that a person’s
exposure to political information will reflect individual partisan leanings. In other words,
people will avoid information that they expect will be discrepant or disagreeable and seek
New Era of Minimal Effects 24
out information that is expected to be congruent with their pre-existing attitudes (Mutz,
2006).
In the days of old media, selecting conventional news sources on the basis of
partisan preference was relatively difficult given the demise of the partisan press in the
19th
century. But during campaigns, voters could still gravitate to their preferred
candidate, and several studies documented the tendency of partisans to report greater
exposure to appeals from the candidate or party they preferred (Lazarsfeld et al. 1948;
Schramm & Carter 1959; Sears & Freedman 1967). Early voting researchers deemed
this preference for in-party exposure antithetical to the democratic ideal of reasoned
choice. As Lazarsfeld et al. put it,
In recent years there has been a good deal of talk by men of good will about the
desirability and necessity of guaranteeing the free exchange of ideas in the market
place of public opinion. Such talk has centered upon the problem of keeping free the
channels of expression and communication. Now we find that the consumers of
ideas, if they have made a decision on the issue, themselves erect high tariff walls
against alien notions. (Lazarsfeld et al. 1948, p. 89).
Research on selective exposure to information in the era of network mass media
news domination generally yielded equivocal results. In several instances, what seemed
to be motivated or deliberate selective exposure turned out to occur on a de facto or
byproduct basis instead: for instance, people were more likely to encounter attitude
congruent information as a result of their social milieu rather than any active choices to
avoid incongruent information (see Freedman & Sears, 1967).
Technology and the New Partisan Selectivity
It is not a coincidence that the increased availability of news sources has been
accompanied by increasing political polarization. Over time, polarization appears to have
spread to the level of mass public opinion (Abramowitz & Saunders, 2006; Jacobson,
New Era of Minimal Effects 25
2006; for a dissenting view, see Fiorina, Abrams & Pope, 2005). For instance,
Democrats’ and Republicans’ negative evaluations of a president of the other party have
steadily intensified (Abramowitz & Saunders, 2006; Jacobson, 2006). The presidential
approval data reveal a widening chasm between Republicans and Democrats; the
percentage of partisans who respond at the extremes (“strong approval” or “strong
disapproval”) has increased significantly over time. In fact, polarized assessments of
presidential performance are higher today than at any other time in recent history,
including the months preceding the resignation of President Nixon.
Given the intensification of partisan animus, it is not surprising that media choices
increasingly reflect partisan considerations. People who feel strongly about the
correctness of their cause or policy preferences are more likely to seek out information
they believe is consistent with their preferences. But while as recently as twenty-five
years ago, these partisans would have been hard-pressed to find overtly partisan sources
of information, today the task is relatively simple. In the case of Republicans, all they
need to do is tune in to Fox News or the O’Reilly Report.
The new, more diversified information environment makes it not only more
feasible for consumers to seek out news they might find agreeable, but also provides a
strong economic incentive for news organizations to cater to their viewers’ political
preferences (Mullainathan & Schleifer, 2005). The emergence of Fox News as the
leading cable news provider is testimony to the viability of this “niche news” paradigm.
Between 2000 and 2004, while Fox News increased the size of its regular audience by
some 50 percent, the other cable providers showed no growth (Pew Center, 2004).
New Era of Minimal Effects 26
There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that politically polarized
consumers are motivated to exercise greater selectivity in their news choices. In the first
place, in keeping with the well-known “hostile media” phenomenon (Gunther et al.,
2001; Vallone, Ross & Lepper, 1985), partisans of either side have become more likely to
impute bias to mainstream news sources (Smith, Lichter & Harris, 1997). Cynical
assessments of the media have surged most dramatically among conservatives; according
to a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press survey, Republicans are twice as
likely as Democrats to rate major news outlets (such as the three network newscasts, the
weekly news magazines, NPR, and PBS) as biased (Pew Center, 2004). In the aftermath
of the New York Times’ front-page story on Senator McCain’s alleged affair with a
lobbyist (Rutenberg et al., 2008), the McCain campaign was able to use this “liberal
attack” as a significant fund-raising appeal (Bumiller, 2008). Given their perceptions of
hostile bias in the mainstream media environment, partisans of both sides have begun to
explore alternative sources of news. During the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, Republicans
were more frequent users of talk radio, while Democrats avoided talk radio and tuned in
to late night entertainment television (Pfau et al., 2007, pp. 36-38).
