Erasmus Mundus Master’s Joint Degree Journalism, Media and Globalisation Joint degree
DO AMERICANS PREFER STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE IN POLITICS? A SELECTIVE EXPOSURE EXPERIMENT TO PERSONALIZED NEWS
by
Abraham Koshy Student ID: 12367583
Master’s Thesis
Graduate School of Communication Master’s programme Communication Science
Supervisor: dhr. dr. Lukas Otto June 3, 2019
ABSTRACT
This paper addresses the issue of preference exhibited by American citizens when it comes to infotainment personalized news coverage over substantive thematic coverage. Extant literature has looked the specific characteristics that constitute personalized news, analyzed the scope of the trends in many western democracies, and studied the effects of such news on citizens’ attitudes about politics. This study uses a novel conjoint design to understand if Americans exhibit a preference for the different types of personalized news (individualized and privatized) over thematic news, and whether political cynicism and cognitive abilities moderate this
preference. Results confirm the status quo in journalism that Americans, critically thinking and otherwise, like entertainment options in their political news. Findings indicate that citizens exhibit a preference for individualized news when given personalized infotainment options, but pick privatized news when the alternative is thematic news. Within the context that Americans love their entertainment options, within and outside politics, individualized news plays a crucial role in reducing cynicism as they draw citizens away from cynicism inducing privatized news.
DO AMERICANS PREFER STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE IN POLITICS? A SELECTIVE EXPOSURE EXPERIMENT TO PERSONALIZED NEWS Journalism as an industry is undergoing many transitions as it grapples with changes to technology and audience demand. In an erstwhile television era, people tuned into a select few channels to get their political information. The Internet, on the other hand, is home to thousands of options containing information about politics and entertainment. Citizens face a choice many times a day about what type of information they want to read: information about sports or the latest celebrity or news about politics and society. Americans have been found to be news avoiders (Ksiazek, Malthouse, & Webster, 2010) and outright prefer entertainment over politics when given the choice (Prior, 2007). More and more journalistic organizations have confronted this change by adapting elements of entertainment into their political coverage in order to attract more audiences that might otherwise be distracted by more entertaining news options. This trend has been termed infotainment, and political communication scholars have since been engaged with the question of whether this trend has negative effects on democracy (Adam & Maier, 2010; Kaase, 1994; Norris, 2000) by causing cynicism and disengagement amongst the electorate or if it has some positive consequences in helping engage with citizens that might have otherwise preferred entertainment over boring political news (Brants, 1998). When describing
infotainment, scholars have long used the term personalization of politics (Rahat & Sheafer, 2007) to reflect the specific characteristics of this trend that focus on individual politicians and citizens in society. Donald Trump’s latest outrageous tweets goes to the front page of most news websites every other day, while in other cases it is the story of the young child who has been separated from his family thanks to Trump and his administration’s harsh immigration policies.
Emotion, humor, scandal, excitability, and empathy are all frequently used to grab audiences in to read these stories. In the race to grab the audience’s attention using personalized news, substantive news that adopts a thematic, structural look at societal problems is consequently ignored (Jebril, Albæk, & De Vreese, 2013). Scholars have so far looked at the specific characteristics that constitute personalized news (e.g., Rahat & Sheafer, 2007), analyzed the scope of the trends in many western democracies (e.g., Holtz-Bacha, Langer, & Merkle, 2014), and studied the effects of such news on citizens’ attitudes about politics finding (e.g., Jebril et al., 2013). However, we do not know if citizens exhibit a preference for infotainment over thematic news in their selection of news, and if their cynical attitudes towards politics influence this selection. This study will aim to fill this gap by using a conjoint experiment to test the various preferences exhibited by American citizens when presented with different types of personalized news as well as a thematic alternative.
