News That Matters: Television and American Opinion, Updated Edition

SHANTO IYENGAR is the Harry and Norman Chandler Chair in Communication and professor of political science at Stanford University. His books include Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the Electorate (Free Press 1995) and Media Politics: A Citizen’s Guide (Norton 2007). DONALD R. KINDER is the Philip E. Converse Collegiate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is the coauthor with Lynn M. Sanders of Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (The University of Chicago Press 1996) and with Cindy D. Kam of Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion (The University of Chicago Press 2009).

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1987, 2010 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2010

Printed in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38858-8 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-38858-1 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38860-1 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Iyengar, Shanto.

      News that matters : television and American opinion / Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder.—Updated ed.

            p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38858-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      ISBN-10: 0-226-38858-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Television broadcasting of news—Political aspects—United States. 2. Television broadcasting of news—United States—Psychological aspects. 3. Television and politics—United States. 4. Public opinion—United States. I. Kinder, Donald R. II. Title.

      PN4888.T4I94 2010

      302.2’345—dc22

2010015350

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

NEWS THAT MATTERS

Television and American Opinion

Updated Edition

Shanto Iyengar & Donald R. Kinder

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

CHICAGO STUDIES IN AMERICAN POLITICS

A series edited by Benjamin I. Page, Susan Herbst, Lawrence R. Jacobs, and James Druckman

Also in the series:

Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America

BY MICHAEL TESLER AND DAVID O. SEARS

Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate

BY GREGORY KOGER

In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq

BY ADAM J. BERINISKY

Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion

BY DONALD R. KINDER AND CINDY D. KAM

The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans

BY MATTHEW LEVENDUSKY

Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public

BY JENNIFER L. MEROLLA AND ELIZABETH J. ZECHMEISTER

Agendas and Instability in American Politics, Second Edition

BY FRANK R. BAUMGARTNER AND BRYAN D. JONES

The Private Abuse of the Public Interest

BY LAWRENCE D. BROWN AND LAWRENCE R. JACOBS

The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform

BY MARTY COHEN, DAVID KAROL, HANS NOEL, AND JOHN ZALLER

Same Sex, Different Politics: Success and Failure in the Struggles over Gay Rights

BY GARY MUCCIARONI

Contents

Preface to the Updated Edition

Acknowledgments

1 A Primordial Power?

2 Pathways to Knowledge: Experimentation and the Analysis of Television’s Power

3 The Agenda-Setting Effect

4 Vivid Cases and Lead Stories

5 Personal Predicaments and National Problems

6 Victims of Agenda-Setting

7 The Priming Effect

8 Priming and Presidential Character

9 Priming and Presidential Responsibility

10 Victims of Priming

11 Electoral Consequences of Priming

12 News That Matters

Epilogue, 2010

Appendix A

Appendix B

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface to the Updated Edition

At the beginning of the American Republic, information about public affairs was hard to come by. Not much news was produced and it traveled slowly, when it traveled at all. Not anymore. Today, we are swimming in information: inundated with suggestions about what politics is about; instructed on which problems are worth our attention; and informed as to how our political institutions and elected officials are performing. With what effect?

Not much was Joseph Klapper’s surprising answer, set out in his famous and influential 1960 book, The Effects of Mass Communication. After carefully sorting through the evidence available at the time, Klapper concluded that mass communication functions far more frequently as an agent of reinforcement than as an agent of change (15). Minimal effects became the conventional wisdom.

Some thirty years ago, when we began to dream up the research that eventually became News That Matters, we felt obliged to present Klapper’s conclusion in our teaching, but we did so halfheartedly. We suspected that the conventional view underestimated the influence of mass communication, and for two reasons. First, the research that Klapper reviewed relied primarily on observational studies, and although observational studies have their advantages, they lack the precision and control that experiments offer. We wanted to investigate political communication through experimental means. Second, communication researchers in Klapper’s time lacked a sophisticated psychological theory of human judgment and choice. Klapper did not know it, but as he was putting the finishing touches on The Effects of Mass Communication, a revolution was brewing in psychology. Much of the new look in communication research, including our own, has been inspired by the cumulative and considerable achievements of the last half century of cognitive science, developments led most notably by Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, and Amos Tversky. The general theory begins with Simon’s notion of bounded rationality, the assertion that human thinking powers are very modest when compared with the complexities of the environments in which human beings live. Faced with complexity and uncertainty, lacking the wits to optimize, they must be content to satisfice—to find ‘good enough’ solutions to their problems and ‘good enough’ courses of action (Simon 1979, 3).