Experimental studies of news consumption further confirm the tendency of
partisans to self-select into distinct audiences. In one online study administered on a
national sample, the researchers manipulated the source of news stories in five different
subject matter areas ranging from national politics and the Iraq War to vacation
destinations and sports (Iyengar & Hahn, 2008). Depending on the condition to which
participants were assigned, the very same news headline was attributed either to Fox
News, National Public Radio, CNN, or BBC. Participants were asked which of the four
New Era of Minimal Effects 27
different headlines they would prefer to read, if any. The results were unequivocal:
Republicans and conservatives were much more likely to select news stories from Fox,
while Democrats and liberals avoided Fox in favor of NPR and CNN. What was
especially striking about the pattern of results was that the selection applied not only to
hard news (i.e. national politics, the war in Iraq, healthcare), but also to soft news stories
about travel and sports. The polarization of the news audience extends even to nonpolitical
subject matter. The partisan homogenization of the Fox audience is also
confirmed in a Pew national survey reported in Bennett and Manheim (2006, 224).
Some implications of these trends are important to consider (although space limits
our ability to give them adequate attention). First, the partisan polarization among some
(but not all) segments of the public offers audiences greater choice over what
information, whether true or false, to use to ornament their opinions. This raises questions
about the value of information in this information age. In the case of information about
Iraq following the invasion in 2003, Fox audiences acquired a far greater level of
factually incorrect information than, for example, PBS audiences, with other TV and
radio sources arrayed in between (Bennett, Lawrence & Livingston, 2007, 120).
In addition, selective exposure enables the popular lifestyle choice of political
avoidance, meaning that staggering numbers (perhaps half or more depending on the
issue) essentially eliminate the political world from personal reality. Witness the large
numbers who do not possess any information (correct or incorrect) about most issues.
The appearance of a more engaged public than actually exists is maintained by newsdriven
polling that pushes people with no basis for having opinions into opinion
expression to avoid the appearance that the largest proportion of democratic public is
New Era of Minimal Effects 28
otherwise engaged (which is not news, but makes for bad news stories that might raise
doubts about the existence of a credible public).
David Moore (2008) has made this case on the basis of Gallup data gathered
during his time as editor at the polling firm. He demonstrates convincingly that for almost
any issue one might imagine, the largest plurality of opinion does not care one way or
another if their preferences actually happen. Thus, for example, on the eve of the Iraq
war, 29 percent of Americans were for it and would have been upset if it did not happen,
30 percent were against it and would have been upset if it happened, and 41 would not
have been upset whether the war happened or not. Yet, the poll results reported to the
public through the press were based on polling operatives instructed to push respondents
to have an opinion. As a result, the plurality that did not really care was inclined to lean
more toward the war. Their underlying lack of real opinion was not reported in the news
(the Gallup data from Moore were the uncommon result of an in-house experiment).
Thus, the political-media spin made the war appear to be strongly supported by the
people: ABC/Washington Post reported 71 percent favoring war, NBC/Wall Street
Journal had it at 65 percent, Newsweek, reported 70, and so on (Moore, 2008). Thus, the
selective exposure phenomenon is a multi-sided phenomenon. Strongly partisan
minorities continue to roil national politics, but the largest segment of the public seems to
have selected itself out of the game. Meanwhile, conventional media and polling
techniques (and a good deal of social science survey research) continue to paint them
back into the picture as though they were there.
New Era of Minimal Effects 29
The Future is Now
There is reason to think that the interaction between increasingly individualized
reality construction and proliferating personal media platforms has accelerated in just the
last few years. For example, the news selection study reported earlier revealed strong
evidence of partisan polarization in news selection, yet seven years earlier, in a similar
study of exposure to campaign rhetoric, the researchers could detect only modest traces
of partisan selectivity (see Iyengar et al., 2008). In this study, the investigators compiled
a large selection of campaign speeches by the two major presidential candidates (Al Gore
and George W. Bush) along with a full set of the candidates’ television advertisements.
