Marketing and the Media Last time: On-line processing and spin control Today: –Who gets the news? –Whose opinions can be “spun”?

Prospect theory and politics Implication: spin control is potentially important –binary choices can be reversed via subtle changes in decision frame –if an elite can affect the news agenda, the news media may unwittingly affect public opinion via its framing of those issues Who controls the policy/issue agenda? How much room is there for priming by strategic actors in politics? Who controls the selection of decision frame? –do different people choose different frames? If so, why and under what conditions?

On-line processing How do we know what people know and how they make judgments? Lodge, McGraw and Stroh: 2 models of candidate evaluation –memory-based model: current judgment is based on a (perhaps unbiased) assessment of recalled data –impression-driven model: current judgment based on a retrieval of a “running tally” of marginal judgments; the data bits on which the judgments are based may be disposed of

Relating Prospect Theory to Judgment “Agenda control” in campaigns can matter –If candidate A’s position on issue 1 is more popular than candidate B’s position on issue 1, and vice-versa for issue 2; and voters are on-line processers, A focus on issue 1 raises A relative to B; staying “on message” may have a cumulative effect –If two alternative decision frames α and β can be used to describe issue 1, with α more favorable to candidate A and β more favorable to candidate B Messages that use framing α will tend to raise A relative to B; staying “on message” may have a cumulative effect

Who gets the news? Price and Zaller: who is best at news story recall? –background levels of political knowledge strongly predict recall of political news stories Implications? –You can’t be manipulated by the news if you don’t receive the news. Inattentive people can’t be spun –If recall is a good measure of reception, then the politically sophisticated are the most likely to have received. But the politically sophisticated should be hard to manipulate –therefore, it’s the middle range of sophisticates likely to be the most manipulable

Critiquing Price and Zaller What if people are on-line processors? –high recall of stories correlates with high interest in politics, but may tell us nothing about manipulation because the less- interested may fail the recall test but still have received the story –politically sophisticated individuals may still be subject to framing effects

Who can be primed by news coverage? Miller and Krosnick: how does news media coverage of events affect issue salience? –conventional argument is memory-based story: individuals are manipulated by media content; news coverage makes related memories more easily accessed; manipulability should be negatively related to general political knowledge –M&K find that politically knowledgeable individuals are more responsive to media priming –interpretation: trust relationship; the politically knowledgeable are better at recognizing new information from a trusted source