Theoretical Framework Infotainment and its consequences
The study of infotainment has been approached from the macro perspective looking at broader trends, such as the shift from the focus on politics and its influence on society toward the focus on entertainment options such as celebrity culture and sports (Sparks, 2000). These shifting trends have been categorized as a decrease in journalistic standards by adopting tabloid
approaches (Esser, 1999; Sparks, 2000). The micro perspective has looked at the specific frames and features that define infotainment news, such as the topic, style, subject and format
characteristics to develop a definition for infotainment (Brants & Neijens, 1998; Norris, 2000). Infotainment also falls under the study of thematic and episodic frames used in news reporting—
an episodic type that deals with specific circumstances or people (e.g., war and conflict) and shifts focus away from the government and its systemic issues, or a thematic type that provides a substantive, factual look at a given structural societal problem (e.g., climate change; Iyengar, 1991). Infotainment is clearly of the episodic type (Jebril et al., 2013). It also has the same features described by scholars when they talk about soft news (Prior, 2003): which has also been described as more instantaneous time or incident specific or personality based news. The debate about infotainment comes down to the normative discussion about the consequences of the choice that citizens can make between different types of news, whether soft and hard news or episodic and thematic frames. This study will look closer at this choice that Americans face between episodic and thematic frames by analyzing the preferences exhibited by American citizens for a specific trend in infotainment—personalization of politics.
Personalization of politics
Personalization of politics has often been conceptually analogous to infotainment in political communication literature and has been defined in many ways. The broadest definition includes media coverage, institutionalized politics, and private characteristics and behaviors of politicians (Rahat & Sheafer, 2007), and defines the “personalization of politics” as a broad trend in news to cover politics more in terms of individual political actors instead of institutions and policies. This trend has also been conceptualized and operationalized as ‘individualization’ (Van Aelst, Schaefer, & Stanyer, 2012). Personalization has also been conceptualized as the focus on politicians’ private characteristics over their professional competencies (Adam & Maier, 2010). Van Aelst et al. (2012) also conceptualized this trend as ‘privatization’, for its focus on political leaders as private individuals whose lives are up for judgement. Van Santen (2009) combined
these theories and proposed separate definitions for these concepts: individualization for the focus on politicians’ private characteristics, emotionalization for the focus on individual experiences and emotions of politicians, and privatization for the focus on competence of politicians. These scholars have categorized personalization from the presentation of individual politicians but another school of thought also refers to personalization from the perspective of the individual every day citizen. Personalization has also been conceptualized as the focus on
individuals who are emblematic of a political issue (Bennett, 2001; Neuman, Just & Cringler, 1992). Jebril et. al. (2013) looked specifically at the effects of personalized news by combining both the approaches and operationalized personalization in two categories: privatization for a focus on private characteristics, behaviors, competencies of politicians and personalization for the focus on individual stories that are emotional, human interest oriented, often emblematic of larger societal and political trends. This distinction is useful because the other aspect of the study of personalization, which is still relatively in its infancy (Kruikemeier, Van Noort, Vliegenthart, & De Vreese, 2013), looks at the effects of such coverage.
Personalized news, or strategic news, has been found to have negative consequences on democracy by inducing cynicism amongst the electorate (Cappella & Jamieson, 1997; De Vreese & Semetko, 2002). Jebril et. al. (2013) add nuance to this discussion in their findings that it is privatized news that increases political cynicism while personalized news decreases it. In an experimental design, Otto and Maier (2017) also looked at effects on political trust of
personalized news and operationalized these two aspects under the concept of personalization by referring to ‘privatization’ as the aspect for the focus on politicians as private figures, and
many converging and similar definitions for personalization as privatization, individualization, and emotionalization in extant literature; therefore, this study adopts this latest conceptualization by Otto and Maier (2017) which accurately includes approaches from extant research into the two distinct aspects of personalization: individual citizens (individualization) and politicians (privatization).
In the American context, personalization has been conceptualized as strategic game coverage, which looks at the focus on the private characteristics of politicians over their policies and professional competencies (Cappella & Jameison, 1997). This has been attributed to
journalists who cover politics as a horse race (Adam & Maier, 2010) and this has been found to have a negative effect on political cynicism (Cappella & Jameison, 1997). Scholars have found that Americans tend to outright prefer entertainment over politics (Prior, 2007). Within this context, some scholars have argued that infotainment in the news can help educate and bring forth otherwise disinterested citizens (Brants, 1998), and that once they are drawn in, the learning outcomes are better for the otherwise politically disinterested (Baum, 2003). Extant literature has broken down this trend in journalism into its different components as well as investigated its respective effects, but we do not know if citizens actually exhibit a preference for such personalized news. As mentioned earlier, infotainment and personalization fall into the broader study of episodic and thematic frames (Iyengar, 1991), which distinguishes between episodic news that looks at individual instances and episodes often using emotional appeals versus thematic news that talks about structural problems in policies and institutions.
