Good news, political knowledge and political interest : how positively valenced news stories impact political interest and political knowledge in comparison to negatively valenced news stories?

Master Thesis

Good News, Political Knowledge and Political Interest

How positively valenced news stories impact political interest and political knowledge in comparison to negatively valenced news stories?

Anaïs D.M. Rocca anais.rocca@student.uva.nl

11190132 Supervisor: T.E Powell

T.E.Powell@uva.nl February 2, 2018

Abstract

Studies had outlined that bad news exposure could impact political interest and political knowledge. However, despite their emerging popularity, nothing is known about whether good news stories also have an effect on political interest and political knowledge. To test the impact of good news stories can impact political knowledge and political interest in comparison to bad news, I carried out a 3 conditions pretest, post-test within-subjects experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to the good news exposure, bad news exposure or the control condition. The stimuli consisted of four newspapers articles about the Syrian Civil War. Interestingly, participants who had been exposed to the good news stories had acquired more political knowledge and seemed more eager to learn more on the topic compared to those exposed to the bad news stories or to the control condition. These results were not statistically significant. Moreover, the data had shown that the participants’ prior political knowledge, prior political interest, and education level did not imply any moderation effect. Nevertheless, personality traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness had shown to moderate the relationship. These results dispelled the belief that bad news stories are better in triggering political knowledge and political interest and outlined the importance of personality traits in news impact exposure.

Keywords: Political Knowledge, Political Interest, News Valence, Good News Stories, Bad

News Stories, Knowledge Gap, Personality Traits, Journalism, Media,

1. Introduction

These last decades, have tended citizens to disengage themselves from politics (Bennet, 2008). Undeniably, “voting turnouts and public opinion investigations demonstrate that citizens, especially among the youngest, tend to show a lower average of political interest than their parents at the same age” (Bennet, 2008). In the literature, political knowledge and political interest are often presented as ones the most important predictors of political engagement (Gerber et al. , 2016). Indeed, both are essential to be an active citizen (Moeller & de Vreese, 2015), yet, these characteristics vary from person to person and scholars are refering to the Knowledge Gap to define the gap splitting citizens highly informed about politics facts and public affairs and those who are less knowledgeable (Baum, 2002).

Scholars of the political communication field had outlined the impact of news exposure to build political knowledge and to generate political interest.

Bad news exposure had shown to simultaneously trigger or decrease political mobilization. Because bad news stories prevail in the news media (Harcup & O'Neill 2001; 2016, Stone & Grusin, 1984), scholars are particularly concerned about their impact.

However, in this always more fragmented media landscape which characterized these two last decades, media consumers have now a variety of alternatives (Blumler & Kavannagh, 1999).

Ten years ago, most of the Americans reported watching hard news, whereas nowadays, alternative news such as soft news seemed to have gained popularity.

Moreover, many news media such as “MSNBC”, the “Huffington Post” or even, “FoxNews” propose an alternative solution to the bad news stories by broadcasting only good news sections (McIntyre & Gibson, 2016). Along with this emerging trend, an increasing number of good news websites specialized on the publication of positively valenced news stories only had been created around the world and have a growing audience (McIntyre, 2016). To quote a few of these websites in different languages, there are ’’goodnewsnetwork.org‘’, “optimistWorld’’, “happynews’’, “Gimundo”, “pepsnews”, “buone notizie”, “diario de noticias positivas”, “Cuentamealgobueno”, “PNN” or “positive news” and some of them are already gaining in popularity. Many claimed this new trend purpose is to make reader happier (McIntyre, 2016) or to shed light to a brighter perspective of the world.

However despite their growing popularity, to my knowledge, nothing is known yet on whether good news stories affect political knowledge and political interest and if these types of news could help audience rebound with politics and perhaps lower the knowledge gap. Thus, this Master thesis aims to research whether and how good news stories have an impact on political interest and political knowledge in comparison to bad news stories.

RQ : How positively valenced news stories impact political interest and political knowledge in comparison to negatively valenced news stories ?

Good news stories and bad news stories

Scholars in the communication field seem to be unable to provide any clear or universal distinction to define bad news from good news. Indeed, a news story could be perceived as positive by individual while the very same news story can be perceived as negative by another

depending his beliefs and attitude towards the topic depicted in the news story (Harcup & O’Neill, 2016). However, “the idea of “bad news” is generally associated with negatively valenced news stories and “good news” with positively valenced news stories” (McIntyre, 2016). Bad news stories are generally perceived as tragic, sad or conflicting event, such as murders, diseases while “good news” are associated with touching, uplifting or human related events (Harcup & O’Neill, 2001), for example, “advances toward a cure” or “ a disaster victim who got rescued”. Lee and Leung (2014) had outlined 5 Good news categories, namely; “News that brings hope when society is in crisis”, “News that promotes desirable social value and norms”, “News that tells encouraging or touching stories”, “News about festivals and celebrations” and “News that promotes the country’s development and success”.

Generally speaking, the literature covering good news stories and their impacts is still scarce. Lee and Leung (2014) had investigated how Hong Kong journalists perceived good news stories. Their results had shown that the journalists who considered the cultural role of the media, as well as the market logic and local and national identity valued good news stories better. Their results also had shown that, generally speaking, the type of news story who was valued higher was “News that brings hope when society is in crisis”. Secondly, McIntyre (2016), focused on what made good news newsworthy. In other words, what good news media editors publish on their website. To this end, she carried out a content analysis among six positive news websites’ coverage and compared them to the New York Times coverage. The author had found that the news value “entertainment/oddity” and “emotional impact” were the most prevalent news values for positive news website while, “Power elite”, “Timeliness” and “Conflict” were the most frequent in the case of the New York Times. Thirdly, McIntyre and Gibson (2016), had investigated on whether good news stories made readers happier and on whether they had an impact on sharing intentions. The author had not found any statistically relevant result but found that the silver-lining news stories, namely a news story which topic is not necessarily positive but is presented positively, do make people happier.

