Common Knowledge

News and the Construction of Political Meaning

W. Russell Neuman, Marion R. Just, Ann N. Crigler

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226161174
• Thema: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Thema: Política

Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors: so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media.For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issues—drugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1, 600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience.At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed; it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the news—or tries to make anything of it— Common Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom.

Index

(page numbers in italics refer to figures or tables)

ABC News, 27

Abel, Elie, 49

abortion, 28

Abramson, Jeffrey B., 117

Achen, Christopher, 141n

acquired immune deficiency syndrome. See AIDS

active audience perspective, 110–113. See also audience agendas; media agendas

active media perspective, 117–119. See also audience agendas; media agendas

active-passive press theories, 118

Afghanistan, 40

agenda-setting tradition, 42, 111–112

AIDS, 4–6, 29, 41, 47–48, 57–58, 63, 67–69, 72–73, 75, 86–92, 94, 102, 106–107, 111–112, 114, 117–118, 120–121

Alger, Dean, 57

Allen, Harris, Jr., 15

“All Things Considered,” 31

Altheide, David L., 37, 60

Andreoli, V., 18

Andres, Monica C., 11

apartheid. See South Africa

Arterton, F. Christopher, 11, 117

Ashmore, R. D., 143n

Atkin, C. K., 80

attention-barrier hypothesis, 91–93

audience, 6. See also active audience perspective; audience agendas; audience evaluation study; audience frames

audience agendas, 6, 110–113

audience evaluation study, 36, 89–91, 90

audience frames, 74–77, 75. See also cognitive frames; economic frames; human impact factor; media frames; morality frames

Babbie, Earl, 13

Bagdikian, Ben H., 9

balance theory, 61

Ball-Rokeach, Sandra J., 9, 11

Baltimore, David, Dr., 4

Barber, James David, 10

Bard, Mitchell, 46

Barkin, Steve M., 39, 62

Bartels, Larry, 141n

Bates, Stephen, 120

Becker, Lee, 11–12, 15

Beentjes, Johannes W. J., 85

Bennett, W. Lance, 9, 49, 52, 60, 67,...