Drawing on this work to sharpen our expectations, we proceeded to carry out a series of experiments examining the relationship between television news and public opinion. Contrary to conventional thinking, television news, we found, shapes opinion in consequential ways—it is news that matters. Or so we claimed, back in 1987.

Ours is an odd business. We turn ideas into papers and papers into books, and then we send them out into the world—where, almost always, they quickly and silently disappear. Where do they go? Into obscure journals and onto dusty library shelves, unloved and for the most part unread. That is not everyone’s experience, we realize, and thankfully it is not our experience entirely. The proof rests in your hands. Our little book has proven to be surprisingly resilient. In print continuously for nearly a quarter century now, it seems actually to be gaining strength, winning awards in the last few years from both the American Political Science Association and the American Association for Public Opinion Research. It shows every sign of outlasting its authors.

Twenty-five years ago, the Internet was merely a gleam in Al Gore’s eye; Barack Obama was studying constitutional law at Harvard, hoping that if things broke right, he just might end up as editor of the Law Review; and Fox News had not yet elbowed its way onto the national scene. A lot has changed since, to put it mildly, and so it seems fair to ask what our research has to say to communication and politics today.

It is a fair question—and not an easy one. Our answers, partial and speculative, are set out at the end of the book, in a new epilogue. We are grateful to John Tryneski, our longtime editor and good friend at the University of Chicago Press, for inviting us to undertake this reconnaissance and report on it here. We hope we have succeeded in placing our findings and interpretations in the new world—the twenty-first century world—of information, communication, and politics.

Shanto Iyengar

Palo Alto, California

Donald Kinder

Ann Arbor, Michigan

December 2009

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of an extended collaboration that began at Yale University in 1979 and ended, thanks only to the miracle of word processing, about five minutes ago with Iyengar in Stony Brook and Kinder in Palo Alto. Along this long road, we incurred many debts.

In the early days, when we were not yet fully persuaded that the political effects of television could be studied usefully by experimental means, Robert Abelson and William McGuire provided essential and much appreciated encouragement. Since then, many people have offered advice. Much of it was enlightened; some of it we took. For wading through early versions of the book, red pencils in hand, we would like to thank Edie Goldenberg, Michael MacKuen, Warren Miller, Benjamin Page, Ellen Robb, and Janet Weiss. Don Herzog, Samuel Popkin, and Steven Rosenstone went far beyond the call of collegial duty. Their detailed and thoughtful reactions improved the book and enriched our understanding of our own work. We hope someday to return the favor.

We were also blessed with exceptional graduate student assistants. At Yale, Mark Peters and Roy Behr not only managed the running of our experiments but also contributed significantly to our thinking about television and politics. We are particularly grateful to Behr for allowing us to use a portion of his dissertation research. At Michigan, Jon Krosnick was a tireless analyst and kibitzer whose relentless questioning strengthened the work (and, in time, our friendship).

Our experiments necessitated the use of sophisticated audiovisual facilities and equipment. The late Frank Dendas, director of the Yale Television Studio, gave generously of his time and expertise, and welcomed us to the Studio’s remarkable facilities. Lawrence Grippo, then a Yale undergraduate, skillfully created our newscasts, somehow kept track of our overflowing collection of videotapes, and ably assisted in the running of experiments. We would also like to thank the hundreds of people in New Haven and Ann Arbor who saw fit to participate in our studies. Without their cooperation, this book could not have been written. As chair of the department of political science at Yale, David Mayhew helped us find necessary resources. We are also grateful to Nancy Brennan at the Center for Political Studies at Michigan and Estelle Krieger at the department of political science at Stony Brook for preparing the manuscript—again and again, with great cheer and competence.

