MEDIA DEPENDENCY THEORY

Introduction

Media dependency theory offers a helpful way to think about the relationship between media and the fulfillment of different audience needs and goals.

At the heart of the theory is the proposition that in industrialized and information-based societies, such as the one we presently live in, individuals come to rely on media to satisfy a range of different needs and goals. These include learning about where those individuals should go to vote as well as staying up-to-date about the latest fashion trends.

Before diving into this theory, it is helpful to be mindful of the fact that journalistic outlets are just one group of social actors within a broader system of information. This broader system includes other mass media actors, like movies and books. It includes other institutional actors, like politicians and non-media corporations. It includes personal contacts, like your friends and family members. It even includes your personal experiences, like your attendance at an event or a study abroad experience that exposed you to a different culture. There are many other potential actors in that system, but this helps illustrate the notion that journalistic outlets operate within an environment made up of many different entities, each of which can offer at least some information that might be of interest to a particular audience member.

This perspective is helpful because it underscores the importance of understanding the context around people’s interaction with information, which is crucial to understanding journalistic media’s role in informing people. That, in turn, is an explicit rejection of earlier, more simplistic theories about the effects of mass media. For example, in the 1930s, scholars and popular intellectuals argued that mass media were incredibly powerful and that people generally accepted the information disseminated by mass media as-is. (This is called the hypodermic needle perspective.) At the same time, this systems perspective rejects the view that mass media have little to no effect — the limited effects perspective began to take hold as the hypodermic needle perspective lost popularity in the 1940s and 50s — as the magnitude of the effect is dependent on the context.

Journalistic Media and Relationships

Returning to media dependency theory, it posits that the impacts of journalistic media on people (and of people on journalistic media) depend on the context and the nature of the relationships within a network of social actors, technological actants, and audiences that are relevant to that context.

The theory further posits that an individual’s characteristics and goals (e.g., how interested they are in some topic), their personal environment and interpersonal network (e.g., whether they know people with first-hand experience with that topic), and the dominant media and social systems they live within (e.g., how free they are to access news media they believe would be informative about that topic) all impact the extent to which they may depend on media for information about that topic.

For example, let’s consider the topic of foreign election interference in the 2020 election. Perhaps, as someone passionate about politics, you were very interested in that topic — and thus have a personal goal of learning more about it. However, because you were (most likely) not an intelligence officer and lacked the security clearance needed to review intelligence reports yourself, you probably didn’t have the ability to gain first-hand knowledge about that issue. Moreover, you might not have had any such intelligence officers in your friend or familial networks, so you didn’t personally know someone with first-hand knowledge, either. You thus had to depend on people other than yourself (third parties) and those close to you for information. One such third party might have been a journalist who has been covering the topic of election interference for months as the National Security Correspondent for The Washington Post. As such, you might have come to depend on that journalist for what you believed to be trustworthy information about the topic. (Or, perhaps, you depended on other journalistic outlets who themselves depended on the Post’s reporting for key details.)

However, that could change over time. Perhaps a reputable whistleblower leaked a series of private intelligence reports online. Now, you may find yourself dependent on the whistleblower for access to the information, as they controlled which of the intelligence reports were made available to the public. As you review the leaked documents, you may become less dependent on others’ interpretation of the issue — including The Washington Post’s reporting. Put another way, as your information network changes, the kinds and degrees of dependence also change.

Importance of Journalistic Media

Although journalistic outlets are just one of many sets of constituents within information systems, they are often important. That’s because people generally need journalistic media to function in modern societies, which are more co-dependent than ever before due to increased specialization and globalization. Put another way, personal contacts and experience are no longer enough to satisfy all (or even most) of the things a person needs to know in order to fully participate in modern social life.

Crucially, media dependency theory contends that the degree of ambiguity about news information impacts the degree of media dependency. Put another way, as news information becomes more ambiguous (less clear to you), audiences are presumed to become more dependent on journalistic outlets for understanding that news.

Ambiguity can come from many different sources. It might involve lack of knowledge about some phenomenon, such as whether a new technology developed by a rival nation poses a threat to your nation’s security. It might involve rapid change associated with a phenomenon, such as whether an emerging coup d’état in a friendly nation might impact the diplomatic relationship between them and your nation. It might also involve simple disagreement among institutional elites about some phenomenon, such as which political group is more likely to be correct about the costs and benefits to a proposed renewable energy plan.