McIntyre (2016) had outlined that good news were often associated with soft news while negative news were associated with hard news. However, Boukes (2015)’s interpretation of Brants & Van Praag (2006) and Graber (1994) define soft news as news which come out of their primary role to inform the audience to a media logic, and aimed to entertain and to keep the audience interested as consumers of coverage of politics and current affairs instead. Many

news categories are cast into the category of “soft news”, such as “infotainment, sensational news stories, political satire, talk-shows and “news with human interest framing”” are cast into the “soft news category” (Boukes, 2015). Although the last category is associated with good news, stating that good news and soft news are the same thing is a simplification. Indeed, soft news are not necessarily good news. For example, sensational stories of celebrity getting a divorce is considered as a soft news story but not as a good news story. Consequently, the dynamics and impacts between news stories and respondents’ political knowledge and political interest may differ between news stories considered as soft news and good news stories. However, this dissociation being stated and since there are no research on good news stories yet, the literature related to soft news impacts on political knowledge and political interest will be used as a starting point for this research, while keeping in mind that the results might differ.

Indeed, the research on soft news impact shed lights on an another perspective since, for example, Baum (2002,2003), Prior (2007), Boukes (2015) had proved that soft news could help citizens to build political knowledge. Even though if, according to Baum (2003), “this knowledge will be acquired accidentally by passively viewing soft news”. Indeed, according to Althaus (2012), the acquisition of political knowledge is based on the use of heuristics and mental shortcuts. Besides, Igartua & Barrios (2012) had shown that it was possible to build political knowledge and political interest on a topic based from entertainment thanks to “elaboration likelihood model” (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). This passive way on getting political knowledge can help individuals unable to understand Hard News to gain political knowledge through soft News. As stated above, citizens tend to disengage themselves from politics and an explanation to this phenomenon lies on the fact that not everyone can understand hard news. Indeed, some people don’t have the knowledge or acquaintances to understand complex political scandals like the case of the Panama papers which had been reported in the headlines for months in 2016. Consequently, a lot of individuals unable to understand hard news, watch comedies or read soft news instead as regular media consumption (Rittenberg, Tewksbury & Casey, 2012).

As stated earlier bad news stories, which are associated with hard news, have not always positive impacts on political interest and political knowledge. First, they can be hard to understand for some individuals and secondly, research had shown that bad news could lead to political demobilization and, even more to political disillusion (Krupnikov, 2016) and they

had showed to impact reader’s health negatively (Boukes & Vliegenthart, 2017; Veitch & Griffitt, 1976).

In the light of this fact, we can consider that negatively valenced news stories could be a threat to democracy. For example, the 2017 French Presidential Elections’ low voting turnout had said to be the consequences of political disillusion following political scandals throughout the campaign.

As stated before, bad news consumption is generally associated with higher political interest and political knowledge (Gerber et al. 2011). Besides, various studies had focused on the impact of negatively valenced news stories and had assessed that they positively correlate with political interest and political mobilization (Soroka & McAdams; Goldstein & Freedman, 2002; Lau 1982). This relationship can be explained first of all at the psychological level. Indeed, for survival reasons, “ our brains were hardwired ” to pay more attention to negative news than good news (Soroka & Mcadams, 2015). In addition, the feeling of anger or anxiety triggered by these types of news stories tend to be an efficient mobilization factor (Martin, 2008).

Thus, for the reasons mentioned above, I expected participants exposed to the bad news condition to show a higher political interest and political knowledge than those exposed to the good news articles or to the control condition.

H1: Generally speaking, negatively valenced news stories will have a larger impact on

political interest and political knowledge than positively valenced news stories and the mixed condition.

Political knowledge and Political Interest

Political interest often goes hand in hand with “political knowledge” to predict political engagement. According to Russo & Stattin (2016)’s interpretation of Strömback & Shehata (2010), “politically interested citizens are attentive to political information and have the motivation and skills to learn from news sources”. Politically informed citizens are also interested to debate about politics and engage themselves more.

Besides, research had shown that the variables which can impact political interest are similar to the one that can impact political knowledge, namely gender, income, education level, media consumption and news exposure (Ran et al. 2016), initial political knowledge level and the audience attention to the news (Moeller & de Vreese, 2015; Ran et al., 2016).

Political knowledge, on the other hand, is a complex and multidimensional construct (Eveland et al., 2004). It is defined in the literature as the fact of “holding the correct information on a political issue “ (Hoffman, 2012) or “the range of factual information about politics stored in long-term memory” (Carpini & Keeter, 1996). According to Ran et al.(2016)’s interpretation of Carpini (2005), there are three types of political knowledge; “Knowledge about political institutions and processes”, “substantives civic issues” and “political actors”. Nevertheless, the literature mostly define two types of political knowledge namely; “contextual political knowledge” which stands for “the understanding of political process and structures that form the political system”, for example understanding how the concept of electorate college during the US Presidential Elections, and the second category is the factual knowledge, which stands for knowing a political fact, and finally, contextual political knowledge which aims to

understanding it.

An example of factual political knowledge could be the knowledge of “the number of U.S judges in Senate” or unemployment rate (Moeller & de Vreese, 2015). Scholars tend to focus on factual knowledge firstly because “factual information is considered an entry point to build a more structured, in depth form political knowledge” (Ran et al., 2016), and secondly,

because it is easier to test. This is why I chose to include factual and contextual knowledge in my research.

