1. Media effects Hypodermic needle model Minimal effects model
Uses and gratifications
Agenda-setting
Framing
Priming
Spiral of Silence

2. Hypodermic needle model
Working hypothesis of propaganda studies (1920s-1940s)
Regarding public as undifferentiated mass
Vulnerable, because of its atomization, to outside influences
Media intending to (instrumentalised in order to) doctrinate
Assuming immediate persuasive effects
Anecdotical evidence
Did Randolph Hearst prompt the Spanish-American war in 1898?
Did Stalinist propaganda work, or did Russians merely acquiesce and resign to their fate under totalitarianism?

3. Limited effects model
Early empirical (survey) research into campaign and media effects (e.g. Berelson, Lazarsfeld & McPhee, The People’s Choice, 1954)
Finding remarkably weak informational and persuasive effects
Explanation:
Avoidance of cognitive dissonance
Selective exposure
Selective perception
Selective retention
Limited effects or fugitive effects?

4. Uses and gratifications
Shifting focus
From what the media do to the audience
To what the audience do with the media
“The 'uses' approach assumes that people's values, their interests, their associations, their social rôles, are pre-potent, and that people selectively 'fashion' what they see and hear to these interests.” (Katz 1959)
Gans (1974) Popular Culture and High Culture
Taste cultures
Audience active and goal directed
Audience use media
Media compete with other sources of need satisfaction
Audience self-conscious of interests and motives for media use
Abandon value judgments about cultural significance of mass communication
Level of political interest is a matter of choice/taste not duty

5. Limitations of the “uses and gratifications” model
Coincides with claims (first emerging in the 1960s) that low levels of political interest and participation should not be regarded as a problem, but rather as indicator of stability, and public satisfaction with democracy (higher participation → polarization → instability)
Diversity of motivations for media use may undermine the “selective exposure” argument of the limited effects model
Individual (news) media selection can be based on non-political considerations (e.g. entertainment value)
In US, for example, talk radio, the Daily Show, or Wall Street journal consumed for entertainment/information reason
Resulting in exposure to biased political content with possible effects

6. Agenda-setting Shift in focus
From persuasive (directional) effects
To cognitive effects
Press ”may not be successful … telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.” (Cohen, 1963)
Amount of news coverage afforded to a particular issue expected to determine public concern about that issue
Groundbreaking publications
McCombs & Shaw (1972) “The Agenda-Setting Function of the Mass Media”
Funkhouser (1972) “The Issues of the Sixties: An Exploratory Study in the Dynamics of Public Opinion”
Assessing causality between media and public agendas
Hierarchical vs. Longitudinal studies
Controlling for real-world indicators
Aggregate vs. individual-level studies
Considering conditionality of effects
Assessing Granger causality
Assessing dynamics (optimal effect-spans and memory decay functions)

7. Framing Framing sometimes defined as second-level agenda-setting
First level: transmission of object salience
Second level: transmission of attribute salience
Framing is indirect persuasion
Direct persuasion concerns the altering of belief contents (convincing through argument that e.g. a policy choice will produce a positive instead of a negative outcome)
Framing concerns the altering of importance that individuals attach to particular beliefs (convincing to support a certain policy by associating the policy measure with a particular value)
Media vs. Individual frames
Media frames: making some aspects of perceived reality more salient, to promote particular problem definitions, causal interpretations, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation
Individual frames: mentally stored clusters of ideas that guide processing of information

8. Causes and effects of framing
Media frames as dependent variable
Influenced by social norms and values of journalists, organizational pressures and constraints, pressures of interest groups, journalistic routines, ideological or political orientations of journalists
Intentionality: ”authorities and pressure groups categorize beliefs in a way that marshals support and opposition to their interests” (Edelman)
Media frames as independent variable
Influences on attitudes and opinions - through problem definition, attribution of blame, indication of problem solution by the media
Influences on individual frames – overlapping frames, but different weights attached: ”what was central to the media might be rather peripheral to most repondents” (Huang)
Individual frames as dependent variable
Thematic vs. episodic media framing affects attribution of responsibility, dependent on general salience of issues
Conflict, human interest, or conflict frames tend to activate different cognitive processes in the audience
Individual frames as independent variable
Linking audience frames with patterns of political action and participation
Audiences may process media stories either in terms of diagnostic, prognostic, or motivational framing; first two imply attribution of blame and responsibility, and expectations about future policy, hence asserting passivity in audiences

9. Priming
Priming, a close relative to framing, reintroduces the notion of persuasive media effects
Concerned with the consequences of setting the public agenda
Experimental studies (Iyengar and Kinder, 1983)
Persuasive effects on beliefs, attitudes and choices
Placing issues or values high on the public agenda makes these salient, i.e. important, problematic, easily retrievable
Salient issues serve as criteria for evaluating leaders, performances, political processes
“It is difficult to change people’s preferences; it is easier to affect the priorities or weights they give to subpreferences bearing on the central decision. A voter may assess the political situation from several standpoints; from one, the Democrats appear better to him and, from another, the Republicans do. His decision is likely to follow the aspect given greater weight by him – with no change in the substance of his own opinions. Thus the voter’s feeling about what is critical in the political situation enables him to find a way out of a potential ‘conflict’ over the issues and hence facilitates political integration within the individual.” (Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee, The People’s Choice, 1954)

10. Spiral of silence Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann
Public, opinion, sanction and punishment
”to the individual, not isolating himself is more important than his own judgment”
Indidividual observes environment to assess distribution of opinions
The stronger he finds his opinion present and reinforced by the environment, the more confident and outspoken he will be
Public opinion understood as amalgam that compels consent
Role of media
It is not the actual but the apparent, publicly visible strength of opinions that the individual assesses
Spiral of silence a dynamic model of public opinion formation
Prevalence of opinions in the media key variable in explaining the likelihood that an individual will speak his mind, be silent, or change his mind