Maria Elizabeth Grabe
Biographic Data
| ID | 80193 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maria Elizabeth Grabe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maria Elizabeth |
| FAMILY NAME | Grabe |
| SIGNATURE | GRABE M E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University Bloomington |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6372-8363 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 380 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Populist Hustlers Versus Establishment Dynasties: The Contentious Visual Framing Dual of the 2022 Kenyan Election
We draw on three data sets to offer a comprehensive view on visual representation of presidential candidates and the impact of media images on the outcome of the Kenyan election. Content analyses of legacy media revealed patterns in journalistic coverage, whereas Facebook posts brought to light comparable self-representation of candidates. Daily tracking poll data were used to test for associations between visual representation and voter support …
Race-Specific Pathways to Understanding the Impact of Social Media Use on Covid-19 Vaccine Confidence Among US Citizens
This study investigates fluctuations in COVID-19 vaccine rates between Black and White Americans by surveying a demographically proportionate sample of 2,412 individuals in April 2023. We found that dependency on social media was a significant negative correlate for vaccine confidence, regardless of race. However, moderation models uncovered a critical race-based asymmetry: institutional confidence and psychological reactance significantly modera…
Mitigating Information Insecurity: An African Perspective on Satisfaction With Democracy
While Africans are committed to democracy, governments across the continent have failed to deliver on the democratic aspirations of the populace, with declinatory outcomes for satisfaction with democracy (SWD) over the past decade. A number of reliable variables (e.g., economics, political participation, democratic performance) have been used over the past 50 years to study trends in SWD worldwide. Yet the integrity of information ecosystems, inc…
Multinational and Multimodal Character Framing of Political Candidates in Online News: Do Political and Media System Classifications Matter
An evolving body of research generally referred to as visual politics has brought the heavy research focus on linguistic modalities of political communication closer to parity with visual emphasis. The study reported here transcends this schism by joining momentum toward multimodality as an ontological departure point for research. We expanded an existing visual instrument into a multimodal one and provided evidence that it reliably captures char…
Gendered News Coverage at the Apex of Political Leadership: Validating and Applying a Visual Character Frame Instrument to the Campaigns of Merkel, Clinton, and Their Male Opponents
This cross-national, two-study project examines leadership at the intersection of gender, politics, and visual framing. In Study 1, an online experiment, we used AI-generated images of synthetic women and men candidates ( N = 996) to validate an existing visual character frame instrument and examine if voters associate gender with these frames. We found strong consistency between German and US voters in attributing gender-variant leadership quali…
Pictures from the primaries: Black presidential hopefuls and representation differences across the media bias and reliability spectrum
Understanding the Impact of Anger-Evoking and Efficacy-Eliciting Tweets in White Support for the BLM Movement
Empathy With Muslim Victims of Discrimination: Can Personalization and Emotionalization in News Reporting Pave the Way
Hate crimes against Muslims in the United States have been on the rise since 2016 (FBI, 2022), discouraging this group’s participation in public life. Most Americans, therefore, encounter Muslims only via media representations. We investigated if two journalistic storytelling devices can kindle in white non-Muslim Americans empathy and supportive attitudes toward Muslim women who are victims of discrimination. Indeed, personalization and emotiona…
The Social Contagion Potential of Pro-Vaccine Messages on Black Twitter
Black Americans in the US not only suffered from disproportionately high hospitalization and death rates throughout the pandemic but also from the consequences of low COVID-19 vaccination rates. This pattern of disparity is linked to distrust of public health systems that originates from a history of medical atrocities committed against Black people. For that reason, mitigation of race-based inequity in COVID-19 impacts might find more success in…
Facing the Competition: Gender Differences in Facial Emotion and Prominence in Visual News Coverage of Democratic Presidential Primary Candidates
This study considered the impact of gender on visual coverage of the top 12 candidates in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary. Using Microsoft Azure’s Face API, we analyzed 9,529 still images from 43 mainstream news sources for facial emotion (happiness, anger, neutrality) and prominence (close-up, medium, long shots). We found visual evidence for an age-old narrative that undermines confidence in women’s leadership fitness: They were presen…