Over the years, our research was funded by grants from the political science program at the National Science Foundation (Grants SES 80-12581, 81-21306, and 82-08714). We thank program directors Gerald Wright and Frank Scioli for ably shepherding our proposals through the Foundation. Additional support came from the National Institutes of Health (in the form of a postdoctoral fellowship to Iyengar) and the Block Fund of Yale University. Most of the national survey data we report were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. They were originally collected by the Center for Political Studies (CPS) of the Institute for Social Research, the University of Michigan, for the National Election Studies. Neither CPS nor the Consortium bears any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations we offer here. Nor does anybody else. In the spirit of true collaboration, we have only each other to blame.

Last, but hardly least, we wish to express our gratitude to our spouses and our children. Were it not for Ellen and Nikhil, and Janet and Benjamin, we would no doubt have completed this project sooner, but would have been unimaginably poorer for it.

1

A Primordial Power?

On a typical weekday evening, some fifty million Americans gather around their television sets, tuned into the national newscasts of the three major networks. By a wide margin, they believe that television—not magazines, not radio, not newspapers—provides the most intelligent, complete, and impartial coverage of public affairs, and goes furthest in clarifying the candidacies and issues at stake in national elections (Bower 1985). We Americans trust television news; we see it as authoritative (perhaps in part because we see it); we have welcomed Huntley, Cronkite, Brokaw, and the others into our living rooms gladly.

Because of its wide reach and high credibility, television news obviously possesses the potential to shape American public opinion profoundly. Whether television news realizes this potential, however, is the subject of considerable and occasionally acrimonious debate. In fact, research has more often than not concluded that mass media in general and television news in particular merely strengthen or reinforce the public’s existing beliefs and opinions.¹ Indeed, Patterson and McClure (1976) concluded that television news coverage of presidential campaigns had virtually no political impact. According to their analysis, network news failed even to inform voters regarding the choices they confronted. Why? Patterson and McClure put it this way: Since the nightly news is too brief to treat fully the complexity of modern politics, too visual to present effectively most events, and too entertainment-minded to tell viewers much worth knowing, most network newscasts are neither very educational nor very powerful communicators (1976, 90).

We subscribe to much of this indictment. Television news is brief; it does drastically simplify the complexity of modern politics; it is undeniably visual; and it does borrow unabashedly from the world of entertainment television. We know, moreover, that viewers typically pay rather casual and intermittent attention to the parade of stories that make up the news each night (Kinder and Sears 1985, 660–64).

Nevertheless, we believe that Patterson and McClure’s conclusion—that network newscasts are neither very educational nor very powerful communicators—is quite thoroughly mistaken. Our purpose here is to establish that television news is in fact an educator virtually without peer, that it shapes the American public’s conception of political life in pervasive ways; that television news is news that matters.

Our argument begins with the observation that Americans develop opinions toward an astonishing variety of issues that lie far outside their own experience. To be sure, they are preoccupied first and foremost with the immediate concerns of private life: with earning a living, supporting a family, making and keeping friends. But at the same time, they also manage to decide whether huge federal deficits threaten the economy and whether fighting in Latin America threatens national security. They reach such judgments without benefit of direct experience: without undertaking their own economic analysis, without traveling behind the lines in Nicaragua. Because they take part in the grand events of politics so rarely, ordinary Americans must depend upon information and analysis provided by others—in modern times, upon information and analysis provided by mass media.

This dependence gives the media an enormous capacity to shape public thinking. Cohen has put this point well, and although he was writing with newspapers in mind, his argument applies with at least equal force to television news:

The press is significantly more than a purveyor of information and opinion. It 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. And it follows from this that the world looks different to different people, depending not only on their personal interests, but also on the map that is drawn for them by the writers, editors, and publishers of the papers they read. Perhaps the notion of a map is too confining, for it does not suggest the full range of the political phenomena that are conveyed by the press. It is, more properly, an atlas of places, personages, situations, and events; and to the extent that the press even discusses the ideas that men have for coping with the day’s ration of problems, it is an atlas of policy possibilities, alternatives, choices. The editor may believe he is only printing the things that people want to read, but he is thereby putting a claim on their attention, powerfully determining what they will be thinking about, and talking about, until the next wave laps their shore (1963, 13).