Personalized, both privatized and individualized aspects, news can be categorized as episodic as they feature specific instances, people or characteristics (Jebril et al., 2013). Thematic coverage
would be the opposite, a dense article that dissects a given political issue from a structural perspective, attributing more blame to the government. The choice that citizens face can be between personalized episodic news and thematic news as well as a choice between the different types of personalized episodic news. It is worth investigating if, when given a choice between such episodic personalized news and thematic news, do they overwhelmingly prefer the
entertaining counterpart, as journalistic organizations might have us believe? This study sets out to investigated the following research question:
RQ: What are the preferences exhibited by American citizens for the different types of personalized news over thematic news?
To help answer this question, we turn to another theory in political communication that has received recent much attention in the context of filter bubbles and political polarization which looks at citizens preferences when selecting information from partisan or ideologically biased media outlets—selective exposure.
Selective exposure
The increasing tendency for news organizations to focus on their respective ideological audiences thanks to the changing television and digital media landscape (Mullainathan & Schleifer, 2007) has reinvigorated the application of a once ignored theory from psychology to study the choices of citizens within this fractured media landscape. The average citizen first faces a fundamental choice between entertainment and politics when they look for news and
information online or on television. This choice has been termed interest-based selectivity (Feldman, Wojcieszak & Bimber, 2018). Next, they face a choice to select news that is line with their ideological leanings (partisan selectivity). Partisan selectivity has received the bulk of
attention from political communication scholars within the context of political polarization (e.g., Iyengar & Hahn, 2009). Do citizens only tune in to news that are congenial to their ideological leanings or are they tuning into news from sources that they disagree with? The research is inconclusive as some researchers have proven that conservative voters prefer Fox News and vice versa (Iyengar & Hahn, 2009) using experimental methods while others disagree and have proven from large scale user internet history data that citizens engage with all sorts of different partisan news (Nelson & Webster, 2017). Experimental methods have also been useful to understand the psychological processes that influence the partisan selection of news in different contexts (Stroud, 2011). Selective exposure experiments have mostly been rooted in Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance, and has been defined as the tendency for people to select information or news based on their prior beliefs to avoid cognitive dissonance. The theory of motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990) goes one step further to state that people are motivated by directional goals and accuracy goals and that each have their own ways of avoiding cognitive dissonance, where those driven by directional goals might select news differently from those that are driven by accuracy goals (Kim, 2009). Motivated Reasoning has also been found to cause selective exposure amongst the populace, as they do not prefer to read news from the ‘other side’ that might cause cognitive dissonance (Knobloch-Westerwick, Mothes, Johnson, Westerwick, & Donsbach, 2015). Scholars have posited grave conclusions for the future of political polarization from these findings as selective exposure has been found to have a negative impact on attitudes and behaviors toward the opposing party and its members (Iyengar, Lelkes, Levendusky, Malhotra, & Westwood, 2018).