Moral panics about the integrity of information in democratic systems: Comparing tabloid news to disinformation
Contemporary concerns about the integrity of information are not easily dismissible as merely a perennial cycle of moral panic. In an attempt to provide context and map territory for future research, this conceptual paper draws comparisons between disinformation, the deliberate fabrication and dissemination of false information, and tabloid news – a news format with a century’s old reputation for sparking consternation over journalistic truth tel…
The Influence of News Brand Cues and Story Content on Citizen Perceptions of News Bias
Mainstream U.S. news media stand accused of bias against the forty-fifth president, Donald Trump. The relentlessness and intensity of these accusations over the course of Trump’s presidency are unusual and make for an opportunity to study perceptions of news bias. During the experiment reported here, participants ( N = 315) were exposed to biased (pro- and anti-Trump) news stories that were attributed to either CNN, Breitbart , or remained unattr…
Informed Citizenship in a Media-Centric Way of Life: Informed Citizenship
Two trends are prominent and universal to contemporary democracies: Voting rates are in steady decline while media use is growing. A transdisciplinary vantage point might help to redirect research trajectories that lead to alarming conclusions of democratic crisis. To that end, dominant ontological positions will need revision or perhaps replacement. This essay calls for (a) knowledge to be explicated beyond the written word, with serious conside…
Demographic variation in how the social brain processes news messages
A high capacity for visual perception distinguishes Homo sapiens from other primates. This human ability to detect social cues and retain visual records of social networks has been tested mostly with static facial images in laboratory settings. However, media consumption has become closely entangled with the way social life is navigated. Therefore, the study reported here tested demographic differences (gender and education) in visual information…
Personalized News and Participatory Intent: How Emotional Displays of Everyday Citizens Promote Political Involvement
Political communication scholars have shown that nonverbal communication cues have the potential to influence political judgments. The bulk of this literature has focused on leader displays in the context of electoral politics. The study reported here aligns with that body of literature, but tests how facial displays of ordinary citizens might affect political participatory intentions among different demographic groups. The study reported here pr…
Defecting From the Gutenberg Legacy: Employing Images to Test Knowledge Gaps
Education-based knowledge gaps are well-documented across countries, media platforms, and content. Without exception, knowledge is measured through words not images. Given the centrality of sight in the natural history of Homo sapiens, the extraordinary visual acuity of humans, and the proliferation of screen-based visual media environments in contemporary life, an experiment was conducted to test the knowledge gap visually. Participants watched …
At the Intersection of the Digital Divide and the Knowledge Gap: Do Knowledge Domains and Measures Matter
This study reports on knowledge gain, examined through three separate measures (free recall, comprehension and recognition) among high- and low-education groups who used two types of news media (newspaper vs. online) to consume two kinds of news (public affairs vs. entertainment). Results (n = 123) confirm the knowledge gap and validate concerns about the digital divide. Yet three different knowledge acquisition measures generated dissimilar find…
The architecture of female competition: Derogation of a sexualized female news anchor
This paper succeeds recent experimental findings of gender variation in how news consumers process information delivered by a female news anchor. Specifically, men remembered news presented by the unsexualized version of the anchor better while women had higher memory scores for news presented by her sexualized rendition. Explanations for why men may have been distracted from processing news information delivered by a sexualized female news ancho…
Knowledge acquisition gaps: A comparison of print versus online news sources
This experimental study tested the knowledge gap hypothesis at the intersection of audience education levels and news formats (newspaper versus online). The findings reveal a gap in public affairs knowledge acquisition between South Korean citizens ( N = 123) from different educational backgrounds. Moreover, the high education group comprehended news with the same level of efficiency across online and newspaper formats while low education partici…
Visual Influence