This material was assembled on an interactive, multi-media CD and distributed to a
representative sample of registered voters with Internet access a few weeks before the
election. Participants were informed that they were free to use the CD as they saw fit and
that their usage would be recorded on their computer. Following the election, they were
provided instructions for downloading and transmitting the data to the market research
firm from which they received the CD.
The CD tracking data in this study showed only modest traces of a preference for
information from the in-party candidate. Republicans and conservatives were
significantly more likely to seek out information from the Bush campaign, but liberals
and Democrats showed no preference for Gore over Bush speeches or advertisements.
These findings suggest either that the intensity of partisan identity is higher among
Republicans, or that selective exposure has become habitual among Republicans because
they were provided earlier opportunities than Democrats (with the launch of the Fox
Network in 1986) to engage in biased information seeking. The news selection study,
New Era of Minimal Effects 30
conducted in 2007, suggests that Democrats are now keeping pace; in 2000, very few
Democrats in the CD study showed an aversion to speeches from Governor Bush, but by
2007 hardly any Democrats selected Fox News as a preferred news source.
In summary, a media environment featuring an abundance of consumer choice
implies first, that we will witness increasing inequality in the acquisition of political
information. The “haves” will find it easier to keep abreast of political events and the
“have-nots” will find it easier to ignore political discussion altogether. Second, the
increased availability of information implies an important degree of selective exposure to
political information. Among the relatively attentive stratum, partisans will gravitate to
information from favored sources, while ignoring sources or arguments from the
opposing side. Meanwhile, the large ranks of inadvertent citizens will continue to elude
those who attempt to communicate with them, fueling the costs of political
communication, while diminishing the effects.
Conclusion
As with the earlier era of transition to a mass society, the transition to the personally
mediated society requires us to spot where the old and new formations come into play in
different political communication processes. The goal is to avoid battles among those
who see one socio-technological picture (e.g., the remnants of mass media) and those
who see another (the interactive production of personalized information). In the current
U.S. picture, for example, some groups and demographic segments (e.g., senior citizens)
may more resemble the group membership mass audiences of an earlier era, and they also
reflect the media consumption habits of that earlier era (e.g., they are the core audience
for network TV news viewing). Yet, for the growing majority of citizens, the news is less
New Era of Minimal Effects 31
a habit than an afterthought. Most staged political performances are less credible for
many younger citizens than reality TV (Coleman, 2007). The audiences who find them
compelling seem to be the partisans and the press. In this transitional era, information
processing and perspective building often involves turning to late night comedy (Young
& Tissinger, 2006). As these communication processes continue to change, the very
effects of communication are in play.
Broader Implications: Biased News as a Recipe for Market Success?
As part of the American audience polarizes over matters of politics and public
policy, it is possible that rational media owners stand to gain market share by injecting
more rather than less political bias into the news (Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2006). The
emergence of Fox News as the cable ratings leader suggests that in a competitive market,
politically slanted news programming allows a new organization to create a niche for
itself. Recent theoretical work in economics shows that under competition and diversity
of opinion, newspapers will provide content that is more biased: “Competition forces
newspapers to cater to the prejudices of their readers, and greater competition typically
results in more aggressive catering to such prejudices as competitors strive to divide the
market” (Mullainathan & Schleifer, 2005, p. 18). The recent efforts of MSNBC to
emulate Fox are revealing. The network’s most popular evening program -- “Countdown
with Keith Olbermann” -- conveys an unabashedly anti-Bush Administration perspective.
The network now plans to “to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for
viewers of a similar mind” (Steinberg, 2007). When the audience is polarized, “news
with an edge” makes for market success. Meanwhile, far greater numbers watch
American Idol, and many of those avoid news altogether.
New Era of Minimal Effects 32
More generally, the evidence on partisan bias in news consumption is consistent
with the argument that technology will narrow rather than widen users’ political horizons.
Over time, avoidance of disagreeable information may become habitual so that users turn
to their preferred sources automatically no matter what the subject matter. By relying on
biased but favored providers, consumers will be able to “wall themselves off from topics
and opinions that they would prefer to avoid” (Sunstein, 2001, pp. 201–202). The end
result will be a less informed and more polarized electorate, with the political
communication game aimed at those who have largely tuned out.