That proposition from media dependency theory can further be extended into an argument that journalism can be especially influential on people’s understanding of emerging international affairs. That is, people typically have less certainty (and thus more ambiguity) when it comes to the world beyond their immediate geographical sphere because they might not have recent (or any) personal experience in those contexts — perhaps they have never been to Cambodia — and they might not have any personal contacts who have expert knowledge or experience in those contexts. Because of this, people become more dependent on media depictions of those places, peoples, and issues, and on journalistic outlets when new developments are emerging about those places, peoples, and issues.

Exclusivity and Dependence

According to media dependency theory, when a media organization has exclusive information, it tends to have more power within its relationship with an audience member (and the broader ecosystem) because it increases the degree of information asymmetry. This is particularly true if the information is in demand to satisfy that individual’s valued goals, and doubly so if access to such information is tightly controlled.

Exclusive information does not have to mean classified information, as with the earlier example. It might simply mean that they are the only source for that information at a given time, such as in the early hours following a chemical explosion at a local manufacturing plant. While local officials may eventually put out their account of the event via a televised press conference, people are likely to first hear about it from the breaking news coverage provided by journalists.

However, journalistic media do not inherently get to have exclusive information about breaking news (or confidential affairs). Indeed, some institutional actors, such as governments or private companies, can restrict both media access to important resources and individuals’ access to certain journalistic outlets. In doing so, those institutional actors can try to reorient dependency away from journalistic media and toward their own version of events. For example, a private company may prevent news media from accessing that manufacturing plant or speaking to its employees. Similarly, government officials in some countries may even prevent journalistic media from broadcasting information about the incident until those officials give their approval. Such intervention happens quite often in practice, to varying degrees.

It is important to note that media dependency theory was first proposed during a time of high media concentration, when there were relatively few major broadcast networks in places like the United States. Today’s media ecology is far more complex, though. In particular, mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) and networked media (e.g., social media and messaging apps) have become important elements in today’s media ecology. They allow individuals to serve as intermediaries between mass media and other people. That is, individuals and aggregators with large online followings can become key brokers of news information during an event and thus gain power — even if only temporarily — by virtue of others’ dependence on them. Additionally, people can now more easily find videos and accounts of an event posted by a range of other people who observed it first-hand, thus reducing the exclusivity that any one actor might otherwise have.

Key Takeaways

• Media dependency theory is a systems-level theory that views journalistic outlets as just one group of actors within a broader system of information.
• Media dependency theory focuses on understanding relationships within a system, with the strength of the relationships impacting the degree of dependency.
• Media dependency theory contends that the degree of ambiguity impacts the degree of media dependency. Journalism can be especially influential on people’s understanding of things that they have limited personal experience with, such as international affairs.
• When a journalistic outlet has exclusive information, it has more power in a relationship as the relationship becomes asymmetric. However, different institutional actors, like governments and private companies, can restrict access to important media resources.

FRAMING THEORY

Introduction

Framing theory provides us with a helpful lens for understanding how people develop their perception of reality, and the role that journalistic outlets play in shaping those perceptions.

Framing is deeply indebted to another theoretical perspective — the Social Construction of Reality — which was formalized in 1966 by sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman. At its core, this perspective argues that a person’s perception of reality is not entirely, or even mainly, objective. Instead, what we perceive to be reality is actually a human and social construction that is deeply shaped by our previous lived experiences and the ways in which we are socialized via everyday interactions. As such, the theory contends, reality becomes socially constructed as we experience it and learn about it, and we each therefore develop differing perceptions of reality. Those differences may be fairly minor: Perhaps two witnesses agree that a police officer acted with the needed force in response to a threat but one of them thinks the officer could have toned things down a little. However, they might also be significant: Perhaps those two witnesses disagree over who the aggressor was, and whether any force was needed on the officer’s part.

This perspective is important because it presumes that individuals act based on their unique perceptions of reality. For example, if someone perceives the officer to have acted with unnecessary force, they may be more likely to protest against police brutality than someone else who perceives that exact same situation to have involved an appropriate response. As this example suggests, the theory posits that different people experience different constructed realities — even when they inhabit the same spaces under the same present circumstances.

A World With Multiple Realities

It follows from this theoretical perspective that the world consists of multiple perceived realities. Those perceived realities are shaped by a range of factors, operating from an individual level (e.g., one’s preconceptions, perhaps resulting from their particular upbringing) to a social systems level (e.g., the dominant systems of thought within their culture). In short, while there may indeed be a singular ‘true’ reality out there, made up of material things and governed by the laws of physics, an individual’s perception of that reality is just an approximation of it. And, sometimes, it’s not a very accurate one.