The preceding chapters have built a theoretical and data-driven case for why news visuals in general, and image bites in particular, should be considered for their persuasive influence and taken more seriously in election news research. The scaffolding for the book's longitudinal content analysis of presidential campaign news has been assembled in a cross-disciplinary fashion, with contributions from communication research, neuroscience, cognitiv…
Facing the Electorate
Given the tendency of candidates to appear in image bites more often than sound bites, the non-verbal behavior of presidential nominees takes on added significance. This chapter argues that facial displays are influential elements within image and sound bites, and examines the character of televised candidate displays shown on the evening news. To structure the analysis, it draws on the literature of biopolitics that has identified three classes …
Taking Television Seriously
Over the past four decades, television news has become the primary source of political information for a majority of Americans and, as that reliance has grown, the most credible, appealing, interesting, and believable source as well. These trends are not without reason, as audiovisual media more effectively complements human information-processing abilities than any other message platform. Politically, television connects candidates with voters a…
Why Visuals Matter
This chapter surveys a vast terrain of theory, findings, and history, in order to diagnose the origins and interrogate the legitimacy of neglecting the visual dimension of television news. Although television is an audiovisual medium, the focus primarily is on its visual component, precisely because it has been unappreciated (indeed much denigrated) as a source of information. Moving away from contemporary media and politics, the chapter looks ba…
Image Bite News
This chapter documents the extent to which presidential candidates visually appear on the nightly news by drawing on a longitudinal analysis of presidential news coverage from the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 general elections. For each year, the political reporting of the main broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) was coded for visual information. It summarizes the frequency and duration of candidate image bites that were broadcast, in which cand…
Visual Bias
This chapter introduces a new approach to measuring bias based on the visual aspects of broadcast news. Unlike the candidates' verbal statements and self-presentation style, the indicators of visual bias employed fall more squarely under the control of editors and producers than candidates and their consultants. In order to explain the persistence of the liberal bias charge against journalism as a political theme, the chapter traces the rise of p…
Image Bite Politics
Image Bite Politics is the first book to systematically assess the visual presentation of presidential candidates in network news coverage of elections and to connect these visual images with shifts in public opinion. Presenting the results of a comprehensive visual analysis of general election news from 1992-2004, encompassing four presidential campaigns, the authors highlight the remarkably potent influence of television images when it comes to…
Explicating Sensationalism in Television News: Content and the Bells and Whistles of Form
Sensationalism in journalism has been a popular topic of fiery discussions for centuries. Yet, it appears that this topic is more often debated than systematically investigated. Indeed, the word, sensational ism, has become an easy name-calling device for those who are in the mood for criticizing the mass media. Even in academic circles, the term has been used with little precision. The goal of this study is to take a step towards explicating the…
Sourcing and Reporting in News Magazine Programs: 60 Minutes versus Hard Copy
A number of studies consistently point at the disproportionate focus on elite news sources such as men in government and business while women, minorities, and working-class people are shown to be underrepresented as sources in the news. At the same time research reveals that soundbites from sources are shrinking while reporters are taking up increasingly more news airtime. In a society that rests on democratic ideals about the mass media's facili…
Villains, Victims and the Virtuous in Bill O'Reilly'S “No-Spin Zone”: Revisiting world war propaganda techniques
This study updates methods of communication analysis popular in the period between the world wars in an effort to analyze news commentator Bill O'Reilly's “Talking Points Memo” editorials. The results show that O'Reilly is a heavier and less nuanced user of the seven devices developed by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in the late 1930s than the notorious radio commentator of that time, Father Charles Coughlin. O'Reilly also employs other p…
Happy warriors” Revisited: Hedonic and agonic display repertoires of presidential candidates on the evening news
Absent from most analyses of political news are detailed assessments of the candidates' nonverbal behavior, which has been shown experimentally to have considerable persuasive influence. Unlike attractiveness and other relatively stable aspects of appearance, facial displays are highly variable and reveal important moment-to-moment information about the emitter's internal state. In this paper we argue that facial displays are influential elements…