Most of the time, the relationship between news consumption and political knowledge and political interest is a two-ways relationship (Moeller & de Vreese, 2015). Indeed, because the individual’s initial political knowledge and political interest influence the choice of the news exposure on his news selection which will impact again on his political knowledge and political interest and the way the individual will pay attention to the political information in the news (Lecheler & de Vreese, 2017). Table 1 borrowed from Lecheler & de Vreese (2017) shows this two-way relationship;

Table 1; Political Knowledge, Political Interest and News Consumption

I integrated this two-way to my research design. However, since the participants were not given the choice to which media they wanted to be exposed, I expect participant’s prior political knowledge and prior political interest to moderate the impact of news exposure on participants’ final political knowledge and political interest level.

As stated earlier, people with low political knowledge and political interest had reported to watch soft news more than bad news. Thus I expect the impact of good news exposure to be larger for the participants with low political knowledge and low political interest while I expect good news to have a smaller impact on individuals’ with a high political knowledge level and a high political interest level before taking the experiment.

H2 : Positively valenced news stories will have a larger impact on respondent’s political

interest and political knowledge if their initial political knowledge and political interest is low while good news stories will have a large impact on negative news stories if their political interest is small.

Education has also been proved to show high correlation between political knowledge and news exposure thus I expect that they will moderate this relationship (Moeller & de Vreese, 2015).

Various studies had outlined the importance of education as a predictor of political knowledge, political interest and media choice (Gerber et al., 2011). Thus, I expect participants with low education level to pay more attention and be more interested by good news stories.

H3 : Positively valenced news stories will impact political knowledge and political interest

positively for low educated respondents, while it will have a smaller impact for high educated participants.

Personality Traits and News Exposure

The big five personality traits namely, to what extent an individual scores on openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, can predict one’s behavior (Costa & Mcrae, 1988).

These five traits are defined by Costa & Mcrae (1988) as the following ; “Openness” characterizes complex individuals, open to new experience, “conscientiousness” defines high self-disciplined and meticulous individuals, “extraversion” describes enthusiastic individuals who thrives in social interactions, “agreeableness” refers to individuals who value the community welfare before their own interest, and finally, “neutoriticism” labels individuals who often experience negative emotions and subected to anxiety or doubts. Each person have all these personality traits but at a different level. According to Gerber et al. (2011)’s definition the big five are “Dispositional personality traits are individual level characteristics that affect how people or stimuli they encounter in their environment and in combination with environmental factors, affect a broad range of behaviors and attitudes”.

Along with income and education personality traits had shown to be predictors of political behavior. Indeed, for example Gerber et al. (2011) had reported that individuals who score high on Extraversion, on Openness and low in Neuroticism tend to be more engaged in political activities while agreeableness people are associated low vote turnouts to avoid conflicting situation and ‘’conscitioussness is associated with conservatism’’. There is more, Nabi & Riddle (2008) had shown that the impact of news exposure differ on the individual’s personality traits. In an other study, Gerber et al. (2011) had shown that personality traits could predict political news consumption, political knowledge and political interest. For example, individuals who scored high on neuroticism and individuals who scored high on agreeableness tend to prefer watching soft news, and generally speaking tend to show a lower political interest and political knowledge level. While individuals who score high on extraversion, openness and conscientiousness tend to be more interested in politics and thus, show a higher political knowledge level. Individuals who score high on openness are characterized by being open minded, eager for new experiences and knowledge.

In the continuity of the finding of Gerber et al. (2011), I expected participants’personality traits to moderate the impact of good news exposure or bad news exposure. Since as stated above, agreeable and neurotics individuals rather to watch soft news because they don’t want to be exposed to conflict or emotional stress, I expect them to be more interested and pay more attention to the content of the news stories if exposed to the good news articles rather than the bad news article.

H4a: Positively valenced news story will have a larger impact on political knowledge and

political interest for participants who score high on agreeableness and neuroticism.

Since conscientiouss individual cling to social norms and conservatism (Gerber et al., 2011) and because the bad news stories are more prevalent in the news media, and because extroverts and open individuals are less affected by negativity than neurotics or agreaable people, I expect them as well to be more interested and pay more attention to the content of the news stories if exposed to the bad news articles than the good news

H4b: The Negatively valenced news story will have a larger impact on political knowledge

and political interest for participants who score high on conscientiousness, on extraversion and on openness.

Method Design

Since the impact of positively valenced news stories in comparison to negatively news stories on political knowledge has not been researched so far, therefore, I couldn’t base my research model on existing one. Yet, a 3 condition pre-test-post-test between-subjects experimental design was chosen because it enabled dissociating the impact of the different group on participants’ political interest and political knowledge. The participants were randomly assigned to one of the three condition groups. The first condition group was exposed to four good news stories, the second condition group was bad news stories, while the participants assigned to the third condition and control condition were exposed to a combination of two good news stories articles and two bad news articles. The control condition was a combination of both to mitigate the impact of only sole news valence.

The choice of the participants exposure to four article is justified because, like in the case of the experimental research of McIntyre & Gibson (2016), the manipulation most of the time

consisted in the exposure of only one newspaper article. This methodology may be less time-consuming for the participants, yet it is difficult to generalize the results based only on the exposition to one article. Consequently, I chose to expose the participants to four short

Participants

The participants were recruited through social media using a convenience sample to reach the larger number of respondent within the shorter amount of time.

The data collection had lasted 7 days between December the 31st and January the 6th. 231 participants agreed to take part in this experiment within these days. The participants were recruited through social media.

The participants’ average age was 31 years old (M = 31.39 ; SD = 13.378).

A large majority of the participants took the experiment in French (N = 141) and (N = 90) took it in English. 32 countries were represented in my sample, yet, the majority of them come from France (N= 82) and Switzerland (N= 67). The majority of them were women (N= 151), man (N= 79) and other (N= 1).

