Wrong by Dannagal Goldthwaite Young

Author:Dannagal Goldthwaite Young [Young, Dannagal Goldthwaite]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Reinforcement in a High-Choice Media Environment: A Different Beast

As cable fragmented the television landscape in the 1980s and 1990s, cultivation research moved in a new direction. With more thematically diverse viewing options, it became harder to argue that all media content had the same effect on heavy television viewers.11 Instead, researchers began thinking about how exposure to specific media genres or programs was shaping viewers’ perceptions of reality. This approach centered on how mediated depictions of the world (of events, relationships, and power dynamics) shaped the cognitive representations (mental models) viewers came to hold in their minds.12 Watching shows that depicted traditional romantic relationships, for example, informed our brain’s schematic representations of what “romantic relationships look like.”13 We would then draw on those “mental models” to make sense of the real world.14 In other words, exposure to specific media content served as an “observation of the world” that we then used to inform our knowledge, theories, and beliefs about what reality was like.

On average, media provide just some of the many observations that we use to understand our worlds. This helps explain why the strongest media “effects” tend to emerge in the context of issues and topics with which we have the least real-world experience.15 Researchers have found that the effects of watching stereotypical depictions of minority groups on television are strongest among those with little interaction with members of those groups in real life.16 Similarly, the effects of media exposure on perceptions of police are greatest for those with the fewest real-world interactions with police.17 If media provide some fraction of the observations that we use to inform our understanding of the world, then media’s influence will be strongest in the context of phenomena we have the least opportunity to directly “observe” on our own.

Putting this all together, from the 1960s to the 1980s, centralized low-choice media technologies were operating against the backdrop of low elite polarization, high(ish) trust in institutions, and sociodemographically mixed (not very sorted) political parties. In their quest to offend as few people as possible, media producers created broadly appealing, status-quo-affirming television content that was associated with viewers looking more and more similar in their worldviews the more they watched.

But what happens in a decentralized, high-choice, fragmented media environment in which media producers deliberately create content to separate—and create relationships with—different kinds of people? And what happens when this strategic audience segmentation occurs in a climate of increasing political polarization, institutional distrust, and the social sorting of the political parties? Well, the fact that MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and the political news satire program The Daily Show were all launched in 1996 is no accident. Recall that the 1994 Republican revolution marked a seismic shift in American politics. It coincided with a sharp increase in ideological polarization of elites, increased affective polarization among the public, and the increased social sorting of the two parties. All these trends were making American media consumers harder to please, especially in terms of their perception of bias in political programming.

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