A crucial implication of this perspective is that it is simply impossible for journalism to mirror reality. That is, if a journalist cannot fully capture a ‘true’ reality because of their human shortcomings, then they cannot possibly replicate it in their work. Instead, journalism is, at best, a good approximation of reality, with the journalist’s job being to approximate that reality as best they can.

Even if one rejects the proposition that individuals inherently cannot mirror reality, there is also a practical issue at play that makes framing theory useful: Even if journalists could accurately replicate reality, they simply do not have the time or space to show everything about that reality. Instead, they can only show a small portion of it.

For example, consider a televised broadcast of a protest against police brutality. One may think that setting up a camera and pointing it at the crowd offers a mirror of reality — after all, it is a simple, mechanical recording of what’s happening. However, the camera can only show one angle of what is happening. Depending on where it is placed, it may be too close and miss the entire scope of the crowd — or, it may be too far and make the crowd appear small or miss important details about the interactions. As such, the journalist must make a choice to place the camera in the place that they believe offers the best representation (approximation) of the ‘reality’ of that event.

But journalists rarely ever just point a camera at something and call it a day. A large part of their job is to make sense of what is happening. Put another way, even if they just report ‘facts’ — and facts are themselves contentious things — they must still connect those facts. The process of making sense of reality is inherently an interpretive (and thus constructive) act.

Media Framing and Frames

One way to conceptualize that process of sense-making is through framing theory and, specifically, media framing. Sociologist Robert Entman refers to media framing as the process by which an individual “selects some aspects of a perceived reality and makes them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.” That’s a lot to take in, so let’s break it down.

First, this conceptualization of the framing process — and there are other ways of conceptualizing it — involves two key sub-processes. The first is selection, or the choices about what to include or exclude about that perceived reality. The second is salience, or the choices about what to emphasize about that perceived reality and what to downplay. These choices, again, are often driven by the necessity of communicating something within a finite amount of time or space — like a handful of live tweets or a 30-second broadcast segment.

Second, this conceptualization describes four main acts of framing. The first is diagnosing problems, or defining the issues associated with a topic. For example, the aforementioned broadcast segment on a protest may choose to diagnose the problem as police using excessive force against detainees or as the vilification of police. The second is diagnosing causes, or identifying what or who are the main forces driving the problem. For example, that segment may choose to focus on a hurtful culture within policing or an inadequate amount of police training. The third is making moral evaluations, which may include asserting whether the causal agents or the consequences of an issue are good or bad. For example, that segment may assert that these protests are good because they may serve as catalysts for change, or bad because the protests are divisive within society. The fourth is recommending treatments, which describe potential ‘solutions’ to the identified problems. For example, that segment may assert that systemic reform is necessary or that police should receive more support from other actors and institutions.

The result of that process is the media frame, which refers to the written, spoken, graphical, or visual message that a communicator uses to contextualize a topic, such as a person, event, episode, or issue, within a text transmitted to receivers by means of mediation.

Again, there’s a lot to unpack there, but the key takeaway is that media frames are the tools that communicators — including journalists — use to simplify and contextualize an issue or event. A single frame (or media text, like a news story) does not need to include all four of those acts of media framing. In fact, news stories rarely do, especially when they aim to be as neutral as possible.

Moreover, media framing and frames involve both conscious and subconscious processes of selection and salience. Put another way, a journalist may consciously adopt a particular frame because it addresses questions they believe their audiences will want answers to, even as they subconsciously reject alternative frames because they recall seeing those frames in recent coverage by a competitor.

Finally, it is crucial to recognize that news stories often include information from different sources, which in turn shapes the frame. For example, a journalist may only diagnose the problems associated with the aforementioned protest with their words but add elements of moral evaluation to the story’s frame by including quotes from a source that asserts the police acted in a brutal and unprofessional way.

Impacts of Journalistic Frames

Journalistic frames often impact audiences’ understandings of and attitudes toward a topic or issue. In this way, they influence the realities that those audience members construct. This may include interpretations not only of basic elements, like what happened, but broader (and no less impactful) notions about what is most important or problematic about a topic or issue, who are the good and bad people involved, and what are or aren’t sensible solutions to a given problem.

To illustrate this, consider the two following news briefs about two emerging treatments for a group of 600 people who have been infected by a dangerous virus.

