mass media research papers

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Behav Sci (Basel)
• PMC10451722

Exploring the Influence of Public Perception of Mass Media Usage and Attitudes towards Mass Media News on Altruistic Behavior

Chi-horng liao.

1 Department of Communication Studies, Tzu Chi University, Hualien 97004, Taiwan; wt.ude.uct.liam@yrrejhcl

2 Bachelor Program in Digital Media and Technology, Tzu Chi University, Hualien 97004, Taiwan

3 Media Production and Education Center, Tzu Chi University, Hualien 97004, Taiwan

Associated Data

Data sharing is not applicable.

Based on the cultivation theory and the theory of planned behavior, this study determined how people’s perceptions of mass media news and their attitudes towards it impact their altruistic behavior by examining the factors that influence perception. The study collected data from 435 individuals with access to mass media in Taiwan, which were analyzed using SEM. The results revealed that media exposure, credibility, and social influence were critical factors that influenced individuals’ perceptions of mass media news, with media exposure having a more significant influence. Surprisingly, the findings demonstrated that perception was negatively related to attitudes, inconsistent with the proposed hypothesis. Thus, perceptions and attitudes were positively associated with altruistic behavior, and attitude was found to mediate the relationship between perceptions about mass media news and altruistic behavior. The study also provides important implications for theory and practice, especially in mass media entities, in developing and adopting practices that promote trust among the audience by encouraging altruistic behaviors through news coverage of various issues.

1. Introduction

There are numerous problems that the public needs to address in the modern world. These global problems include spreading pandemics and other diseases, refugee crises due to political conflicts, and natural disasters, which render most people homeless and in need of different kinds of support. To ease the impact of these issues, people must engage in altruistic acts such as providing medical aid to the displaced, integrating refugees, and making donations [ 1 ]. In the modern world, helping one another to bring about positive social outcomes for the public good is the purpose of many organizations. Therefore, on the road to achieving this purpose and goal, organizations must search for donors who can provide different resources in terms of money, time, physical effort, and other contributions from the general public. The success of these organizations in helping others relies on the extent to which they can attract such donors. To raise funds for altruistic causes, organizations must understand public giving behavior. Altruistic behavior is beneficial to individuals and society at large. For example, it can ensure the well-being of individuals both mentally and physically [ 2 ]. Additionally, it holds considerable significance for humanity’s collaborative efforts and societal advancements. Hence, the factors influencing donors’ altruistic behavior must be understood and analyzed.

Achieving altruistic behavior among the audience depends on whether they perceive the news from mass media positively or negatively. The fact that the audience demonstrates behavior that either supports or does not support altruism depends on their perceptions and attitudes toward the positive and negative impacts of mass media news [ 3 ]. It is essential to investigate the factors that influence the perception of the public towards mass media news and how they relate to attitudes toward mass media news and altruistic behavior. Perceptions and attitudes influence how people behave.

Perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors have been linked in several past studies. For example, there have been observable relationships between user perceptions, attitudes, and behavior toward social media advertising in three countries (South Africa, Australia, and Germany) [ 4 ]. The existence of the relationships between perception, attitudes, and behavior regarding social media advertisements was empirically demonstrated in the study. Research has also examined the online factors influencing consumers’ perceptions and attitudes toward advertising on social media. The findings revealed a significant positive relationship between perceived interactivity and attitude toward social media advertisements and a positive relationship between credibility and attitude toward these advertisements [ 5 , 6 ].

Another study also investigated the youth market’s perceptions, attitudes, and behavior towards internet banking services [ 7 ]. It was discovered that young individuals, aged 16 to 29, had higher positive opinions and behavioral intentions toward online banking services than the other user groups in their study. This study also demonstrated the presence of linkages between perceptions, attitudes, and behavior. Likewise, another study discovered that residents’ perceptions of tourism’s positive economic and cultural impacts influence not only their attitudes toward tourism, but also their attitudes toward tourists. The study aimed to explain how the residents’ perceptions of tourism’s impacts on host communities influenced not only their attitudes toward tourism, but also their attitudes toward tourists. They found that both types of attitudes influence behavioral support for tourism [ 8 ].