This type of two-level categorization of information processing is common across many disciplines and has been also categorized as System 1 and System 2 processing. System 1 processing occurs when citizens are driven by their heuristics and put little effort in reasoning while processing information, and this has also been categorized by certain scholars as negative for a healthy democratic discussion (Kahneman, 2003; Stanovich & West, 2000). For example, people might prefer to read sensational and emotion driven news about terrorist attacks instead of an in depth factual news article about the danger that climate change poses to the Arctic Ice and its implications 30 years from now. This question of preference using System 1 processing is especially pertinent to the study of personalized news and infotainment because they specifically contain emotional, vivid, and excitable characteristics (Otto & Maier, 2016). News about Donald Trump’s latest inflammatory tweet (privatized) or news about the Honduran immigrant’s lonely journey through the deserts and swamps of Mexico to get to the American border
(individualized) are just examples of how American media frequently presents news to the electorate. By using these emotional or controversial frames, they hope to attract a larger audience. Thematic news coverage about the structural problems in the White House or the immigration policy and its enforcement are often sacrificed in favor of their more entertaining counterparts (Iyengar, 1991). Therefore, it is meaningful to understand if citizens exhibit a preference for one type of news over the other in the context of personalized news. This
discussion relates back to the entertainment elements embedded in the presentation of this news —episodic personalized news and thematic news require different information processing styles and citizens might exhibit a clear preference for one over the other. The first hypothesis is developed:
H1: Personalized (privatized and individualized) headlines are selected more than thematic headlines.
Another example of a two level information processing theory is the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM; Petty, Brinol & Priester, 2009). ELM states that it takes effort, willingness and motivation to adopt a central information processing route that leads to critical thinking. In contrast, when citizens lack the effort and motivation to use their central route, the resulting peripheral information processing route is susceptible to heuristic-based cues such as the ones found in personalized information. Information processing styles measured using Need for Cognition (NFC) and cognitive reflexes (CR) are have been used as indicators to see how willing a person is to put effort into critical and complex thinking (Knobloch-Westerwick, Mothes & Polavin, 2017). NFC has been used as a measure of a person’s attitudes towards critical and complex thinking, whether one likes it or not (Tsfati & Cappella, 2005). CR has been used to test a person’s ability to engage in such critical thinking using word problems (Frederick, 2005). These measures have been used as moderators in the study partisan selective exposure in American respondents, as those willing to think critically should be guided toward balanced news instead of ideologically biased news (Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2017). Since people high in cognitive abilities as measured by NFC and CR have been found to enjoy thinking and process messages more carefully (Cacioppo, Petty & Morris, 1983) and are less influenced by heuristics (Haugtvet, Petty & Cacioppo, 1992), such as those found in personalized news, it is worth investigating if they also exhibit a preference for avoiding such messages. Those willing to think critically are also expected to choose thematic news headlines over episodic personalized news headlines.
H2: Selection of personalized headlines over thematic ones is moderated by cognitive resources and NFC.
Cappella and Jamieson (1997) found that the strategic game frame adopted by American journalistic organizations pitching candidates against each other in a battle over their
professional and private characteristics increased political cynicism among the electorate. Jebril et al. (2013) build upon this work to distinguish between the effects of different types of
personalized news and find that privatized news increases cynicism while individualized news decreases cynicism. Given these findings, it is worth investigating how the politically cynical choose when given a choice between the two. If the politically cynical prefer privatized news over thematic, and privatized over individualized, it points to a vicious cycle of preference which leads to cynical attitudes. On the other hand, the politically cynical could choose to avoid the type of media that has been found to cause that very feeling. The following hypothesis are developed to test if political cynicism acts as a moderator for selective exposure to the types of personalized news.
H3: Political cynicism moderates the selection of thematic over privatized headlines. H4: Political cynicism moderates the selection of individualized over thematic headlines. H5: Political cynicism moderates the selection of individualized over privatized
headlines.
Method
Online survey experiments have been an excellent tool to measure and understand the choices that people make as well as the effects of these choices. Selective exposure to attitude-consistent information has been measured using field experiments where typically respondents
are offered the choice between two articles, one with a liberal bias and one with a conservative bias, and sometimes a neutral choice (e.g., Feldman et al., 2018). Respondents typically read the article they choose, and selective exposure is measured as the time spent reading as well as the choice made. However, this approach is slightly limiting in that it offers only one choice to its respondents when there are actually many such choices made every day. This limitation was addressed by offering an unobtrusive reading environment for the respondent where respondents can browse, click and read through an entire magazine for five minutes (Knobloich-Westerwick et al., 2017). Selective exposure is measured in terms of clicks as well as time spent reading a given article. When two different attributes are contained in the choices to be given to the
respondent but the choice is still limited to two, conjoint experimental designs have been used to study selective exposure. Mummolo (2016) ran a conjoint experiment where respondents where given the option to select between two articles that varied in their source bias and topic
relevance. Respondents did not read the articles they said they prefer, but are instead provided a series of choices of headlines. Selective exposure is measured as the selection in each given choice which drastically increases the number of observations. When it comes to infotainment, the choice is not as clear cut as asking respondents to choose between a liberal versus
conservative news article; instead the choice can be between personalized (both individualized and privatized) over a thematic article, or a choice between privatized over individualized articles. The conjoint design allows us to incorporate multiple such choices with their respective attributes to see what preference is exhibited. Such a design also drastically increases the number of observations found.