Implications for Media Effects
The increasingly self-selected composition of audiences has important
consequences for those who study media effects. Survey researchers, who rely on selfreported
measures of news exposure, will find it increasingly difficult to treat exposure as
a potential cause of political beliefs or attitudes. Those who say they read a particular
newspaper or watch a network newscast are likely to differ systematically in their
political attitudes, and it will be imperative that survey-based analyses disentangle the
reciprocal effects of media exposure and political attitudes or behaviors.
Self-selection also has consequences for experimental research. Actual exposure
to political messages in the real world is no longer analogous to random assignment. As
we have noted, news and public affairs information can easily be avoided by choice,
meaning that exposure is limited to the politically engaged strata. Thus, as Hovland
(1959) pointed out, manipulational control actually weakens the ability to generalize to
the real world where exposure to politics is typically voluntary. Accordingly, it is
New Era of Minimal Effects 33
important that experimental researchers use designs that combine manipulation with selfselection
of exposure.
In substantive terms, we anticipate that the fragmentation of the national audience
reduces the likelihood of attitude change in response to particular patterns of news. The
persuasion and framing paradigms require some observable level of attitude change in
response to a media stimulus. As media audiences devolve into smaller, like-minded
subsets of the electorate, it becomes less likely that media messages will do anything
other than reinforce prior predispositions. Most media users will rarely find themselves
in the path of attitude-discrepant information. An exception to this pattern may occur for
relatively inattentive and politically non partisan citizens exposed to big stories that are
repeatedly in the news, receive prominent placement, and echo throughout the multiple
media channels from television, to radio talk shows, to blogs and email forwarding. Less
saturated news topics may have little effect on opinion (even for attentive partisans) than
strategically targeted messages by interest groups and online organizations such as
moveon. At the same time, the news may continue to serve a governance and positioning
function in terms of keeping officials, lobbyists and other interest organizations apprised
of where their issues stand, but that entails a different way of thinking about media
effects.
Levels of political polarization among the public further bring into question
findings of significant media effects. Findings suggesting that audiences have been
persuaded by a message will be suspect because discrete media audiences will tend to
self-select for preference congruence. Further, media users will be more attuned to
resisting any messages that prove discrepant; thus, we would expect to observe
New Era of Minimal Effects 34
reinforcement effects even when voters encounter one-sided news at odds with their
partisan priors. For example, after the revelations in the news media that the Bush
Administration’s pre-war intelligence claims were ill-founded, the percentage of
Republicans giving an affirmative response when asked whether the US had found WMD
in Iraq remained essentially unchanged, while at the same time the percentage of
Democrats giving a “no WMD” response increased by about 30 percentage points (Kull,
Ramsey, & Lewis 2003). In short, the Republicans remained unaffected by a tidal wave
of discrepant information.
The increasing level of selective exposure based on partisan preference thus
presages a new era of minimal consequences, at least insofar as persuasive effects are
concerned. But other forms of media influence, such as indexing, agenda-setting or
priming may continue to be important. Put differently, selective exposure is more likely
to erode the influence of the tone or valence of news messages (vis-à-vis elected
officials), but may have little impact on the sheer volume of news.
What this suggests is the need for theory building. In some areas, this is happily
under way, as noted in the above discussions of new work in the area of collective action
and digital technology, and the economy of social networks and digital media content
production. Many other areas may benefit from interrupting the pursuit of normal science
and thinking about larger democratic implications of a fragmented media environment
populated with vastly different audience segments. How do we think about the growing
numbers who elude the best efforts to bring them into political debates that do not interest
them as much as reality TV, yet who remain critical to election outcomes or legitimation
of wars? How shall we think about the solid blocs of 30 or so percent on each end of the
New Era of Minimal Effects 35
spectrum who are actively engaged yet prove unresponsive to most efforts to impart new
information, to stimulate deliberative activities, or to deepen concerns about others in
society (e.g, the lack of popular engagement with issues such as inequality)? In addition,
how can we add ideas about how to involve younger citizens in the interactive life of
democracy in ways that enable them to become producers of information rather than just
passive consumers of non-credible advertising? Perhaps greater attention in the field to
more normative discussion and a policy agenda is in order.
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