Thus, these studies have demonstrated the relationships among perceptions, attitudes, and behavior, and have proven the existence of the relationships among the variables. However, as observed from the above-mentioned previous studies, most of the focus is on consumer behavior, and there is still a need for more information on the public’s giving behavior. Secondly, previous studies have overlooked factors that could influence consumer perceptions. Our study contributed to the literature by developing a model of public perceptions and attitudes that incorporates how the public’s perception of mass media news is brought about. This model suggests the ways these perceptions could be enhanced, as they are crucial in influencing people’s attitudes towards mass media news, which influences their engagement in altruistic behavior. Thus, this study investigates how different factors indirectly influence altruistic behavior through perceptions and attitudes, making it one of the few studies to examine this meaningful relationship. The study also adds to the existing literature on altruism (or altruistic behavior) and how it relates to perception and attitude. Thus, this study’s primary aim was to identify the various elements that shape public perception of mass media news. The current study employs the cultivation theory and the theory of planned behavior (TPB).

The study employs a cross-sectional study design in which data were collected from the general public in Taiwan exposed to mass media news through a questionnaire survey using a convenient, nonprobability sampling method. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was the primary analytical tool used to test this study’s hypotheses. The Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS) Covariance-Based Structural Equation Modelling (CB-SEM) software was used.

1.1. Study Objectives

The study’s main objective was to investigate the factors affecting public perceptions of the use of mass media news concerning the environment, disasters, global aging, strange diseases/pandemics, and poverty-related information, and how these perceptions shape their attitudes toward altruistic behaviors. The specific objectives of the study include examining the relationship between exposure to mass media and people’s perceptions of mass media news, examining the relationship between the credibility of mass media news and people’s perceptions of mass media use, examining the relationship between social influence and people’s perceptions about mass media news/message, investigating the direct relationship between people’s perceptions about mass media news/message and altruistic behavior, investigating the relationship between people’s perceptions about mass media news/message and attitudes toward mass media news, and finally establishing whether attitudes toward mass media news mediate the relationship between publics’ perceptions about the use of mass media and altruistic behaviors.

1.2. Research Structure

This paper comprises eight sections. Section 1 serves as the introduction, providing the study’s background, research motivation, objectives, research gap, and overall structure. Section 2 presents a literature review, exploring relationships among constructs and proposing research hypotheses. Section 3 outlines the study’s methodology, encompassing the research design, measurement items of constructs, data collection method, and data analysis approach. This section also addresses achievement validity and reliability. Section 4 presents the formal survey and the subsequent data analysis. Section 5 discusses the study results and their correlation with previous studies and theories. Section 6 delves into the theoretical underpinnings of the current study’s findings, along with their practical implications. In Section 7 , the author acknowledges the research limitations and offers suggestions for future studies. Finally, the concluding section summarizes the results.

2. Literature Review and Hypotheses Development

This section provides an overview of the subject under study and the supporting theories. It outlines the key concepts of our theoretical model, encompassing aspects like media exposure, credibility, social influence, perceptions about mass media news, attitudes toward it, and altruistic behavior. Additionally, we propose potential connections between these variables and develop hypotheses to be examined in our research.

2.1. Cultivation Theory

The study applied the cultivation theory to elucidate the relationships among the constructs. According to the theory, individuals consistently exposed to media content over a prolonged period tend to interpret social realities based on how they are portrayed. Consequently, this exposure has an impact on the attitudes and behaviors of the audience [ 9 ]. The theory specifically addresses how regular television program viewing can shape people’s understanding of reality, implying that mass media significantly influences their perception of the world. According to the cultivation theory in mass communication, excessive consumption of media content that disproportionately emphasizes positive or negative themes or news can adversely affect the audience [ 10 ]. In other words, exposure to skewed content may negatively affect individuals’ perceptions and attitudes [ 10 ].

