| Popis: |
Political science scholars such as Levendusky (2013) and Arceneaux and Johnson (2013) have debated the extent to which specific media brands, particularly hyper-partisan ones, can shape the political attitudes of their audience, particularly in the context of the United States. There are two main weaknesses however in the current body of literature that studies the role of specific news sources and political attitudes: (1) it is heavily focused on the U.S. which has a particularly rigid and polarized partisan system and media market and, as a result, (2) media coverage of U.S. politics is rife with strong partisan cues that come from political elites. The first point presents a challenge for generalizing the findings of U.S.-focused studies to other countries. Meanwhile, the second related point makes it difficult to empirically separate the influence of cues inferred from media source brands and from the effect of cues from partisan elite discourse that appears in news coverage. To build on the existing literature, I conduct a 2x3 between-subjects experiment with an additional pure control. Treated participants are exposed to one of two articles with either a favorable slant towards a wealth tax proposal by the Wealth Tax Commission (WTC) or an unfavorable slant. In order to control for the effect of partisan cues, the article is edited to have ambiguous cues for partisan elites and contains the same wording about partisan elites’ position on the proposal in both articles. Participants are asked to indicate their most and least favored news sources pre-treatment and then are randomly assigned to view the article attributed to their most favored source, least favored source, or no source. I then measure participants’ opinions towards the wealth tax proposal post-treatment, how consistent with their political beliefs they view the proposal, and how much bias they perceive in the news coverage. This allows me to understand how exactly media effects may be driven from the cues that the public receives from media brands themselves, independently of partisan cues, how source cues affect perceptions of bias, and whether individuals view news slant from favored news sources as more consistent with their personal political preferences and predispositions. |
