Page 80 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

Chapter 4

Media Consumption and

Perceptions of Social

Reality: Effects and

Underlying Processes

L. J. SHRUM
Rutgers University

Don’t come to television for the truth. TV’s a goddamned amusement park.
We’ll tell you the good guys always win. We’ll tell you nobody ever gets can-
cer at Archie Bunker’s house. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear.
Paraphrasing Howard Beale, Paddy Chayefsky’s
character in Network (Chayefsky, 1976)

Although in the movie it was unclear whether his words were those of a
madman or a sage, hardly anyone nowadays seems to question Howard
Beale’s claim that television presents a distorted view of reality. What
people—whether they be researchers, media critics, television executives,
or the local bartender—do question is if the distortion has any effect, and
if so, why and how.
These interrelated questions about the whether and how of media
effects lie at the heart of scholarly debates and critiques of media effects
research. Over the past few decades, there have been two persistent criti-
cisms. One is that the evidence accumulated to date has provided little
indication of sizable media effects on viewers’ thoughts, feelings, or
actions, in spite of a generally held “myth of massive media impact” by
many researchers (McGuire, 1986). The second criticism of media effects
research is that it for the most part has lacked any focus on explanatory
mechanisms. That is, media effects research has been primarily concerned
with relations between input variables (e.g., media information and its
characteristics) and output variables (e.g., attitudes, beliefs, and behavior),
with little consideration of the cognitive processes that might mediate

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