2.2. The Theory of Planned Behavior

The theory of planned behavior (TPB) has been employed to establish the relationship between certain independent variables and the dependent variable of altruistic behavior. This theory offers a practical conceptual framework for understanding the complexities of human social behavior [ 11 ]. According to the TPB, an individual must first intend to perform a certain action before actually doing it. This intention is determined by their motivation, collective expectations, and perception of the ease or difficulty of executing the behavior [ 12 ]. Furthermore, the TPB predicts that when individuals express their intention to adopt a particular behavior, it is likely to be manifested in their actions, particularly in situations where they have sufficient control over their behavior [ 13 ].

The mass media plays a significant role in providing the public with information and awareness about emerging issues and novel concerns [ 14 ]. Media coverage of lesser-known issues can impact the level of public concern for these matters, leading to increased attention from the public [ 2 ]. Furthermore, the media can influence the problems that the public perceives as important. The way news is presented can shape how readers or viewers perceive and form specific values and opinions. According to the TPB, personal actions are driven by intended behavior, which in turn is influenced by attitudes (one’s desires), subjective norms (the opinions of others), and perceived behavioral control (one’s belief in their ability to act) [ 15 ]. News consumption is equivalent to consuming information, ultimately impacting people’s perspectives [ 16 ]. The TPB also suggests that one’s attitude can be used to predict possible actions. If an individual holds a more favorable attitude towards a particular behavior, their intention to engage in that behavior will be greater. Conversely, if their attitude toward a behavior is negative, their inclination to engage in it will be diminished. So, it is the attitudes toward mass media news that influence the altruistic behavior of the public.

2.3. Media Exposure and Public’s Perceptions about Mass Media News/Message

Media exposure and usage have a significant impact on shaping views, attitudes, and behaviors among media users. The frequency of communications or media content to which individuals are exposed and the extent to which they retain that information is referred to as media exposure [ 17 ]. Media plays a crucial role in influencing people’s perceptions and behaviors by disseminating information, raising awareness, and providing education. It facilitates communication among individuals and enables them to gain insights into various global, social, and environmental concerns [ 18 ].

Moreover, media exposure fosters feelings of promotion and generates perspectives that foster altruistic behavior. A study revealed that the internet, television, and newspapers are the most commonly utilized channels for obtaining information about international topics such as climate change, natural disasters, and pandemics. Media coverage emerged as the most influential source of knowledge concerning these subjects [ 19 ]. The media to which people are exposed significantly shapes their beliefs, opinions, and actions, substantially impacting their comprehension of altruism-related issues.

Research has consistently shown that an individual’s perceptions can be influenced by the extent of their exposure to a particular subject. For instance, a study revealed that exposure to mass media has a positive impact on an individual’s perception of personal responsibility towards the environment, subsequently affecting their behaviors in relation to environmental concerns [ 20 ]. The research investigated the influence of media exposure and engagement with social networking sites on environmental concerns. Similarly, individuals’ positive evaluations of particular television programs stimulate their interest in altruistic behaviors. For example, witnessing heroic deeds and empathizing with prosocial behavior can inspire individuals to model such conduct [ 21 ]. Exposure to messages related to altruism through mass media coverage also plays a role in shaping people’s awareness and concerns regarding generous or helping behaviors. As the cultivation theory supports, frequent exposure to media content can influence individuals’ perceptions and interactions with their environment, ultimately affecting their behaviors [ 9 ]. Consequently, extensive mass media coverage can increase the public’s perception of giving or helping behavior. Based on this understanding, the study hypothesized that:

Exposure to mass media positively relates to the increased positive perception of the mass media news/message .

2.4. Credibility and Public’s Perception of Mass Media News

Credibility in media news/messages refers to the extent to the degree which receivers perceive the information as trustworthy and believable [ 8 ]. Alternatively, media credibility is defined as a perceived quality based on various factors, including trustworthiness and expertise [ 22 ]. In marketing, credibility pertains to the believability of product information within a brand, necessitating consumers’ perceptions that the brands possess the ability, expertise, willingness, or trustworthiness to consistently deliver what has been promised [ 23 ]. Media credibility has been explored within two major domains: source and medium. Source credibility has been investigated in interpersonal, organizational, and mass-mediated situations by examining how different communicator traits might impact message processing. A communicator can be an individual, group, or organization. On the other hand, medium credibility focuses on the channel through which material is provided rather than the source of the content [ 24 ].