Television news magazine crime stories: A functionalist perspective
More than a century ago, Emile Durkheim argued that the rituals of processing and punishing crime are functional in constructing a society's morality, teaching its members to abide by certain rules, and promoting cohesion among members by making it public when individuals have violated shared moral values. This content analysis investigates network and syndicated news magazine crime stories for their potential to promote these three social Juncti…
Knowledge acquisition gaps: A comparison of print versus online news sources
This experimental study tested the knowledge gap hypothesis at the intersection of audience education levels and news formats (newspaper versus online). The findings reveal a gap in public affairs knowledge acquisition between South Korean citizens ( N = 123) from different educational backgrounds. Moreover, the high education group comprehended news with the same level of efficiency across online and newspaper formats while low education partici…
Experimental Evidence of the Knowledge Gap: Message Arousal, Motivation, and Time Delay
Journal Article Experimental Evidence of the Knowledge Gap: Message Arousal, Motivation, and Time Delay Get access Maria Elizabeth Grabe, Maria Elizabeth Grabe 1Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 1Maria Elizabeth Grabe; e-mail Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Narine Yegiyan, Narine Yegiyan 2Department of Communication, University of California, Davis Search for other…
Gender in Crime News: A Case Study Test of the Chivalry Hypothesis
This content analysis tested the chivalry hypothesis in 6 months of crime reporting in a local U.S. newspaper. The chivalry hypothesis posits that female criminals receive more lenient treatment in the criminal justice system and in news coverage of their crimes than their male counterparts. The study found partial support for the chivalry hypothesis and prompts a more nuanced formulation of the hypothesis-here termed patriarchal chivalry. This s…
Business As Usual: The American Dream in Hollywood Business Films
Using reviews of 120 top-grossing Hollywood films about business released from 1927 to 1995, in this study we examine the American dream myth's structure and analyze how the relative dominance of 2 seemingly contradictory tales, the cautionary and the hopeful, varies over time. We further investigate the influence of a particular tale's dominance on class and occupational mobility, character demographics, and keys to success. Finally, we evaluate…
Personalized News and Participatory Intent: How Emotional Displays of Everyday Citizens Promote Political Involvement
Political communication scholars have shown that nonverbal communication cues have the potential to influence political judgments. The bulk of this literature has focused on leader displays in the context of electoral politics. The study reported here aligns with that body of literature, but tests how facial displays of ordinary citizens might affect political participatory intentions among different demographic groups. The study reported here pr…
Turning Sexual Science Into News: Sex Research and the Media
In this article we report on the findings of a two-part project investigating contemporary issues in sexuality researchers' interaction with journalists. The goal of the project was to explore best practices and suggest curricular and training initiatives for sexuality researchers and journalists that would enhance the accurate dissemination of sexuality research results in the media. We present the results of a survey of a convenience sample of …
News as Aristotelian Drama: The Case of 60 Minutes
This study systematically examined 60 Minutes for instigating drama through visual and narrative content as well as packaging techniques. News sources and reporters were also scrutinized for their role in highlighting dramatic dimensions in news. This content analysis of a 6-month census reveals that the program employs visual and narrative techniques and features news sources and reporters in ways consistent with Aristotle's prescriptions for dr…
Tabloid and Traditional Television News Magazine Crime Stories: Crime Lessons and Reaffirmation of Social Class Distinctions
In recent times, critics have charged that tabloid news emphasizes and sensationalizes criminal behavior - thereby violating the journalistic ideal of providing objective information to the citizens of a democratic society. Yet, these claims have not been subjected to systematic investigation. This study compares tabloid and traditional broadcast news magazine programs in terms of their emphasis on crime and the content of their crime narratives.…
The Influence of News Brand Cues and Story Content on Citizen Perceptions of News Bias
