Kevin Arceneaux
Department of Political Science
Temple University
Martin Johnson
Department of Political Science
University of California, Riverside
The proliferation of television channels during the last 30 years and the expanded opportunity to choose among types of news and entertainment programming affects the influence of news media, especially partisan news channels. In our recent book, Changing Minds or Changing Channels? Partisan News in an Age of Choice, we find that when viewers can choose what they watch, it dampens the influence of partisan news on a variety of judgments for at least two reasons. First, a diverse array of options reduces the size of the news audience. Second, the people who want to watch partisan news are different from people who prefer not to watch it. Members of the audience for partisan news have stronger political views and predispositions than members of the audience for entertainment programs. Those who are the most likely to be swayed by partisan news are also most likely to avoid it.
Our findings lend further support to normative concerns that media fragmentation offers a far greater harm than political polarization: Disengagement. While many worry about the viewers of MSNBC and Fox News representing wholly different political worldviews rendering a common political conversation impossible, quietly a disconcertingly large number of viewers are dropping out of the conversation entirely. At any time of the day or night a viewer could theoretically watch the news, but so many are choosing Duck Dynasty instead.
We also show that, in spite of the best intentions of political observers who prescribe it, asking partisans to view political messages from the other side will do very little to reduce political polarization. In fact, forcing people to watch counter-attitudinal news hardens their political views. Encouraging people to “hear the other side” in operation actually further entrenches political camps.
While we pay particular attention to political polarization in the book, we hope scholars with interests across a variety of hypothesized media effects will find it of use. Its implications go far beyond the specific media effects studied in the book (including issue opinions, evaluations of political leaders, and judgments about mass media). We develop a motivational model of media use and test our expectations using experimental designs intended to expand the toolkit of political communication researchers. We embed traditional random assignment, or forced exposure, designs in our studies, alongside new techniques that allow us to gauge the effects of self-selection and audience member decisions. Many of our studies incorporate treatments where participants are handed a remote control and allowed to select what to view in a way that emulates naturalistic channel surfing across a constrained set of choices constructed for the laboratory setting. We also use a design borrowed from medical research we call the participant preference design, which allows us to capture what types of programs our research subjects prefer before assigning them to a program to watch.
As others, including Shanto Iyengar and Lance Bennett have warned, the future of political communication research hinges in part on finding new ways to study viewer choices in the modern hyper-choice environment. We think Changing Minds or Changing Channels? makes some strides in that direction and will help further our understanding of contemporary media effects.