The first news brief notes that if Treatment A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. However, if Treatment B is adopted, there is a 1/3 chance that all 600 people will be saved and a 2/3 chance that nobody will be saved.

The second news brief notes that if Treatment A is adopted, 400 people will die. However, if Treatment B is adopted, there is a 1/3 chance that nobody will die and a 2/3 chance that all 600 people will die.

The depictions in those two news briefs are functionally equivalent, with Treatment A being the risk-averse option and Treatment B being the risk-seeking option. However, if a random set of 50 readers were shown the first brief and another 50 random readers were shown the second, the theoretical expectation is that the people shown the first brief — which is more positive — would be more likely to select the risk-averse option (Treatment A). In contrast, the readers who were shown the second depiction — which is more negative — would be more likely to select the risk-seeking option (Treatment B). This is an example of what we call gain/loss framing, one of the many different approaches to framing in psychology.

However, the extent of those impacts is neither uniform nor universal. Modern theories of message processing reject the view that audiences are passive and just accept journalistic frames. Instead, audiences process those messages in light of their existing knowledge and attitudes, which is in turn shaped by their lived experiences and non-media messages (e.g., discussions with friends and family). For example, a person who has had a negative encounter with the police is generally more likely to accept a frame that centers them as the aggressor — or, conversely, to reject such a frame if their experiences have been exclusively positive.

Repeated exposure to particular frames can develop associations over time. For example, seeing repeated images of police brutality may link the concepts of police and brutality over time, such that when the concept of police is triggered — even in other contexts — the individual will also think about brutal actions. Alternatively, that repeated exposure may make it so that when the concept of brutality comes up, the individual may think of the police as an example. Such connections can be both strengthened and weakened by frames. For example, if that same individual is repeatedly exposed to media examples of police engaging in good deeds, the existing negative connections are challenged and may thus become weaker.

Journalistic frames tend to be most impactful in situations where individuals are highly dependent on journalistic media for their understanding of an issue, and especially when there is greater ambiguity around an issue. That is because there are fewer preexisting associations, allowing the media associations to serve as the primary driver. Thus, journalistic frames are especially impactful when they involve contexts, people, and ideas that are new or foreign to an individual.

Finally, it’s also important to keep in mind that journalistic actors are themselves audiences. They therefore not only have their own lived experiences to draw upon but also regularly consume media messages crafted by other actors. As such, they are also impacted by repeated exposure to certain frames and associations. They may consequently go on to subconsciously repeat elements of dominant frames and associations within their work, which in turn reifies those frames and makes those associations even more salient within society. Conversely, those journalistic actors may seek to use their awareness of the dominant frames to challenge them by including counter-frames that weaken problematic associations.

Key Takeaways

• According to the Social Construction of Reality perspective, an individual’s view of reality is not entirely (or even mainly) objective. Instead, it becomes socially constructed as that individual filters things through their own existing knowledge and experiences.
• The framing process involves both conscious and subconscious processes of selection (what to include or exclude) and salience (what to emphasize or downplay). Journalistic outlets can thus depict the same topic in different ways.
• Media frames may impact individuals’ understandings of and attitudes toward a topic or issue, but those impacts are not uniform or universal. That’s because media frames interact with existing knowledge and attitudes.
• Journalistic actors are themselves influenced by frames, and may therefore reinforce (or challenge) dominant associations through the framing choices in their work.

AGENDA SETTING THEORY

Introduction

Bernard Cohen famously wrote in his 1963 book, The Press and Foreign Policy, that journalistic media “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”

Although that statement came before the formalization of agenda-setting theory, it aptly captures its essence: Even if journalistic outlets have a limited ability to shape their audiences’ attitudes toward an issue, they nevertheless exert influence over how important the issue is perceived to be by those audiences. (That perceived importance may be very different from the actual importance of that issue according to other measures.)

While agenda-setting theory and framing theory both address the potential impact of journalistic media coverage, they are very different. Agenda-setting theory focuses on the relationship between media coverage and the perceived importance of an issue, while framing theory connects media coverage to the formation of attitudes toward those issues.

Agenda-Setting Theory

In a nutshell, agenda setting refers to the process by which mass media — including journalistic media — present certain issues (e.g., gun violence) frequently and prominently, with the result being that large segments of the public come to perceive those issues as being more important than others.