Most of them had reached a high educational level (Median= 5) corresponding to Bachelor degree or equivalent.

Stimuli

The manipulation was designed based on newspaper articles, and to avoid differences due to gatekeeping and newsroom policies, the eight articles selected were published by the same news outlet, namely, the British newspaper “The Independent”. This news outlet was selected for its relative neutrality and because it is an English speaking media, as I expected most of my participants be literate in English. The advantages with real newspaper articles are that they ensures the ecological validity of the research and the generalization of these results. Nevertheless, it is harder to ensure that the articles are similar and that is important to ensure the internal validity of this research, thus these articles were edited to the newspaper articles had to be similar, to contain the same political information through conditions. The only thing that had to change were the valence of the news stories. Some parts were edited to shorten the articles and to have the same format among conditions.

The political information were displayed in a different place depending on the article’s focus, nevertheless, it was always at the same place the same per focus, except when the

question asked in post-test was a contextual knowledge question, in that case, the information was spread throughout the article.

In the case of the articles regarding “The Syrians who had to flee the country and the journey across the Mediterranean Sea” the information was placed in the first paragraph, for the articles regarding “How the conflict impacted education”, the information was contextual question, in other word the education situation in Syria. Thus, it was spread, regarding the articles about the “Medical situation in Syria”, the information was placed at the end of the article, and finally, they were placed in the middle for the “Refugee hosting” articles. The news stories were retrieved after research on Google using the keywords “positive news about the Syrians” for positive news stories. For negative news, on the other hand, I used the keywords “Syrians dying in the Mediterranean Sea”, “Schools in Syria”, “Syrians refugees hosting” and “hospital attack in Syria”, the news story was then searched using the online database LexisNexis and only articles from The Independent were selected.

The articles were edited to contain the exact same amount of political information. The only difference between conditions, was that the focus of the positive condition’s news stories were positive, whereas the focus of the negatively valenced news story was negative and in the mixed condition, two news stories were positive and two news stories were negative. Also the news stories were not older than 2015. The articles were rather short between 150 and 200 words long to avoid participants from dropping out the experiment. Furthermore, the name of the new outlet, namely, The Independent, was hidden to prevent that the participant’s opinion about this news outlet impacted the manipulation.

Finally, although most of the participants were expected to take the experiment in English, the experiment was translated into French to reach larger number of potential participants. The translation was a verbatim copy of the English version, the only transgressions were the grammar in the articles and some English expressions which differ in meaning when translated from English to French, and thus, needed to be edited to seems like it could have written in a francophone newspaper and the translation was proofread by two native French speakers.

Procedure

First the participants were asked to write their age, since for legal reasons, only participants over 18 years old were invited to take part to this experiment, this questions prevented to underaged participants from filling out the experiment. Secondly, a pre-test was

carried out to measure the participants’ political interest, political knowledge and personality traits. After this, the participants were randomly assigned to one of the 3 stimuli conditions. Following the stimuli, I measured the dependent variables by asking the participants their political knowledge and political interest and finally, the participants were asked three demographics questions as control variables.

Measures

Respondents’ political knowledge and political interest was tested in pre-test and in post-test.

In the pre-test, political knowledge, by six questions about the Syrian Civil War and the participant’s score was measured using an additive continuum scale from “0” to “10”. In other words, every time a participant answered correctly to one question, one point was added to the scale. As stated in the literature, there are two types of political knowledge, factual and contextual (Moeller & Vreese, 2015). Thus, four questions items were measuring factual political knowledge while 2 measured contextual political knowledge. Political interest, on the other hand, was measured in the pre-test by combining the participant’s interest in politics and interest in public affair from a scale from “0” to “10”. This decision was based on the study of Gerber et al. (2011) who used a similar method to measure political knowledge and political interest. Since H2 focused on the moderation for participants who scored low on political knowledge and political interest in the pre-test, these scale mentionned above recoded.

Before the stimuli, participants’ personality traits were measured using a Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI). It was a five points Likert-scale from "does not describe me at all" to "describe me extremely well." Two items were used to measure each of the five personality traits. For example, participant’s openness score was asked by asking the participants to what extent “I am open to new experiences, complex” and “I am a person conventional, uncreative”. Then, the two items were recoded to ensure that the scale measured the participant’s score on openness, and then combined into the same scale. The same process was applied to each of the five personality trait. This method was used by Gerber et al. (2011) and it has been proven that this TIPI test, though short, give similar results than longer test.

In the post-test, political knowledge was measured like it was in the pre-test, by asking the participants six questions. Participants’ political interest was measured in the post-test, by using two questions. The first one was to what extent the participant wanted to know more

about the topic after reading the article from “0” to “10”. The second question suggested to the participants two links to websites containing further information about the Syrian Civil War and the participants were asked if, yes or no, they were going to consult these links. For the sake of this analysis, the yes or no option was recoded into “0” for “No” and “10” for “Yes” and the two scale were combined into the scale.

Since the participant’s educational level was necessary for the second hypothesis, two categories were considered, namely “low” and “high”. Low stood from “less than high school” to “Vocational, training school”. High, on the other hand, stood from “Two-year degree”. Along with the highest educational level reached which was necessary to test one of my hypothesis, the participant gender, and from which country they were from were asked as control variable.

Manipulation Check

To test the hypotheses, the main variables were the news story valence. However, as stated above, whether a news story is positive or negative can be subjective. Therefore, 12 participants took part in a pilot study to tell them if, according to them, this news story was positive or negative. The participants were asked to focus on the general meaning of the news story and to gloss over positive or negative pieces of information. Except for a few exceptions, more than three-quarters, 9 over 12 of the total agreed with every articles. Thus these news stories were used for the manipulation.