Procedure
Hypothesis was tested using an online Qualtrics survey which was distributed on American city and state subreddits like ‘r/Boston’ and ‘r/California’ on the site reddit.com. 590 responses were collected by distributing the survey on 30 different state and city subreddits. 10242 (569 * 2 * 9) valid observations were collected from 590 respondents. Respondents first answered questions about demographics, then answered questions to measure NFC, CR and Political Cynicism. Following these measures, respondents were told that they would be presented with headlines to two articles and asked them to indicate which article they would prefer to read. After they had indicated their choice and clicked next, another set of two articles would appear asking them to choose once again. A total of nine sets of choices were presented one after the other to the respondents. Three of them were designed as a choice between a
privatized and a thematic headline, three were a choice between an individualized and a thematic headline, and three were a choice between an individualized and a privatized headline. These nine sets of choices were randomly presented to each respondent. The entire survey took about 3.5 min on average to complete across all respondents. 21 respondents were dropped for invalid answers to age, reducing the total sample to 569.
Stimuli
The headlines presented were fake but constructed with recent news events in mind to reflect that these might be real choices faced by citizens. Respondents were debriefed after they completed the survey about the true nature of the headlines. Each set of choices was constrained to one prominent news topic featured from a privatized, individualized, or thematic frame given the choice presented. For example, the one headline presented as one of the choices between
privatized and thematic headlines was about the recent college admissions scandal. One headline presents a politician’s failing in his personality to also be part of this scandal, and the other presents a thematic structural discussion of the economic policies that might lead to such failings. These options reflect a real choice that citizens would have to make in the aftermath of the college admissions scandal, and by constraining the differing elements in the headlines presented between privatized and thematic, we can understand if they exhibit a preference for one over the other. The conjoint design allows us to embed three different sets of choices that reflect the different conceptualizations of privatization in the literature. The first headline reflects news about a prominent political leader and his family, the second adopts a humorous component at a political leaders’ misfortunes, and the third offers a scandalous story with a main political leader as the connection. These are presented along with their respective thematic counterparts: 1. Senator Rubio, son also caught up in college admissions scandal
vs.
Pay-for-play: How the college admissions system resulted in scandal 2. A history of US Presidents speaking at UN Summits
vs.
Trump fumbles at UN summit, refers to Ethiopia as Eritrea 3. The many vices of Washingtonians and their sheer opulence
vs.
Ex-Obama aide slips up again, caught in 3rd tryst with sex worker
Similarly, the second set of choices reflected an option between an individualized and thematic news headline. The conjoint design allows us to incorporate another three different
types of headlines that reflect individualized news—stories of individuals presented in an emotionally appealing way that speaks to larger societal problems. The thematic headlines presented explicitly reflect these larger problems as their subject.
1. The Great Divide: Prospects bleak for rural Americans compared to urbanites vs.
This Indiana farmer lost his family farm of 150 years, faces new life in the big city 2. Pixie the hamster has an unexpected day job - finding landmines
vs.
Landmines still threaten African subcontinent; researchers use novel techniques to fight them 3. 11-year-old Jose remains detained by ICE, 1200 miles away from his family
vs.
ICE needs more oversight; blunder after blunder has embarrassed an important agency Lastly, a third set of choices give respondents an option between privatized and
individualized news. This choice is slightly harder to present as opposed to the previous two sets as there is no logical thematic alternative that the reader might face. Instead, options were presented with a common subject like the chess championship or an IRS audit but with the two frames of individualized and privatized to check the respondents’ exhibited a preference. 1. Trump faces more pressure to go through IRS audit
vs.
