Because there are various concepts of public opinion there are no general statements about the effects of mass media on it. Instead, the effects of mass media have to be related to specific concepts. Moreover, different study designs and methods have to be taken into consideration. According to the quantitative concept, public opinion is regarded
Originally, the term “reciprocal effects” was used by Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang (1953) to describe the behavior of people in front of TV cameras. Here it is used in a broader sense. It denotes all the effects of the mass media on actual and potential subjects of media coverage. Included are the effects
The term “indirect effects” denotes the consequences of direct effects on individuals who are not exposed to media content. According to Seymour-Ure (1974, 22), “a primary [=direct] effect takes place when the person affected has himself been involved directly in the communication process. A secondary [= indirect] effect takes place when individuals or groups not
In view of the preponderance of published research on the effects of the communication media, it is astounding, if not disconcerting, how little attention has been given to the systematic examination of the duration of these effects, and, as a result, how little is known about their duration. Such apparent neglect does not necessarily reflect
There is no single commonly accepted definition of framing in the field of communication. In fact, political communication scholars have offered a variety of conceptual and operational approaches to framing that all differ with respect to their underlying assumptions, the way they define frames and framing, their operational definitions, and very often also the criterion
Building upon early research from rural sociology, diffusion of innovations, public opinion poll data, and information campaigns, Tichenor et al. (1970, 159–160) posed the hypothesis: “As the infusion of mass media information into a social system increases, segments of the population with higher socioeconomic status (SES) tend to acquire this information at a faster rate
The importance of credibility in human communication had already been recognized long before modern communication research emerged as a scientific discipline. For ancient rhetoricians like Aristotle or Cicero it was self-evident that the credibility of a communicator had an important impact on the persuasiveness of his performance. At the beginning of the twentieth century credibility
Emotions are commonly understood as a complex of interactive entities encompassing subjective and objective factors and consisting of affective, cognitive, conative, and physiological components. The affective component includes the subjective experience of situations, which is connected to feelings of arousal, pleasure, or dissatisfaction. The cognitive component refers to how situations relevant to emotions are perceived
One of the dominant functions of modern media is entertainment (Zillmann & Vorderer 2000). Moreover, entertainment offerings presented by virtually all mass media seem designed to provide immediate gratification of the diverse hedonic needs of modern media consumers. If entertainment is the primary goal of modern media, why are so many critics concerned that those
One of the most oft-cited approaches to studying media effects that emerged in the early 1970s is known as the agenda-setting effect (or function) of mass media. First tested empirically in the 1968 US presidential election by University of North Carolina journalism professors Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (McCombs & Shaw 1972), this approach originally