Analyses

To test my first hypothesis, I conducted a one-way analysis of variance to test the impact of the different conditions, namely, exposure to good news story, exposure to bad news story or the control condition (namely a 2 good news articles and 2 bad news articles), on participants political interest and political knowledge in the posttest. However, one of the assumptions for one-way analysis of variance analysis was violated since the three groups did not exactly have the same size. Indeed, (n = 76) participants were exposed to the good news articles, (n =76) to the control condition and (n= 79) had read the bad news. However, this disparity was small, thus we could carried out with the analysis.

The other four following hypotheses were tested which moderator could impact the size or the effect of the relationship between the news exposure and the impact on subject’s political

interest and political knowledge. Thus, these hypotheses were tested using ordinary least squares path analysis using the second model of Hayes PROCESS-macro in SPSS (Hayes, 2018) for the second hypothesis and the first model of the same software for the following hypotheses.

Results

Impacts of News Valence Exposure on Learning and Interest about the Syrian Civil War

The first hypothesis implied that, generally speaking, participants who had been exposed to the four negative newspaper articles will learn more about Syrian Civil War than those exposed to the positive newspaper articles or the participants of the control condition.

Subjects who had been exposed to the positive newspaper articles had scored higher on the questions measuring what they learnt about the Syrian Civil War (M = 4.14, SD = 1.38), while those who had read the negative newspaper articles learnt (M = 3.87, SD = 1.41), and finally, participants who had been exposed to a combination of two positive and two negative newspaper articles, in other words the control condition, tend also to be fairly interested to know more about the Syrian Civil War (M = 3.81, SD = 1.4).

A One-way Analysis of variance was carried out to test the impact of the different news exposure on participants’ score in the political knowledge test. No significant effects was found among the subjects of exposure of news valence towards their score in the test, F(2) =1.2, p = .302, η2 = .01, the results were confirmed by a post-hoc test indicated that there were no mean difference within negative news exposure and the control condition

(Mdifference = 0.05, p = 1), however, the mean difference between positive news exposure

and the control condition was larger (Mdifference = -.32, p = .445) and so was the mean difference between positive news exposure and negative news exposure (Mdifference = -.27,

p = .685). However, if the is slightly bigger for positive news exposure, it is not statistically

significant. Thus, H1 was rejected. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note a larger effect for the participants exposed to the good news condition who tend to have a higher political interest and political knowledge score than the other conditions.

According to H1, subjects exposed to the negative newspaper articles will be more eager to learn more about the Syrian Civil War. However, subjects who had been exposed to the

positive newspaper articles tend to show a higher political interest (M = 6.02, SD = 3.22), while those who had read the negative newspaper articles had seemed less eager to learn more about the Syrian Civil War (M = 5.33, SD = 3.45) Finally, participants who had been exposed to a combination of two positive and two negative newspapers articles, in other words the control conditions, tend also to be fairly interested to know more about the Syrian Civil War (M = 5.42, SD = 3.29).

To assess the impact of news valence on participants’ desire to learn more about the Syrian Civil War, a one-way analysis of variance was carried out. At this point, it is important to state that one of the assumptions required for this type of analysis since the groups are not equally sized. No statistically significant effect was found. F(2) = .955, p = .386 η2 < .01. The results were confirmed by a post-hoc test, which indicated that there was no statistically significant effects between the control condition and the exposure to positive newspaper articles (Mdifference = -.59, p = .822), nor between the control condition and the exposure to negative newspaper articles (Mdifference = .09, p = 1). Finally, the means did not differ significantly between the participants exposed to positive newspaper articles and negative newspaper articles (Mdifference = .68 , p = 606).

Thus my first hypothesis had to be rejected.

Initial Political Interest Level and Initial Political Knowledge as moderators of Political Interest and Political Knowledge

Following the two-way relationship between initial political interest and political knowledge and how the latter impact the type of news the individual is likely to exposed himself or to what extent he is likely to pay more attention to a news stories. I thus expected the participants’ score in political knowledge and political interest in the pre-test to moderate the size of the news exposure impact, especially regarding good news stories. However as it can be seen in the table below, although the model was statistically significant, these variables did not moderate the impact of good news exposure, nor the impact of bad news and

education was the only variable significant of the model. Consequently, my second hypothesis had to be rejected.

Table 2 : Ordinary Least Squares Analysis to Test Participants’ prior Political Knowledge and Political Interest

Political Knowledge Political Interest

Constant 3.46*** 4.82**

Good News X Prior Political Interest -.11 -.40

Good News X Prior Political Knowledge .02 .07

Bad News X Prior Political Interest -.11 -.41

Bad News X Prior Political Knowledge -.18 .20

Age .01 -.02 Gender -.08 1.31 Education .16** .32* F 2.9*** 5.23 R2 .12 .21 R .35 .45

Prior Political Interest .07 -.26

Prior Political Knowledge -.14 -.11

Good News Exposure .04 .60

Bad News Exposure .71 .25

Note.  N  =  231.    

Education level as a moderator for Political Interest and Political Knowledge My fourth hypothesis was that good news will affect more participant with lower

educational level than participants with higher educational level. However, as it can be seen on Table 3 below, none of these variables were statistically significant. Thus, H3 was rejected.

Table 3 : Ordinary Least Squares Analysis to Test Participants’ Education Level Political Knowledge Political Interest

Constant 3.96*** 5.50***

Good News X Education Level -.09 .45

Bad News X Education Level .24 1.29

Age .01 -.01 Gender -.23 .48 F 1.37 2.28 R2 .04 .07 R .20 .26 Education Level -.52 .48

Good News Exposure Bad News Exposure

.43 .06 .69 -.32 Note.  N  =  231.     * p <.05. ** p <.01. *** p <.001.