The central causal mechanism is a very simple one: The more media attention an issue receives (issue salience), the more important it is perceived to be (by audiences). For example, if there is sustained journalistic coverage of immigration over the course of a few months, then news consumers will think that immigration is an important issue at that point in time — even if they don’t have strong opinions about it.

Although the term ‘agenda-setting theory’ may be seen to imply a conspiratorial effort to manipulate public opinion, this is far from the case. It simply reflects twin processes: First, journalistic media are bound by time and space. For example, an evening news broadcast often has just 22 minutes to transmit information about the day’s most important issues and events. This forces journalists to focus on specific issues and simplify them, and thus make decisions about what they believe matters most to the audiences they serve. Even with a news website, where space and time to cover a topic are less restricted and an online editor could theoretically cram 500 stories on the homepage, journalists must still make decisions about how to organize the information they publish. Indeed, the decision about which story to place at the top of a website’s homepage offers a salience cue — it is placed first because it is presumed to be the most important story.

The second process occurs on the audience side: Audiences turn to journalistic media because they have a need for orientation, or a desire to understand new or emerging situations. That need for orientation, in turn, is impacted by two elements: relevance and uncertainty. Relevance pertains to the question, “Do I think this issue is personally or socially important to me?” Uncertainty pertains to the question, “Do I feel I lack the information I need about this topic?” When both relevance and uncertainty are high, audience members pay greater attention to journalistic outlets’ cues about salience, and thus the resulting agenda-setting effect is stronger.

Similarly, when the issue at question is unobtrusive — that is, it is an issue people have little to no personal experience with, such as international affairs — then they are more likely to rely on media cues for assessing the importance of that issue. This may be countered by certain contextual factors, though. For example, scholars have found that agenda-setting effects are weaker in closed media systems (those tightly controlled by governments) with the idea being that people trust those journalistic media less. They thus actively seek out other sources of information and draw even more upon personal assessments.

Agenda-setting effects are therefore not uniform or universal. They are instead dependent on the context. Indeed, as Cohen wrote about the relationship between journalistic media and foreign affairs, “the world will look different to different people depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read.”

Intermedia Agenda Setting

Journalistic outlets do not just influence ordinary citizens, politicians, and the like. They also influence one another. Within the context of agenda-setting, we refer to the process by which journalistic media influence one another as intermedia agenda-setting.

The core argument for this hypothesis is that just as regular citizens turn to trusted journalistic outlets for cues about what is important, journalistic outlets themselves turn to other journalistic media that they perceive to be leaders within a given context. For example, The New York Times may cover a story about U.S. troops withdrawing from Syria, which leads a local newspaper to perceive that to be an important issue and thus devote resources to covering a local angle about the same topic (e.g., covering local families who might have a spouse or child returning home from deployment).

This has led to a broader argument that audiences have historically developed reasonably consistent perceptions of which issues are most important at a given point in time because journalistic outlets generally follow similar issue agendas. This does not mean that they all cover the exact same issues, and certainly not in the same way. Instead, it contends that dominant coverage patterns often emerge across media — such as a period of intense and widespread journalistic coverage of climate change, before that attention wanes and the issue later re-emerges as a priority — and that many people within similar contexts will often identify similar sets of issues as being “important” at a given point in time.

Intermedia agenda-setting has required some reconceptualization in recent years, though, because the news ecology has become more complex. The perspective was initially proposed during a time when traditional media dominated audience attention. This is no longer the case, as niche and alternative media have grown immensely — leading to more specialized information sources — and social media have transformed the ways people engage with news.

As such, while elite journalistic outlets like The New York Times may still shape the initial perception of issues and their import, active audiences will blend messages from a greater range of journalistic and non-journalistic media. This ostensibly weakens the Times’ agenda-setting power. Additionally, the transformation of the distribution of news — which is also more social today — and the emergence of new ways for audiences to engage with journalistic actors has enabled those active audiences to increasingly shape media agendas themselves.

Key Takeaways

• Agenda-setting theory proposes that issues that receive relatively more media attention tend to be perceived by audiences as being relatively more important.
• Framing theory shares some conceptual similarities with agenda-setting theory, but they differ in that agenda-setting emphasizes the relationship between media coverage and the perceived importance of an issue, while framing theory connects coverage to attitude formation.
• The magnitude of an agenda-setting effect depends on the context. Agenda-setting effects are neither uniform nor universal.
• Journalistic outlets do not just influence ordinary citizens and politicians; they influence fellow journalistic actors. They can therefore create a feedback loop.