How people view the media significantly influences their behaviors. The general public, government entities, organizations, and advocacy groups hold different media perspectives. The public’s perception of the veracity and accuracy of the information in the media is said to influence the initiation of legislation and discussions on various issues [ 25 ]. While scholars have long debated the credibility of the source and message, message acceptance behaviors are directly influenced by how people perceive the medium. When the medium, source, and information are perceived as accurate, people tend to rely on the information and become persuadable [ 26 ]. Therefore, people base their opinions on altruism on the veracity, dependability, and accuracy of the media sources and material to which they are exposed. Thus, media credibility is a crucial concept, especially considering the influence of mass media news on global issues. The credibility of the source impacts a person’s willingness to change perceptions based on the information provided.

Several empirical studies have demonstrated a clear relationship between media credibility and perception. For instance, research has shown that the credibility of an eWOM (Electronic word of mouth) source, as indicated by dimensions of expertness and trustworthiness, positively impacts risk perception [ 27 ]. This implies that the media, through which a message is conveyed, directly has an influence on its believability. Credibility is most significantly influenced by factors such as trustworthiness and knowledge, with the reliability of a source contributing to its perceived morality or goodness.

Nevertheless, expertise is primarily defined by knowledge, experience, and competencies [ 28 ]. These findings show that media news with high credibility is perceived as possessing high levels of trustworthiness and expertness. Conversely, information from unreliable sources requires more scrutiny and elaboration than compared to highly trustworthy sources [ 29 , 30 ]. Individuals become more confident of the data since they perceive the source positively. Therefore, based on the above argument, this research proposes that:

Credibility (trustworthiness and expertness) of the mass media positively relates to the public’s positive perception of the mass media news.

2.5. Social Influence and Public’s Perception of Mass Media News

Social influence refers to the changes generated in an individual’s mindset due to external sources, such as communicated information [ 7 ]. It involves the individual’s belief about how significant others perceive whether they should engage in a particular behavior, known as social influence [ 31 ]. The exploration of social impact seeks to comprehend how external factors, like communicated data, can alter an individual’s perceptions and attitudes [ 7 ]. Social influence could be a driving force for individuals exposed to mass media news/messages, as it influences their perception of its usefulness. Mass media and internet websites can act as sources of social influence, as individuals seek information from various sources to learn about different issues [ 15 ]. Social influence leads people to adjust their attitudes, behaviors, opinions, or beliefs to align with those of the majority, a phenomenon known as conformity [ 32 ]. Studies have demonstrated that social influence relates to youth risk perceptions [ 33 ]. Hence, the study proposed that:

Social influence positively relates to public perceptions of mass media news.

2.6. Perceptions of People about Mass Media News/Messages and Altruistic Behavior

Inherently, humans are social, and many of their thoughts, decisions, and behaviors revolve around their interactions with others. A social phenomenon that garnered significant attention is altruism [ 34 ]. Altruism is defined as a selfless act performed for the benefit of another. This behavior seeks to promote the welfare of others without any conscious regard for one’s self-interests [ 21 ]. Humans demonstrate and act upon this genuine concern for the well-being of others. Understanding the factors that influence altruistic behavior has been the subject of extensive research in psychology and economics for many decades [ 1 ]. However, prior research in these two fields on altruistic behavior has mostly been conducted independently. Therefore, this study introduces the concept of “altruistic behavior,” which describes the motivational state of individuals who actively promote the well-being of others at their own expense [ 25 ]. Altruism can be understood in terms of two main concepts: (1) behavioral altruism, which refers to observable actions that benefit others, and (2) psychological altruism, which involves the underlying motivations and intentions behind such behavior.

Regarding behavior, altruism encompasses any action taken out of altruistic intentions. From a psychological perspective, altruism involves the willingness to sacrifice one’s welfare to benefit someone else [ 29 ]. Despite many definitions of altruism, they all share a common theme, implying an act of benevolence carried out for the good of others, with no thought of personal gain or detriment. Altruistic behavior is described as voluntary action undertaken to help others without expecting external rewards, compensation, or to avoid punishment [ 3 , 35 ]. Most authors agree that actual altruistic behaviors are acts of kindness performed to help others, driven by one’s own free will, with the sole purpose of benefiting the other person, and without expecting anything in return. The focus is on benefiting others, though it may only sometimes be beneficial.