Mainstream U.S. news media stand accused of bias against the forty-fifth president, Donald Trump. The relentlessness and intensity of these accusations over the course of Trump’s presidency are unusual and make for an opportunity to study perceptions of news bias. During the experiment reported here, participants ( N = 315) were exposed to biased (pro- and anti-Trump) news stories that were attributed to either CNN, Breitbart , or remained unattr…
The architecture of female competition: Derogation of a sexualized female news anchor
This paper succeeds recent experimental findings of gender variation in how news consumers process information delivered by a female news anchor. Specifically, men remembered news presented by the unsexualized version of the anchor better while women had higher memory scores for news presented by her sexualized rendition. Explanations for why men may have been distracted from processing news information delivered by a sexualized female news ancho…
Mitigating Information Insecurity: An African Perspective on Satisfaction With Democracy
While Africans are committed to democracy, governments across the continent have failed to deliver on the democratic aspirations of the populace, with declinatory outcomes for satisfaction with democracy (SWD) over the past decade. A number of reliable variables (e.g., economics, political participation, democratic performance) have been used over the past 50 years to study trends in SWD worldwide. Yet the integrity of information ecosystems, inc…
Demographic variation in how the social brain processes news messages
A high capacity for visual perception distinguishes Homo sapiens from other primates. This human ability to detect social cues and retain visual records of social networks has been tested mostly with static facial images in laboratory settings. However, media consumption has become closely entangled with the way social life is navigated. Therefore, the study reported here tested demographic differences (gender and education) in visual information…
At the Intersection of the Digital Divide and the Knowledge Gap: Do Knowledge Domains and Measures Matter
This study reports on knowledge gain, examined through three separate measures (free recall, comprehension and recognition) among high- and low-education groups who used two types of news media (newspaper vs. online) to consume two kinds of news (public affairs vs. entertainment). Results (n = 123) confirm the knowledge gap and validate concerns about the digital divide. Yet three different knowledge acquisition measures generated dissimilar find…
An Experimental Investigation of Source Confusion in Televised Messages: News Versus Advertisements
The study reported here employed a mixed factorial design to experimentally investigate the effects of message format on memory for the source of information. Political messages were presented in 3 types of formats: conventional political ads, news-like political ads, and news stories. Memory for the source of information was measured directly after exposure and a week later. The results of the experiment suggest that format and time had a signif…
Massifícation revisited: Country music and demography
(1997). Massification revisited: Country music and demography. Popular Music and Society: Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 63-84
Tabloid and Traditional Television News Magazine Crime Stories: Crime Lessons and Reaffirmation of Social Class Distinctions
In recent times, critics have charged that tabloid news emphasizes and sensationalizes criminal behavior - thereby violating the journalistic ideal of providing objective information to the citizens of a democratic society. Yet, these claims have not been subjected to systematic investigation. This study compares tabloid and traditional broadcast news magazine programs in terms of their emphasis on crime and the content of their crime narratives.…
Massifícation revisited: Country music and demography
(1997). Massification revisited: Country music and demography. Popular Music and Society: Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 63-84
Television news magazine crime stories: A functionalist perspective
More than a century ago, Emile Durkheim argued that the rituals of processing and punishing crime are functional in constructing a society's morality, teaching its members to abide by certain rules, and promoting cohesion among members by making it public when individuals have violated shared moral values. This content analysis investigates network and syndicated news magazine crime stories for their potential to promote these three social Juncti…
Sourcing and Reporting in News Magazine Programs: 60 Minutes versus Hard Copy
A number of studies consistently point at the disproportionate focus on elite news sources such as men in government and business while women, minorities, and working-class people are shown to be underrepresented as sources in the news. At the same time research reveals that soundbites from sources are shrinking while reporters are taking up increasingly more news airtime. In a society that rests on democratic ideals about the mass media's facili…
Business As Usual: The American Dream in Hollywood Business Films