Personality Traits as moderators of Political Interest and Political Knowledge H4a stated that participants who score high on agreeableness and high neuroticism and who were exposed to good news stories will learn more and be more interested than if they were exposed to the bad news articles. As it can be seen in the table 4 below, it was the case for the participants who scored high on agreeableness in the case of both political interest and political knowledge. However it was not the case of participants who scored high on

neuroticism.

H4b implied that participants who scored high on openness, conscientiousness and

extraversion will be more impacted by bad news stories than by good news stories. As it can be seen in table 5 below, the results had shown that extraversion was not a statistically significant moderators. A significant effect was found between conscientiousness level, bad

news exposure and political knowledge and a significant effect was found between openness level, good news exposure and political interest, but no significant effects were found

between openness and bad news.

Thus since only two of the moderation effects expected in these hypotheses, H4a and H4b had to be partially rejected.

Table 4 : Ordinary Least Squares Analysis to Test Participants’ Personality Traits on Political Knowledge Openness Conscienti ousness Extraversion Agreeab leness Neuroticism Constant 2.45** 1.69 2.69*** 4.68 3.04*** Good News X Personality Trait .05 -.37 -.37 .64* .00

Bad News X Personality Trait -.21 -.63 -.63* .27 -.08 Age .01 .01 .0*** .01 .01 Gender -.22 -.23 -.23 -.13 -.21 Education Level .18** .17** .18*** .18** .19*** Personality Trait .13 .33 .08 -.54** -.05

Good News Exposure .24 1.91 .84 -1.86 .43

Bad News Exposure .94 2.61 .40 -.82 -.10

F 1.85 2.25 1.74 2.63 1.71 R .25 .27 .24 .29 .24 R2 .06 .08 .06 .09 .06 Note.  N  =  231.     * p <.05. ** p <.01. *** p <.001.

Table 5 : Ordinary Least Squares Analysis to Test Participants’ Personality Traits on Political Interest Openness Conscienti ousness Extraversion Agreeab leness Neuroticism Constant 3.50 3.61 2.34 4.40 1.04 Good News X Personality Trait 1.49* .01 -.16 1.82* -.50

Bad News X Personality Trait .22 .09 .32 .14 -.64 Age -.01 -.01 -.01 -.01 -.01 Gender .28 .56 .49 .51 .37 Education Level .50*** .51*** .53*** .51*** .52*** Personality Trait -.23 -.29 .06 -.52 .65

Good News Exposure -4.70 1.30 -5.60* 2.16

Bad News Exposure -.87 2.25 -.99 -.52* 1.70

F 3.22*** 2.25 2.52 3.25 2.71 R .32 .27 .29 .32 .30 R2 .10 .08 .08 .10 .09 Note.  N  =  231.     * p <.05. ** p <.01. *** p <.001. Discussion

The aim of this master thesis was to test the impact of good news stories on participant’s political knowledge and political interest in comparison with bad news stories and the control condition using the Syrian Civil War as a context for the stimulus material. Although these results were not statistically significant, surprisingly participants exposed to the good news articles reported a higher political interest and political knowledge level than the participants exposed to the bad news condition and to the control condition. These results imply that bad news do not necessarily trigger more political interest and political knowledge. Furthermore, under other circumstances, good news stories could triggers political interest and political knowledge and political interest. Since good news stories are human-related stories, the participant might be willing to identify to the protagonists depicted in the news story in a process similar as the one found in the study of Igartua & Barrios (2012 and thus, pay more

attention to the details passively. Or since bad news still prevalent in the media, being exposed to good news stories might trigger participants’curiosity. These are only hypothesis to explain the fact that bad news exposure had not generate more political interest and political knowledge and will need to be check by further study.

In extension with soft news research on political knowledge and political interest, the purpose of this research was to find out whether good news stories could lower the knowledge gap. Although I did not expect a direct effect, the relationship was expected to be moderated by the highest educational level reached, participants’ initial political interest level or initial political knowledge score, and finally by participant’s personality traits. Nevertheless, most of the moderations were found to be non-significant, except in the case of agreeableness with both political interest and political knowledge, for conscientiousness for political knowledge and for openness for political interest.

The fact that subjects’ prior political knowledge and prior political interest do not operate necessarily as moderator variable can means that this relationship can works only if the subject can choose his news exposure, as it was implied in the two-way relationship model. Further research should try to replicate this model but should give participant the choice to choose the valence to which they want to be exposed to.

Secondly, it was particularly interesting to note that even though education was most of the time significant in predicting political knowledge and political interest, the variable did not operate as a moderator between the impact of news valence on political knowledge and political interest. The reason of this might be that participants do not pay more or less attention to the news if they are low educated or high educated and others factors might impact it.

The fact that agreeableness does show significant results with good news exposure goes in hand with the literature. Indeed, individuals who scores high on agreeableness are often people that avoid social conflicts which can mean that their perceive the positive news as not conflicting (Gerber et al., 2011), and therefore, subjects who score high on agreeableness are indeed paying more attention to positive news while they are not doing this with negative news.

The fact that openness does show a significant moderation effect with the exposure of positive news on political interest could mean that these types of news, even if they are gaining more and more room in the news media, still scarce in the news media. Thus we could expect that this scarcity might had drawn attention to openness individual who thrives

in news experiences (Costa & Mcrae, 1988). This is however interesting that it does not apply in the case of political knowledge. Further research will have to test whether good news stories generate open individuals’ curiosity but did not draw them to pay attention to the details.

The fact that conscientiousness shows a significant moderation effect with the exposure of bad news on political knowledge could mean that these types of news, overplayed in the media, and therefore considered as social norms, can help conscientious to pay more attention to them. However, this moderation was not found for political interest, thus that might mean that bad news do not trigger conscientious curiosity.