Altruistic behavior is related to prosocial behavior, as the authors have established similarities and differences between the two. For example, both behaviors share a similar focus on advancing the well-being of others besides the individual carrying out the action [ 14 ]. In other words, both behaviors involve helping people in need without expecting anything in return. However, the two differ in their intents and motives, costs and benefits, and social context. Altruism refers to the drive to improve the well-being of others as the ultimate objective, while prosocial behavior encompasses a broader range of deeds performed to benefit individuals or groups other than oneself [ 36 ]. In terms of costs and benefits, altruism is characterized as a behavior that incurs costs for the individual performing it but yields benefits for the recipient.

In contrast, prosocial conduct encompasses any action that benefits someone else. To elucidate the distinction between prosocial behavior and altruism in a social context, it is worth noting that the former involves actions highly esteemed and anticipated by society. On the other hand, altruism is more precise, focusing on activities specifically aimed at advancing the well-being of a group as a whole [ 14 ].

A person’s level of altruism and its underlying causes can be traced back to their social learning background. Families, educational institutions, and the mass media play significant roles in socializing individuals in a given society. The mass media, in particular, can influence individuals by teaching acceptable behaviors through media messages [ 2 , 37 ]. Additionally, media coverage can inspire people to get involved in crisis relief initiatives during a natural or human-caused catastrophe [ 9 ]. The mass media constantly instruct people on acting, feeling, and thinking.

People’s perceptions of media have been found to significantly impact their actions [ 38 ]. Public opinion and stakeholders’ reactions to initiate legislation and engage in discussions are influenced by their perception of the credibility of the mass media news/messages [ 25 ]. When individuals perceive the media, its sources, and messages as trustworthy and reliable, they become convincing. Previous studies have primarily focused on how individuals’ behavior in areas such as politics is affected by their perception of media. However, this study concerns how people’s perceptions of mass media news/messages about altruism affect their altruistic behaviors. Therefore, this study suggested that:

Perceptions of mass media news positively relate to altruistic behavior.

2.7. Perceptions and Attitudes towards Mass Media News/Messages

To understand the effect of mass media news/messages on people’s selfless actions, it is necessary to investigate how the public responds to the message and gain insight into their attitudes. Attitude refers to a mental inclination demonstrated by appraising a particular item with some extent of approval or disapproval [ 39 ]. Gaining insight into the public’s attitude means understanding whether they favor or oppose media coverage regarding charitable behavior and whether they are open to adopting such behavior. People form their perceptions of mass media news/messages through exposure, social influence, and credibility of the source and message [ 8 ].

If the audience is consistently exposed to and finds the mass media news trustworthy, their attitudes toward the media’s coverage of global disasters and altruistic behaviors will be positively influenced. For instance, it has been argued that based on their perceptions of exposure, credibility, and social influence, the audience subsequently forms their attitudes toward news/messages from mass media about altruistic behavior [ 8 ]. Similarly, the correlation between individual perceptions and attitudes toward certain behaviors has been verified [ 40 ]. Thus, the authors of this study expected to explore whether the audience’s perception on the credibility and reliability of the news/message they are exposed to leads to a positive attitude toward altruistic behavior. Hence, in this regard, perceptions of the mass media news/message about the global crisis and altruistic behavior determine audience attitudes toward the mass media news/message. Furthermore, this research expects to find a mediation effect of the attitudes towards mass media news/messages in the direct relationship between perceptions of mass media news/messages and altruistic behavior, as perceptions are also related to attitudes towards mass media news/messages. Therefore, this study proposed the following hypotheses:

Perceptions about mass media news/messages positively relate to attitudes toward mass media news/messages.

Attitudes toward mass media news/messages mediate the relationship between perceptions of mass media news/messages and altruistic behavior.