While agenda-setting—to adopt the social science parlance—has been the subject of thoughtful essays over the last half century,² empirical work on the subject has a briefer and less distinguished history. Lippmann’s (1920, 1922, 1925) original warning that news organizations possess the power to determine what the public takes to be important had little immediate impact on research. Even forty years later, Klapper’s encyclopedic summary of findings on the effects of mass communication could devote just two pages to agenda-setting; moreover, that discussion was dotted with such disheartening phrases as it is a matter of common observation or some writers believe (1960, 104–5). Although research on agenda-setting has proliferated over the last decade, so far, unfortunately, the results add up to rather little.³ Even exponents of the agenda-setting idea acknowledge the literature’s fragmented and haphazard condition (e.g., McCombs 1981). Agenda-setting may be an apt metaphor, but it is no theory.

The lack of a theory of media effects has significantly impeded our understanding of how democracy works. The health and vitality of any democratic government depend in part on the wisdom of ordinary citizens. And indeed, commentaries on the current state of the American polity, in scholarly journals and on the editorial page, are laced with normative claims that the public is or is not rational, that the American citizen is shrewd or foolish. Such claims typically pay no attention whatsoever to the dissemination of political information throughout society, to the no-doubt intricate relationship that has grown up between the institutions of mass communication, on the one hand, and the political wisdom of ordinary citizens, on the other. Lippmann was not exaggerating the political significance of this relationship when he wrote that citizens who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information (1920, 54–55). If we are to understand and assess how well the American political system works, surely we need a theory of how information about public affairs percolates through American society.

We begin to develop such a theory here, as part of our effort to understand the ways in which television news shapes the political thinking of ordinary Americans. We test and refine our understanding mainly—though not exclusively—with experiments, a powerful method of investigation that media researchers have largely ignored. Our fourteen experiments introduce systematic and unobtrusive alterations into the television news broadcasts that ordinary citizens watch. As a consequence, citizens assigned to different experimental conditions are furnished with slightly different glimpses of the political world—and as we will see, such differences matter greatly. Because our procedures are unusual, we explain them fully in chapter 2. There we define exactly what we mean by an experiment, argue that experimentation possesses distinctive strengths for the study of television news, and then describe the particular experimental designs we deployed in our research.

Chapter 3 presents results from a series of experiments on agenda-setting, supplemented at key junctures with complementary evidence drawn from our analysis of national surveys. Taken together, the results vindicate Lippmann’s original suspicion that news media provide compelling accounts of a political world that is otherwise out of reach. Our studies show specifically that television news powerfully influences which problems viewers regard as the nation’s most serious. Rising prices, unemployment, energy shortages, arms control—all these (and more) become high priority political issues for the public only if they first become high priority news items for the networks.

In chapter 4 we examine characteristics of coverage that might accentuate the agenda-setting effect. We compare stories that lead off the evening news with those that appear later in the broadcast, on the hypothesis that lead stories might be more influential merely because of their position. (They are.) We also assess whether the dramatic personal vignettes that the networks commonly use to illustrate national problems, which are surely riveting, are also particularly influential. (They are not.)

In chapter 5 we examine how television’s portrayal of national problems interacts with viewers’ personal circumstances. Racial discrimination, job loss, and the threatened collapse of the social security system (among others) are national problems and, for some Americans, overwhelming personal ones as well. Do such direct experiences override the vicarious experiences provided by television news? (They do not.) In chapter 6 we investigate several characteristics of viewers that might make them more or less vulnerable to agenda-setting. We compare the reactions of the well-educated and the poorly-educated, partisans and independents, the politically involved and the politically withdrawn, thereby hoping to identify more precisely just who is affected by agenda-setting.

Chapters 7 through 11 take up what we call priming, a manifestation of television power that is more insidious and perhaps more consequential than agenda-setting. Priming presumes that when evaluating complex political objects—the performance of an incumbent president, or the promises of a presidential contender—citizens do not take into account all that they know. They cannot, even if they were motivated to do so. What they do consider is what comes to mind, those bits and pieces of political memory that are accessible. And television news, we argue, is a most powerful force determining what springs to the citizen’s mind and what does not. By priming certain aspects of national life while ignoring others, television news sets the terms by which political judgments are rendered and political choices made.

Chapter 7 discusses the impact of priming on citizens’ evaluations of the president’s performance. When primed by television news stories that focus on national defense, citizens judge the president largely by how well he has provided, as they see it, for the nation’s defense; when primed