Television news priming shifts which criteria citizens use to rate presidents

Evidence

This central claim of priming has been supported handsomely in a series of realistic experimental tests (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987; Iyengar et al., 1984; Iyengar, Peters, & Kinder, 1982). When primed by television news stories focusing on national defense, people judge the president largely by how well he has provided, as they see it, for the nation’s defense. When primed by stories about inflation, people evaluate the president by how he has managed, in their view, to keep prices down. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1576

Categorization

• SEED: A natural extension: do modern social-media feeds act as even stronger priming engines than broadcast news because they are algorithmically tuned to what users already engage with? Angle: ‘The algorithmic prime’ — whether media effects literature from the 1980s predicts the 2020s feed.
• XREF: connects to: 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; Presidential command of public opinion weakens the checking effect of the other branches — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 2867