PRIMING THEORY

In order to more fully understand the underlying processes for key theories about the impacts of media coverage and depiction, it is helpful to learn about how human memory works. Priming theory is a particularly helpful tool in that regard.

It is worth noting that priming theory — and associated models theorizing about the workings of human memory — come from social psychology and cognition, and it is not the only explanation for how humans make sense of the world. However, such models of human memory have proven to be enduring and influential when it comes to understanding the processing of information disseminated by journalistic outlets.

Priming Theory Explained

In a nutshell, priming theory contends that media depictions stimulate related thoughts in the minds of audience members. For example, talking about “climate change” with a person might activate their thinking about “extreme weather” because, for that person, those two concepts have become related. Media depictions can strengthen (or weaken) the association between those concepts.

In this associative network model of memory, the direction and strength of the ties between ideas and concepts matter. For example, thinking about “extreme weather” may trigger “bad” most of the time, but thinking about “bad” may not trigger “extreme weather” (or trigger it only some of the time). Additionally, stronger ties between two ideas or concepts will result in the faster recall of the association between them.

This model also differentiates between explicit and implicit memory. Explicit memory refers to things an individual actively tries to recall. This would include the answer to the question, “Who is the best professor you’ve ever had?” The key with this type of memory is that the individual can consciously recall the associations between “best” and “professor” and explain that information.

Implicit memory refers to things an individual does not try to purposely recall, such as how to ride a bicycle. The key with this type of memory is that it might take an individual a while to explain the related concepts (and they may not even be able to explain them well or at all), but they are able to subconsciously draw on all the requisite associations to not fall over when they start pedaling.

Priming theory contends that people do not make use of all of the associations they have developed. Instead, they take shortcuts to connect an information need — for example, how to make sense of a professor’s quality — to the previously stored associations that are most readily available. Thus, there is a strong emphasis on recent associations — such as recent journalistic coverage of the relevant issue(s).

Agenda Setting, Framing, and Priming

Agenda-setting theory connects to these understandings of how human memory works in two related ways. The first proposes that repeated journalistic coverage of an issue results in an individual associating that issue with more concepts. That, in turn, increases the likelihood that the issue will be triggered later (as there are more opportunities to trigger it). The second proposes that repeated journalistic coverage of an issue increases the availability of information related to that issue by bringing it to the top of an individual’s mind. That, in turn, increases the likelihood that the issue will be triggered later (as the issue, and its related concepts, are relatively easy to access). Both of these ways influence perceptions about how important an issue is because of how easily it is recalled.

While framing theory draws upon many of the same core propositions about the causal mechanisms in human memory, it differs from agenda-setting theory in that it takes an extra step. Framing theory is not simply about the availability of information. Instead, it argues that media can also influence attitudes toward those issues by rewiring the associations between that issue and different concepts, such as by relating “climate change” to “bad” and “anthropogenic.”

Framing theory and priming theory have been connected to examine issues of stereotypes in journalistic depictions. For example, scholars have used those frameworks to assess journalistic outlets’ role in promoting associations between the concepts of “people of color” and “poverty,” “crime,” and “urban blight.” Those associations may result from the over-representation of crime involving people of color in local television news coverage. Conversely, primes may be used strategically to counter stereotypes, such as by depicting people of color as being successful, serving as community leaders, and inhabiting pleasant neighborhoods. In some cases, however, primes can result in the rejection of the message being primed. For example, a news story about a police officer acting in self-defense may be rejected as being false to someone who has had multiple negative encounters with police, as the depiction of the officer’s actions may appear off-base to that person.

Limitations of Priming Effects

The effects of priming are neither uniform nor universal, though. In isolation, priming effects are often short-lived. They can last as little as 90 seconds and weaken over time if they are not triggered. However, repetition strengthens associations, and that can lead to more lasting effects over time. Indeed, many of our strongest associations are those promoted during our youth and reinforced over the course of our lives as a result of the contexts within which we live.

For example, higher amounts of local television news viewing will often involve more exposure to stories about crime that feature people of color as perpetrators. That, in turn, can result in greater concerns about people of color — or, at minimum, the perception that crime by people of color is an important issue.

Such an effect is not predicated on the words and associations made by journalists themselves, though. Although journalists may use careful language and avoid stereotypes, they may choose to quote individuals who intentionally or unintentionally use language and frames that strengthen and weaken associations between concepts. Audiences often do not meaningfully differentiate between the journalists’ words and those of their sources. This underscores the responsibility journalists have when selecting who and what to quote.