For William Henry, Missouri’s Humphreys County is like any other place - it just happens to top the IRS’ most-audited list
vs.
Senator Durbin visits the Illinois State Chess Championship to watch his daughter compete 3. Oklahoma mayor comes out as gay
vs.
Gay North Carolina store owner closes shop after receiving death threats Demographics
Respondents were asked to fill in their age (M = 33.86), Gender (Male = 72.89%, Female = 24.69%, Other = 1.37%, Refuse to Answer = 1.13%), education (College Degree/Post
Graduate Degree = 72.04%, Some college, no degree = 22.64%, High School Diploma = 4.45%, Grade School/Some high school = 0.08%) and Partisanship (Strong Democrat = 28.30%, Weak Democrat = 8.06%, Independent Democrat = 43.91%, Independent Republican = 13.38%, Weak Republican = 2.4%, Strong Republican = 3.94%) with the same questions used by the ANES. Since most of the sample was recruited from Reddit, it is predictably younger, male, better educated, and more liberal than national averages as indicated by the ANES.
Moderators
NFC. A four question sub-scale of the short-form rational experiment inventory (REI-10; Pacini & Epstein, 1999) was used to measure NFC, as used by Knobloch-Westerwick et al. (2017). Respondents were asked to indicate on a 5-point scale from ‘Completely False’ to ‘Completely True’ if the following statements were true about themselves:
1. I don’t like to have to do a lot of thinking
3. I prefer to do something that challenges my thinking abilities rather than something that requires little thought
4. I prefer complex to simple problems.
The measure had a relatively high reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.68) and respondents
exhibited a high mean score of 4.36, indicating a sample size that consists largely of people that like to think critically.
CR. Respondents answered the CR test (Frederick, 2005) which presented them with the following three word problems that indicate a person’s preference for reflective vs intuitive thinking.
1. A baseball bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
These questions have a seemingly obvious answer (10 cents for example in question 1, when the correct answer is actually 5 cents) and a correct one that takes some thinking to get to. 35.35% of respondents got all three questions correct, 31.61% got 2 out of 3 correct, 23.8% got 1 correct and finally only 9.2% of respondents got none of the answers right.
Political Cynicism. Cynicism was measured using four questions used by Jebril et al. (2013). Respondents were asked to respond on a 7-point scale of ‘Completely Disagree’ to ‘Completely Agree’ to the following statements:
1. It is easier to become a Senator due to political friends than to competence. 2. Senators and State Representatives are mainly focused on themselves. 3. Politicians promise more than they can deliver.
4. Politicians don’t understand what is happening in society.
The responses collected had a high reliability score (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.71) and a mean of 5.34.
Results
The programming language R was used to conduct an analysis of the data accumulated from the 580 respondents. The scholars that championed the use of conjoint experiments (Hainmuller, Hopkins, & Yamamoto, 2014) in political science also published an R package cjoint, which helps generate causal models from the given attribute levels in the experiment. The package generates Average Marginal component-specific Effects (ACME) estimator presented by Hainmuller et. al (2014). The ACMEs generated from the analysis tell us about the
respondents preferences in terms of the three sets of choices presented to them (privatized vs. thematic, individualized vs thematic, privatized vs individualized). Since there were only two levels in each case, a statistically significant result is observed in each category but we look toward the ACME to understand the extent of the preference in the choices.
As shown in Table 1, personalized headlines were only 3% more likely to be selected than thematic headlines. H1 is supported, but by a very small margin of slightly more than 3%
indicating that from the given set of headlines, people very slightly prefer to select personalized news over thematic news. The moderators tested for this preference, NFC and CR, do not yield statistically significant results. This indicates that there is no clear trend that people high in NFC and CR prefer thematic over personalized news, H2 is not supported.
As shown in Table 2, respondents were about 32% more likely to select privatized over thematic articles, and that those high in cynicism 5% more likely than those low in cynicism to make this selection. This indicates that people prefer privatized news over thematic, and that cynical people are slightly more likely to choose them. Evidence shows H3 was supported.
