Page 82 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Persuasion in the Political Context 75

increased media coverage of this domain and a relative decrease in the
media coverage of the economic domain, and vice versa (agenda building).
However, the media agenda was clearly not solely determined by the envi-
ronment and by the activities of political actors. When two major issue
domains (security and the economy, in this case) were simultaneously
sending cues of worsening conditions (as in the 2003 elections), indicat-
ing increased newsworthiness, the media were forced to make a choice
between them. In the agenda setting stage, it was found that the level of
television coverage of issues influences the proportion of survey respond-
ents indicating these issues as the nation’s most important problems.
Survey respondents indicating the security-peace problem as the most im-
portant were more likely than those naming the domestic-economic prob-
lem as most important to state that if the elections were held today, they
would vote for one of the security-peace parties, and vice versa. These
considerations significantly prime individuals’ voting intentions.
In the context of media priming, trust in the news media plays a central
role in regulating media effects. Cohen (2008) stated that the news media
are no longer as consequential in helping to frame public opinion toward
the president as they were a generation ago. The news coverage of the
American president over the past quarter-century or so does not affect
public attitudes toward the president as much as it did during the previous
20 years. Cohen analyzes three great scandals of the modern presidency:
Clinton-Lewinsky, Iran-Contra, and Watergate. Each episode produced
large volumes of negative news, but negative news seemed not to touch
Bill Clinton (see also Kiousis, 2003) as deeply as it did Richard Nixon or
Ronald Reagan. The declining news impact on public thinking about the
president resulted from the fact that the news media provided less news
about the president than it once did. Also, the audience for the news be-
came smaller, and the public displays a more limited trust in the news
media than it once had. Finally, the regularity of negative news makes it
hard for the public to tell if the bad news reflects truly bad conditions to
which it should pay attention, or if it merely reflects the agenda of
journalists.
The results of Miller and Krosnick’s (2000) experiments also showed
that priming occurred reliably only among people who knew a lot about
politics and trusted the media. Among viewers of stories about drugs and
immigration, presented in American television broadcasts by highly
trusted national media networks, exposure to stories about an issue in-
creased the perceived national importance of the issue, which in turn in-
creased the weight people placed on that issue in formulating a positive
assessment of President Bill Clinton’s job performance.