Additionally, media priming is most powerful when individuals have little existing knowledge about a target concept (e.g., “nuclear power”) and are therefore more susceptible to media-driven associations. Put another way, media primes are especially impactful when they involve contexts, people, and ideas that are new or foreign to audiences — that is, when audiences are most dependent on journalistic outlets for their understanding of something.

Individuals do not develop associations between topics through journalistic media consumption alone, though. First, news is incredibly complex, and there are often many competing cues within a single journalistic message (e.g., an article), which in turn trigger multifaceted responses. Second, media environments are also complex, with journalistic outlets operating alongside entertainment, popular culture, politics, and so on. Third, individuals establish associations — and, often, the strongest associations — based on their personal experiences or those relayed by other trusted sources, like their family and friends.

Thus, in order to fully understand a priming effect, one must understand the environment and context around the prime.

Key Takeaways

• At its core, priming theory posits that media depictions develop relationships between concepts and stimulate related thoughts in the minds of audience members.
• Both agenda-setting theory and framing theory are premised on associative network models of human memory, which focus on the associations between concepts and the ease through which they may be recalled. However, they presume different pathways for the activation of concepts.
• Priming effects are often short-lived, but repetition strengthens associations and thereby allows effects to become more lasting.
• Priming effects are not uniform or universal. The magnitude of the effect of a prime depends on the context surrounding it.

NEWS AVOIDANCE AND FATIGUE

News avoidance refers to a phenomenon where audiences reduce their consumption of journalistic media over a continuous period of time due to either an active dislike for news or a preference for other kinds of media content.

Although many theories about the impacts of journalistic media implicitly assume that large portions of the public regularly consume those media, it is important to recognize that large segments of the population don’t actually do that. Indeed, although more journalism is produced today than ever before, the number of people who avoid journalism has also increased in recent decades.

Moreover, audiences’ journalistic media use is usually characterized by a combination of genres, such as sports journalism, political journalism, and environmental journalism. News avoidance is typically linked to the exclusion of certain genres and issues (though it may be extended to all journalistic media use). Put another way, some people (in fact, many) may routinely take in sports journalism but intentionally seek to avoid political journalism.

This development can have profound impacts on democratic societies that presumably rely upon a well-informed citizenry to self-govern because higher levels of news exposure have historically been linked to greater amounts of political knowledge and engagement. Second, news avoidance has negative economic consequences for journalistic outlets as it reduces the potential size of its audience. That, in turn, can also have consequences for non-avoiders, as journalistic outlets have fewer resources with which to produce quality journalism.

Intentional and Unintentional Avoidance

There are many reasons why an audience member may engage in news avoidance, but they can usually be placed into one of two categories: intentional avoidance and unintentional avoidance.

Intentional avoidance is the consequence of individuals consciously tuning out news media. There are three main reasons why they engage in such behavior, all of which are linked to negative dispositions toward journalistic media.

The first reason is that they perceive news coverage to be too negative and pessimistic. While some audiences are drawn to particularly negative or pessimistic news (e.g., violent crime), such news has been linked to increases in negative emotions and decreases in an individual’s well-being over time. The desire to seek positive emotions can thus result in intentional avoidance of news that is presumed to be too negative.

The second reason is that some audiences do not trust journalistic outlets. This may be due to a perception that certain groups of journalistic outlets — if not “the media” as a whole — are pushing their own political and economic interests by being selective about the topics they cover and the information they include in their coverage. The perception that such coverage will be biased against a person’s viewpoints or perception of reality can thus encourage intentional avoidance.

The third reason is that there is always a massive amount of readily accessible journalistic products out there, which can create a feeling of information overload. Not only is there a seemingly endless pool of issues being covered at any given moment, but there is also a seemingly endless pool of stories about each issue — which is impossible for any single person to consume or process. That perceived overload can create stress, confusion, and anxiety, and thus result in intentional avoidance in order for a person to reclaim a positive emotional state.

There is also unintentional news avoidance, which is based on the audience member’s relative preference for non-journalistic media. Put another way, the avoidance isn’t because a person is actively seeking to avoid journalistic media but rather because their preference for another choice — perhaps a new movie featuring Ryan Gosling — is stronger. Indeed, scholars have argued that the large audiences drawn by television news broadcasts in the 1960s and 1970s were due in part to audiences watching the news while they waited for the evening entertainment programs to start (which followed the nightly newscasts).