Using reviews of 120 top-grossing Hollywood films about business released from 1927 to 1995, in this study we examine the American dream myth's structure and analyze how the relative dominance of 2 seemingly contradictory tales, the cautionary and the hopeful, varies over time. We further investigate the influence of a particular tale's dominance on class and occupational mobility, character demographics, and keys to success. Finally, we evaluate…
Explicating Sensationalism in Television News: Content and the Bells and Whistles of Form
Sensationalism in journalism has been a popular topic of fiery discussions for centuries. Yet, it appears that this topic is more often debated than systematically investigated. Indeed, the word, sensational ism, has become an easy name-calling device for those who are in the mood for criticizing the mass media. Even in academic circles, the term has been used with little precision. The goal of this study is to take a step towards explicating the…
News as Aristotelian Drama: The Case of 60 Minutes
This study systematically examined 60 Minutes for instigating drama through visual and narrative content as well as packaging techniques. News sources and reporters were also scrutinized for their role in highlighting dramatic dimensions in news. This content analysis of a 6-month census reveals that the program employs visual and narrative techniques and features news sources and reporters in ways consistent with Aristotle's prescriptions for dr…
Gender in Crime News: A Case Study Test of the Chivalry Hypothesis
This content analysis tested the chivalry hypothesis in 6 months of crime reporting in a local U.S. newspaper. The chivalry hypothesis posits that female criminals receive more lenient treatment in the criminal justice system and in news coverage of their crimes than their male counterparts. The study found partial support for the chivalry hypothesis and prompts a more nuanced formulation of the hypothesis-here termed patriarchal chivalry. This s…
Taking Television Seriously: A Sound and Image Bite Analysis of Presidential Campaign Coverage, 1992-2004
This study updates and builds on Hallin’s landmark investigation of sound-bite news by documenting the prevalence of candidate image bites, where candidates are shown but not heard (as opposed to being shown and heard), in general election news over 4 election cycles. A visual analysis of broadcast network (ABC, CBS, and NBC) news coverage of the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 U.S. presidential elections finds that image bites constituted a greater p…
Villains, Victims and the Virtuous in Bill O'Reilly'S “No-Spin Zone”: Revisiting world war propaganda techniques
This study updates methods of communication analysis popular in the period between the world wars in an effort to analyze news commentator Bill O'Reilly's “Talking Points Memo” editorials. The results show that O'Reilly is a heavier and less nuanced user of the seven devices developed by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in the late 1930s than the notorious radio commentator of that time, Father Charles Coughlin. O'Reilly also employs other p…
Turning Sexual Science Into News: Sex Research and the Media
In this article we report on the findings of a two-part project investigating contemporary issues in sexuality researchers' interaction with journalists. The goal of the project was to explore best practices and suggest curricular and training initiatives for sexuality researchers and journalists that would enhance the accurate dissemination of sexuality research results in the media. We present the results of a survey of a convenience sample of …
An Experimental Investigation of Source Confusion in Televised Messages: News Versus Advertisements
The study reported here employed a mixed factorial design to experimentally investigate the effects of message format on memory for the source of information. Political messages were presented in 3 types of formats: conventional political ads, news-like political ads, and news stories. Memory for the source of information was measured directly after exposure and a week later. The results of the experiment suggest that format and time had a signif…
Happy warriors” Revisited: Hedonic and agonic display repertoires of presidential candidates on the evening news
Absent from most analyses of political news are detailed assessments of the candidates' nonverbal behavior, which has been shown experimentally to have considerable persuasive influence. Unlike attractiveness and other relatively stable aspects of appearance, facial displays are highly variable and reveal important moment-to-moment information about the emitter's internal state. In this paper we argue that facial displays are influential elements…
Experimental Evidence of the Knowledge Gap: Message Arousal, Motivation, and Time Delay
Journal Article Experimental Evidence of the Knowledge Gap: Message Arousal, Motivation, and Time Delay Get access Maria Elizabeth Grabe, Maria Elizabeth Grabe 1Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 1Maria Elizabeth Grabe; e-mail Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Narine Yegiyan, Narine Yegiyan 2Department of Communication, University of California, Davis Search for other…
Visual Influence