As shown in Table 2, H4 was supported. respondents were 38% more likely to choose thematic over individualized articles, with those high in political cynicism about 3% more likely than those low in cynicism to select thematic over individualized articles. This indicates that
people exhibit a clear preference for thematic over individualized news and that the politically cynical are slightly more likely to do so.
As shown in Table 3, respondents were 16% more likely to choose individualized over privatized headlines, with those high in political cynicism 8% more likely to do so than those low in cynicism. This indicates that people and more clearly the politically cynical exhibit a preference for individualized over privatized news when given the choice. H5 is supported by the evidence.
Discussion
Findings indicate that citizens exhibit a small preference for personalized news over thematic news headlines. This is not a surprising finding given that this is the prevalent status quo in journalism. It is interesting that they were only 3% more likely to select personalized news. There is not an overwhelming preference for entertainment amongst the electorate as might be perceived, but merely a small preference to be entertained. This finding for the citizens-side preference for personalized news in an experimental setting adds to our understanding of why it is so popular to present politics in terms of individuals over issues and institutions (Rahat & Sheafer, 2007). This finding also adds an important element to the normative discussion of whether personalization is healthy for democracy (Holtz-Bacha et al., 2014): citizens prefer to read entertaining news, and any normative discussions about the reduction in quality news journalism must incorporate the fact that entertaining elements in the story are just simply more appealing. This finding could be further supported by large scale data analysis of user internet history, much like the one conducted by Nelson and Webster (2017) to study filter bubbles. Such
an analysis would reveal preferences for personalized news not just in experimental contexts, but from using real data from citizens according to their internet browsing behavior. In addition, there was no statistical significance for the moderators NFC and CR. This indicates that the information processing styles used in the selection of infotainment news is not as clear cut as smarter and more critical thinking people prefer to read thematic news—the findings show that citizens universally exhibit a slight preference for infotainment, but what type of information processing style they use is not clear. These findings add important nuance to the study of personalized news; people who are willing and like to think critically are just as interested in entertainment in their political news as their counterparts, but this preference for infotainment is small. Future research can use conjoint experimental methods try to understand specifically when critical information processing is used when processing the different types of personalized news and if they vary in various thematic contexts like presidential coverage, immigration coverage, climate change coverage, etc. The current study offered many such contexts within the choices but the design does not allow us to compare the different information processing styles used in the various contexts; a new study could address this limitation and find out specifically when critical thinking is in play.
The results of this study about the politically cynical are also extremely interesting in the context of the findings in Jebril et al. (2013), who show that privatized news increases cynicism while individualized news decreases it. This experiment found that people exhibit a significant preference for privatized over thematic (38%) news headlines, and that those high in political cynicism are even more likely to exhibit this preference. This points to a cycle of citizens preferring news that then causes them to be cynical (Cappella & Jamieson, 1997; Jebril et al.,
2013), specifically when given a choice between privatized and thematic news. When given the choice between individualized and thematic news, those high in political cynicism were even more likely to choose the thematic news article over the individualized news as compared to those low in political cynicism. Individualized news is shunned by the politically cynical even though it is found to have a decreasing effect on their cynicism, specifically if the alternative is neutral thematic news. Thus far, when the alternative is thematic news, people exhibit a
preference for entertaining political news but shun news about individuals. This cycle of
choosing cynicism inducing news and avoiding cynicism decreasing news is put in better context with the next finding for citizens preference for individualized over privatized news. When given the choice between individualized and privatized news, those high in political cynicism exhibited a higher preference for individualized over privatized news compared to those low in political cynicism. When only personalized options are available, people forego their preference for privatized and choose the individualized news headline instead. These findings add more nuance to those of Jebril et al. (2013) and others; results indicate that the politically cynical do not want to read news that makes them feel cynical about politics when given only personalized choices, but pick cynicism inducing news when offered a choice between personalized and a more thematic alternative.
