News coverage prominence shifts how heavily people weigh issues in political judgments

Evidence

In our first reading in this section, Iyengar, Peters, and Kinder take an experimental approach to measuring the effects of television news coverage on audience members’ ratings of issue importance. They find that, whether or not viewers are persuaded by the specific opinions represented on a news program, they are indeed influenced by the degree to which certain issues are covered. Specifically, people weigh issues that have been featured prominently in the news more heavily than issues that have not been prominently featured, and these subjective weights do influence political judgments and evaluations. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1404

Categorization

• XREF: Agenda setting connects to my broader reading on media influence and political psychology, echoing the communication/control themes in Communication as Culture and The Bias of Communication. — connects to: Sovereign influence over government hinges on mass-media enlightening quality. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 18; News coverage affects attitudes with a peak two-week memory window. — Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, Why Did the Democrats Lose the South?…, 622; Media agenda shifts alter the political weight the public assigns to events over time — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 1626 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle: agenda-setting as a lever where content persuasion fails but mere coverage order still reshapes what voters treat as important.