News Fatigue

News avoidance does not have to reflect a permanent state wherein audience members always avoid certain kinds of journalistic products, or journalistic media altogether. Quite often, it is a temporary state, as when individuals feel overwhelmed and need to take a break from an issue.

For example, consider the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. After being exposed to several stories about the pandemic every day for months, a person may have felt the need to disconnect from their preferred news sources to keep their mental state from deteriorating. However, after taking a break, that person may have resumed taking in such stories — and perhaps needed another break later on.

We can call this phenomenon news fatigue, which connotes a temporary feeling of exhaustion that can be addressed through a period of disconnection (recharging). News fatigue can occur in relation to any kind of issue or genre, such as a royal wedding or political journalism. However, it is typically most pronounced when it comes to natural disasters, illnesses, poverty, and political issues that, by their very nature, already tend to engender negative emotional responses.

Compassion Fatigue

Similarly, there is a phenomenon called compassion fatigue, which refers to the gradual lessening of compassion over time as a result of repeated exposure to traumatic phenomena. For example, consider the refugee crisis resulting from the Syrian Civil War, wherein at least 13 million Syrians were estimated to have been displaced and in need of humanitarian assistance. As the war dragged on over years, audiences around the world moved from being shocked to becoming numbed in order to psychologically protect themselves from repeated exposure to the death and destruction featured in news reports about the war.

Compassion fatigue has been associated with increased feelings of hopelessness and negative attitudes. That, in turn, can lead to desensitization and even resistance to helping those suffering if the issue is perceived as being intractable, or impossible to manage or change. Consequently, individuals may seek to turn off certain emotions as best they can. Compassion fatigue can also impact political and economic support for initiatives to address that issue. For example, in the aforementioned example of the Syrian Civil War, well-informed but fatigued news consumers may be less likely to become involved in protests against the war than their less-informed but non-fatigued counterparts.

This phenomenon is not limited to news audiences or to journalism. It has been found to impact a range of professionals, including doctors, child welfare workers, and lawyers. However, it has been found to have profound impacts on journalists themselves — and especially foreign correspondents who are shuttled from one crisis to another. Those impacts involve not only their emotional and mental states but also the depictions (and tropes) they incorporate into their journalistic work.

Combating News Avoidance

Several strategies have been proposed to reduce the likelihood of news avoidance. The first is to engage in approaches to journalism like constructive journalism and solutions journalism.

Constructive journalism aims to rebalance journalism by accompanying a selection of predominantly negative news stories about an issue with more positive coverage that illustrates the bright spots — however few they may be — related to that issue. For example, this might involve stories about how some Syrian refugees were able to successfully relocate themselves and start new lives, or how a local non-profit helped provide needed aid to displaced refugees.

Solutions journalism aims to not only diagnose problems — like the reasons for the displacement of Syrians during the war — but also adopt a forward-looking perspective that identifies possible solutions. Solutions journalism also tends to offer concrete suggestions to audiences for how to become a part of possible solutions. This may include providing contact information for local nonprofits or identifying specific humanitarian aid legislation that is under consideration.

The second strategy is to look for ways to increase trust in news organizations, such as by being more transparent about how stories are reported and explaining the journalistic processes behind them. For example, this might entail appending an information box to a story that contains anonymous sources that explains the journalistic organization’s policy on granting anonymity. It may also include an explanation that a product reviewer was not paid for the review, but that the outlet may receive money if audiences purchase the product from an affiliated online store.

A third strategy that has received more attention in recent years is to provide slow journalism alternatives. This approach moves away from providing many short and episodic breaking news products (e.g., breaking news stories or tweets). Instead, it promotes providing fewer, longer, and more holistic news products (e.g., a well-reported and in-depth story published a couple of days after the news first broke). The approach is not intended to replace traditional journalism but simply to offer a complement for those who feel stressed by information overload.

Key Takeaways

• News avoidance refers to a phenomenon whereby audiences reduce their consumption of journalistic media over a continuous period of time.
• News avoidance may be the result of intentional and unintentional efforts, such as an active dislike for news or a simple preference for other media content.
• Intentional avoidance may be the byproduct of perceived over-negativity, lack of trust in news, and information overload.
• Individuals may develop either or both news fatigue and compassion fatigue as a result of over-exposure to a particular issue.
• There are different strategies that journalistic actors can employ to reduce the likelihood of avoidance, though some measure of avoidance is inevitable.