Infotainment in the form of individualization can lead citizens away from cynicism inducing privatized frames when given a choice between the two. In the context of the other findings that citizens broadly prefer personalized news over thematic news and the politically cynical prefer to read privatized news over thematic news, it appears that individualized news plays an important role in reducing cynicism in the public by drawing them away from the
private stories of politicians. The normative implications for categorizing personalized news and infotainment as negative in its quality of news and effects on democracy (e.g., Adam & Maier, 2010; Kaase, 1994) are questionable in the context of the findings in this study. Specific types of personalized news, like individualized news, could play an important role in the healthy
functioning of democracy by enticing citizens away from cynicism inducing privatized news. Future research must explore how these preferences operate when individualized,
thematic, and privatized news are all displayed simultaneously, as is often the case when citizens come across news. It is also interesting to understand if citizens go back and select a second or third choice given their alternatives. Research can also look at how mediators like emotions play a role in this selection of these emotionalized infotainment stories. An another important aspect this study did not address is partisanship, which has been found to play a significant role in selective exposure to political news. It is worth exploring how these preferences for infotainment hold when citizens come across ideologically consistent information or if they are part of certain issue publics like working moms, veterans, minorities, etc. Scholars have found selective
exposure occurs in these partisan contexts, but the preference for personalized news in these partisan political communication has not been studied yet. The results in this study offer a framework for how these choices work in non-partisan contexts which opens up avenues for research in partisan contexts.
Limitations
One of the limitations of the study has to do with the external validity. Citizens often face more than the option of one type of news headline versus another one, they see many choices offering different ideological, episodic and thematic perspectives and can choose freely between
them. Some scholars have designed unobtrusive recording selective exposure elements where a respondents is presented with a news magazine or website and allowed to freely click through and read amongst the various articles presented. Selective exposure in such a design is measured both in terms of choices made as well as time spent reading the articles. This is a wholesome design with high external validity and might have helped solve some of the limitations in this study but could not be implemented due to financial and time constraints. Future research could look to improve on the validity of the findings presented in this study.
Another limitation is the broad conceptualization and operationalization of personalization of politics, which was done to include the many approaches political
communication scholars have used so far but at the same time fails to respect the nuances in the different aspects of personalization within thematic contexts (e.g., privatized news about
candidates during election coverage). The experimental design used in this study does not allow to compare the choices between contexts, but future research could try to understand the choices and preferences of citizens toward personalized news within specific thematic contexts (like elections, societal issues like climate change, war). The conjoint experimental design used in this study proves to be a great tool to study selective exposure to such different types of news as it offers the ability to embed the various attributes and frames into a serious of choices, which also increases the statistical power.
Conclusion
This study used responses from American respondents collected in an online conjoint survey experiment to analyze their preferences for personalized news. This novel design allowed to incorporate several sets of choices into a single design; these sets were chosen to adequately
represent the conceptualization and operationalization of personalized news in extant literature as individualized and privatized news. The choices were structured to offer respondents a decision to make between an episodic (privatized and individualized) and thematic news, as well as a choice between the types of personalized news (individualized and privatized). Respondents indicated they have a slight preference for personalized over thematic news, which indicates that emotionalized and entertainment characteristics prevalent in journalistic organizations struggling to stay in business might be with justified reason. Citizens who are willing to think critically in their abilities and expressed attitudes, as measured by NFC and CR, did not exhibit any smarter choices for thematic news in this study. This indicates that either different information processing styles are at play or that critically thinking people like entertainment in their political news as much as anybody else. Political cynicism as a symptom of personalized news comes with a catch: different types of personalized news both increase and decrease cynicism (Jebril et al., 2013). This study found that people prefer cynicism inducing privatized news over thematic news, and thematic over cynicism decreasing individualized news, but prefer individualized over privatized news. In the battle for preventing cynicism in the electorate, this study adds an
important finding that individualized news is preferred by the American citizenry as a choice over privatized news. The American citizenry likes its entertainment, both outside and within their political news consumption. Within this constraint where infotainment is preferred over thematic news frames and individualized news reduces cynicism, individualized news can play a crucial role in reducing cynicism in the electorate as they are preferred over cynicism inducing privatized news. These findings provide important context in the study of personalized news
about citizens’ preferences that can now be applied in the study of a bigger question about
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