It was interesting to observe that nor extroversion level, nor neuroticism level did show interactions with the exposure to positive news or negative news. In the case of extraversion, it could be explained by the fact that extroverts, who thrives in social interactions are not impacted by the valence of the news at all, since it is not necessarily any explicit social interactions. Besides, studies had reported that extrovert did not read much newspaper (Kraaykamp, van Eijck, 2005 ; Gerber et al. 2011). However, it was more suprising to find no that neuroticism was not a moderation. However, the explanation lies in the fact that I used the Syrian Civil War as a context for the stimuli material. Indeed, being a sensitive and serious topic, it is possible that neurotics participants had experienced negative emotions and thus, could not be interested or focus. Consequently, further research should use another context to design a stimuli.

Nevertheless this research presents several limitations. Firstly, this research was the first one to investigate on good news impact on political interest and political knowledge and thus, it was not possible to lean on existing studies to design this experiment. Nevertheless, the variables tested in this research were chosen based on similar works and a selection had to be made since, due to the format of this research it unable to test more variables. In the lights of the results, participants sentiments would have made sense to test. Indeed, it would had clarified how the subjects perceived the article and would had act as a second manipulation check. I encourage further research to replicate this research and include sentiments as a potential moderator variable. Secondly, respondent’s political orientation and political belief could also moderate the relationship between good or bad news exposure and subjects political interest and knowledge and be a threat to the internal validity of the research. Indeed, this research used articles about the Syrian Civil War and a subject who perceive the influx of Syrians refugees as bad things might react differently to the stimuli materials than a

participant who sympathize with the fate of Syrian refugees. Thirdly, I chose to present only the Syrian Civil War as main topic throughout condition to ensure internal validity. Nevertheless, the results would had been more generalizable if the stimulus material was based on various news articles, even though this lack of generalization was partially filled in by the use of four different sub-topics, further studies should try to find if the use of different topics imply different results. Fourthly, in order to gather the larger amount of participants within the shortest amount of time, I used convenience sample which is not representative of the population. Besides, most of them were French. This fact might affect how the participant perceived the news stories, since France has a Mediterranean media system (Hallin & Mancini, 2004).Fifthly, again to gather more participants, the experiment was translated from English into French. Although it was supposed to be a verbatim copy, the translation might have changed the effect of the experiment. Sixthly, it necessary to state that to combine political interest as a dependent variable, I used two different measurement level variables, namely one categorical and one continuous which I combined into the same scale and this simplification might have impacted the the variable political interest in the post-test. Further research might need to combine other items. Finally, the issue with experiment are that they are artificial conditions, consequently, it can not be certain than these results can be found as such in the real life.

Nevertheless, this study has several advantages. First, the items used in the survey were taken from Gelber et al study (2011), and it took into consideration several variables in the literatures that might impact this relationship. The stimuli was designed based on real-life materials and had shown that agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness can act as moderators.

With the growing popularity of good news stories, it would be interesting to study this effect in the long term. Besides, even though they are not significant, these results imply that good news stories might be important to raise the audience political interest and political knowledge. If this fact it verified by further research, good news will be really good news for western democracies.

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Appendixes Pilot Study

The media often refer to "positive news stories" or "bad news stories".

Bad news stories are defined as articles about tragic, sad or conflicting events. Positive news stories, on the other hand, are defined as articles about touching, uplifting or human-related events.

Now, you will be exposed to eight short articles.

Please, read them carefully and, based on the definitions of positive and negative news above, cast them into the right category. Keep in mind that positive news stories can contain some negative references and the other way round. To cast them into the right category, focus on the meaning of the articles.

The story of Yusra Mardini ; from swimming for her life in the Mediterranean Sea to the Olympics According to the UNHCR, the conflict has displaced about 13 million of people, and 5.4 million have fled Syria, creating the largest refugee crisis to grip Europe since World War II. But crossing the Mediterranean Sea is a dangerous journey and more than 4,700 refugees have died of drowning, fuel inhalation, hypothermia and suffocation in

overcrowded dinghies this year. Mardini was a promising swimmer until she was forced to flee her home in war-torn Damascus. As many Syrians, in their desperation to escape conflict in Syria, Mardini and her sister climbed on board a dinghy built to carry six but carrying 20 after reaching Turkey. Their motor failed 30 minutes into their journey and, being one of only four people on board who could swim, Mardini, her sister and two others jumped into the water and swam for three hours, pushing and pulling the boat until it reached the

shore. Thankfully, Mardini’s open water feat had saved the lives of everyone on board. After surviving the perilous journey and settling in Berlin, the 18-year-old is is

"overwhelmed" support as she competes on the refugee Olympic team.

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Refugees freezing to death, as deadly sea crossings carry on into winter

According to the UNHCR, the conflict in Syria itself has displaced about 13 million of people, and 5.4 million have fled Syria, creating the largest refugee crisis to grip Europe since

World War II. So far, more than 4,700 refugees have died attempting sea journeys to Europe this year, of drowning, fuel inhalation and suffocation in overcrowded dinghies. Now, the cold itself is taking lives. Refugees are dying of hypothermia as thousands continue desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean Sea in plummeting temperatures. While European leaders have hailed the "success" of a deal aiming to stop migrant boats being launched from Turkey to Greece, the number of asylum seekers taking the longer and more treacherous route from Libya to Italy has increased dramatically. At least two women have been killed by hypothermia in the past week. Rescuers with the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said it was the first time they had seen refugees die from the

condition."It is the first time we have seen a hypothermia death but we expect this to happen more," Ms Emmen said. "We are trying to be prepared for it."

