News Media Impact on the Ingredients of Presidential Evaluations: Politically Knowledgeable Citizens Are Guided by a Trusted Source

TLDR

News media attention can shape presidential evaluations by making issue‑related beliefs more accessible, with agenda‑setting increasing perceived importance and priming causing voters to weight issues more heavily. The study investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying news media priming in presidential evaluations. The authors identify and test specific cognitive mediators that link media attention to changes in how voters evaluate presidential performance. Media coverage raises belief accessibility but does not directly prime; instead, politically knowledgeable, media‑trusting voters infer national importance and give the issue greater weight in evaluating the President.

Abstract

Scholars have uniformly presumed that news media attention to a policy issue increases its impact on presidential job performance evaluations because news coverage enhances the accessibility of beliefs about the issue in citizens' memories, which automatically increases their impact on relevant judgments. The research reported here demonstrates that media coverage of an issue does indeed increase the cognitive accessibility of related beliefs, but this does not produce priming. Instead, politically knowledgeable citizens who trust the media to be accurate and informative infer that news coverage of an issue means it is an important matter for the nation, leading these people to place greater emphasis on that issue when evaluating the President. Thus, news media priming does not occur because politically naive citizens are victims of the architecture of their minds, but instead appears to reflect inferences made from a credible institutional source of information by sophisticated citizens. W hen television, radio, and motion pictures joined newspapers as conduits of political information during this century, scholars worried that these communication media might have powerful hypodermic effects on the general public's political attitudes, injecting information and opinions into people's minds (e.g., Lasswell 1927). But when this hypothesis was subjected to empirical tests, powerful persuasion by the news media appeared to be the exception rather than the rule (Klapper 1960). During the last two decades, however, it has become clear that the media do indeed shape public opinion. Not only have investigations used improved methods to document persuasion (Page and Shapiro 1992), but new media effects have been identified as well, including agenda setting and news media priming. Agenda setting occurs when extensive media attention to an issue increases its perceived national importance (McCombs and Shaw 1972). Priming occurs when media attention to an issue causes people to place special weight on it when constructing evaluations of overall presidential job performance (Iyengar et al. 1984). Our focus in this article is on the cognitive mediators of news media priming. To specify the mediators of an effect is to identify the mechanisms by which one factor affects another (Baron and Kenny 1986). In the case of priming, news media attention to an issue presumably causes a change in a