The preceding chapters have built a theoretical and data-driven case for why news visuals in general, and image bites in particular, should be considered for their persuasive influence and taken more seriously in election news research. The scaffolding for the book's longitudinal content analysis of presidential campaign news has been assembled in a cross-disciplinary fashion, with contributions from communication research, neuroscience, cognitiv…
Facing the Electorate
Given the tendency of candidates to appear in image bites more often than sound bites, the non-verbal behavior of presidential nominees takes on added significance. This chapter argues that facial displays are influential elements within image and sound bites, and examines the character of televised candidate displays shown on the evening news. To structure the analysis, it draws on the literature of biopolitics that has identified three classes …
Taking Television Seriously
Over the past four decades, television news has become the primary source of political information for a majority of Americans and, as that reliance has grown, the most credible, appealing, interesting, and believable source as well. These trends are not without reason, as audiovisual media more effectively complements human information-processing abilities than any other message platform. Politically, television connects candidates with voters a…
Why Visuals Matter
This chapter surveys a vast terrain of theory, findings, and history, in order to diagnose the origins and interrogate the legitimacy of neglecting the visual dimension of television news. Although television is an audiovisual medium, the focus primarily is on its visual component, precisely because it has been unappreciated (indeed much denigrated) as a source of information. Moving away from contemporary media and politics, the chapter looks ba…
Image Bite News
This chapter documents the extent to which presidential candidates visually appear on the nightly news by drawing on a longitudinal analysis of presidential news coverage from the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 general elections. For each year, the political reporting of the main broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) was coded for visual information. It summarizes the frequency and duration of candidate image bites that were broadcast, in which cand…
Visual Bias
This chapter introduces a new approach to measuring bias based on the visual aspects of broadcast news. Unlike the candidates' verbal statements and self-presentation style, the indicators of visual bias employed fall more squarely under the control of editors and producers than candidates and their consultants. In order to explain the persistence of the liberal bias charge against journalism as a political theme, the chapter traces the rise of p…
Visual Framing
This chapter investigates the influence of image handlers on the manner in which candidates are visually framed in televised appearances, tracking variables most likely to reveal decisions made by campaign consultants as opposed to those made by news producers or even the candidates themselves. Although not given much attention in academic research or the popular press, political consultants are nevertheless a potent force shaping American democr…
Image Bite Politics
Image Bite Politics is the first book to systematically assess the visual presentation of presidential candidates in network news coverage of elections and to connect these visual images with shifts in public opinion. Presenting the results of a comprehensive visual analysis of general election news from 1992-2004, encompassing four presidential campaigns, the authors highlight the remarkably potent influence of television images when it comes to…
Image bite politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections
Knowledge acquisition gaps: A comparison of print versus online news sources
This experimental study tested the knowledge gap hypothesis at the intersection of audience education levels and news formats (newspaper versus online). The findings reveal a gap in public affairs knowledge acquisition between South Korean citizens ( N = 123) from different educational backgrounds. Moreover, the high education group comprehended news with the same level of efficiency across online and newspaper formats while low education partici…
The architecture of female competition: Derogation of a sexualized female news anchor
This paper succeeds recent experimental findings of gender variation in how news consumers process information delivered by a female news anchor. Specifically, men remembered news presented by the unsexualized version of the anchor better while women had higher memory scores for news presented by her sexualized rendition. Explanations for why men may have been distracted from processing news information delivered by a sexualized female news ancho…
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Media Studies and Communication (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Media studies (15 works) · Social Media and Politics (14 works) · Advertising (13 works) · Business (11 works) · Computer Science (11 works)