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Aleppo's children back to school amidst the bombs; attendance is down

Children in besieged east Aleppo attempted to return to school amidst bombardment of rebel-held neighbourhoods by Russian-backed Syrian forces. The new school year began on Saturday in the middle of a bombing campaign which has killed hundreds and destroyed civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, bakeries and emergency response centres. Schools have also been regime targets in the past. Mr Zarqa said in some classes at his school only five children showed up. Save the Children estimate that of east Aleppo's

approximately 100,000 children, only six per cent enrolled in the first few days of classes this year. Many schools remain shut. Mr Zarqa was forced to stop his classes from leaving when school ended on Sunday because of a new strike, he said. "But then, it is not safe at home either. There is no point in children not getting an education because of the

bombs." East Aleppo residents report that cluster munitions, white phosphorus, napalm and basement-penetrating 'bunker buster' bombs have been dropped on opposition-held areas where 250,000 civilians are trapped. Aleppo is 'worse than a slaughterhouse' says UN chief Ban Ki-moon after 96 children killed and hospitals bombed.

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Muzoon Almellehan’s fight for education

A teenage girl has launched an impassioned plea for world leaders to ensure children's futures are not ruined by the country's civil war.

Muzoon Almellehan has been dubbed the "Malala of Syria". Refugee in the UK, she hopes to study to be a journalist in the future, but fears for hundreds of thousands of other Syrian children with no access to education.

During the conflict, Syrian schools had not been spared from bombings and the attendance is down. Schools have also been regime targets in the past . Save the Children estimate that of east Aleppo's, approximately 100,000 children, only six per cent enrolled in the first few days of classes this year and numerous schools remain shut. Muzoon's message to the world was:" If young people are not educated who will rebuild the country? We need education because Syria needs us. I share the same message as my friend Malala: Education is power.

Education is the future and a weapon to fight obscurantism.”

The teenager said that although she and her peers have been dubbed a "lost generation", they have not lost their love of learning, their dreams for the future or, most importantly, hope.

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The White Helmets; heroes fighting horrors of the war.

The emergency teams, better known by their nickname of White Helmets have pulled 62,000 people alive from smashed and burning buildings often with bombing still going on. The group has been awarded the Right Livelihood Award and they have now been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The volunteers have called bombardment to stop. They do not discriminate, they insist, between those they are trying to help. Rady Saad shook his head : "Anywhere else in the world an ambulance will be safe. But in Syria being in an ambulance actually makes you a target. So we have to disguise the ambulances to look like ordinary trucks, but even then you always know that the planes may come back to hit the place again.” Since the beginning of the conflict, hospitals and medical facilities, included MSF and ICRC centres have been bombed, which caused lack of medical supplies. The White Helmets are trying to remedy to this situation and have received widespread international support. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the Syrian Civil war had claimed the life of more than 480’000 Syrians.

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Aleppo rocked by further hospital attacks

The air strike on the al-Quds paediatric hospital in Aleppo has led to expressions of shock and anger in the West, but such attacks on medical facilities have become increasingly prevalent during Syria's bloody civil war. Al-Quds, the main place for paediatric referral in what is left of medical facilities in Aleppo. The doors and windows were covered by sandbags in an

attempt to keep out bullets and shrapnel, but these provided no protection against air strikes. Medecines Sans Frontieres (MSF) reported that seven of the facilities it ran in Syria have been bombed in the last three months alone. Marianne Glasser, the head of the ICRC, pointed out after the al-Quds destruction "this wasn't the first time that lifesaving medical services have been hit". She added: "We urge all parties: don't attack hospitals." It seems unlikely the air strikes will stop and fear of them has driven many clinics to be physically dug-in underground, but that is not a guarantee of safety. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the Syrian Civil war had claimed the life of more than 480’000 Syrians.

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Refugee crisis: Finland's prime minister pledges to give up his home to accommodate refugees

Finland's prime minister, Juha Sipila, has said he will give up his home to accommodate refugees, part of a growing trend of politicians making personal gestures to help the millions of Syrians fleeing war and persecution.

If most of the Syrian refugees have been housed in refugee’s camps, mostly in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, a few of them are asking asylum in Europe after a risky journey. Mr Sipila is the first European leader to make such a concrete gesture, giving a date and

specifying a location for when refugees can start moving in. Speaking to Findland’s national broadcaster YLE, Mr Sipila said his family had a home in Kempele, central Findland, that they rarely used since they moved to the capital, Helsinki."We should all take a look in the mirror and ask how we can help," he said. On Sunday morning, the Pope called on "every" parish, monastery and religious community in Europe to take in at least one refugee family, and said that the Vatican would be housing two.

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Syrian refugees killed by Turkish border guards

Turkish border guards have killed at least eight Syrian refugees, including several children, as families were "fired on indiscriminately" after attempting to cross into the country, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said. Along with Lebanon and Jordan, Turkey is the country that hosts the larger number of Syrian refugees. However, the country has now closed its borders to them. The Observatory said in a statement: "Turkish border guards have committed and are committing massacres against several refugees fleeing from the brutality of the regime and its bombardment since the beginning of the year. The

Syrian National Coalition, an opposition group based in Istanbul and supported by Turkey, gave a higher death toll of 11. It said many of the victims had recently fled the northern Isis-held town of Jarabulus. "After warning shots, a group of seven to eight people ran towards the woods." Since the beginning of 2016, nearly 60 civilians have been shot while trying to flee across the border from Syria into Turkey, the Observatory says. Earlier this year, families who fled the worsening violence in Aleppo stated that Turkish police were regularly opening fire on them.

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2.Experiment in French and in English Introduction and consent form

Q1 Dear participant,

This experiment is available in French or in English. Please, select your language using the small box above.