2.8. People’s Attitudes toward Mass Media News/Messages and Altruistic Behavior

The theory of planned behavior (TPB) states that people’s behavior is mainly determined by their attitudes, which can be understood as how they view and evaluate an object [ 8 ]. The TPB has been employed to forecast the actions of people based on their attitudes. Researchers suggest that if the audience or people have a favorable view of mass media news/messages about altruism, they will be more likely to participate in such behaviors [ 41 ], such as participating in charitable activities and giving donations. The attitude of the public towards news/information disseminated by mass media will play a crucial role in determining their level of involvement in such altruistic activities. How people perceive, think about, and believe in the news/message from the mass media significantly impacts on whether or not they will participate in altruistic behavior.

Previous research has determined an observable relationship between an audience’s attitude and willingness to be involved in aiding activities. Thus, strong attitudes are considered good predictors of behavior [ 41 ]. For example, a study measuring the altruism levels and attitudes of nursing students towards their profession demonstrated that the participants had a higher-than-average level of altruism and held positive feelings about nursing [ 34 ]. This indicates that the more positive the public’s outlook on mass media news/messages, the more likely they are to participate in assisting or donating activities. Consistent with the TBP, if someone has a more positive attitude toward a specific action induced by their perceptions, their willingness to act in that particular way will increase [ 13 ].

Conversely, if their attitude is negative, their willingness to act will decrease. As negativity increases, the intention to engage in the behavior will also decrease. Therefore, a positive attitude towards mass media news/messages results in increased engagement in altruistic behavior. Consequently, this research proposed that:

People’s positive attitudes towards mass media news/messages positively relate to their altruistic behavior.

Figure 1 illustrates the proposed research framework for the study. The framework includes the primary constructs and their interrelationships, highlighting the key factors that are investigated to understand the influence of mass media news on altruistic behavior. The framework serves as a visual representation of the theoretical model that guides the empirical investigation in this study.

Research framework.

3. Research Methodology

3.1. sampling method and procedure.

The data for this study were collected using a questionnaire survey conducted through a convenient sampling method, which falls under the category of non-probability sampling. Convenient sampling is a commonly used form of sampling in population research. It was chosen for its popularity due to its cost-effectiveness, time efficiency, and simplicity. Convenience sampling involves collecting participant data because individuals are readily and easily available. It selects participants who are accessible in a specific location [ 42 ]. However, it is important to note that convenient sampling has some inherent weaknesses. One of the main drawbacks is selection bias, which occurs when certain individuals are more likely to be included in the sample than others, leading to a non-representative sample. As a result, the sample may not accurately reflect the characteristics of the more significant or general population being studied.

This limitation can impact the external validity or generalizability of the study’s findings. Additionally, convenient sampling is not recommended for descriptive or causal research, as it may introduce biases and limit the ability to draw meaningful conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships. While it may provide quick and accessible data, researchers should be cautious about generalizing the results beyond the specific sample used in the study [ 43 ]. The potential risk of motivation bias in the study due to the motivation of participants is also an important point to consider. Motivation to participate may influence the willingness of individuals to be involved in the research, potentially affecting the representativeness of the sample. By recruiting more participants, the researchers aimed to enhance the diversity and representation within the sample, which can help to mitigate the impact of motivation bias. The decision to conduct the study in Taiwan is justified by its vulnerability to natural disasters, such as its location in the earthquake belt and being on major tracks of typhoons in the northwest Pacific area and the East Asia monsoon system [ 44 ]. Conducting the study in a region frequently affected by natural disasters is relevant and appropriate, as it allows for an exploration of the relationships between media exposure, attitudes, and altruistic behaviors in the context of global crises. By acknowledging the limitations of the sampling technique and providing a rationale for the choice of study location, the researchers carefully consider potential biases and context-specific factors. Researchers should continue to be aware of these limitations and take them into account when interpreting and generalizing the study’s results.

The study participants consisted of the general public, specifically those exposed to mass media news related to current global issues such as natural disasters, pandemics, other disease outbreaks, and environmental issues. The questionnaire used screening questions to identify these participants to confirm their media exposure. The questionnaires were created using google forms, an online survey tool, and were transferred to the participants electronically, including social networking sites, email, Instagram, and Messenger. Participation in the study was voluntary, and respondents willingly took part after being informed about the research purpose. A cover letter accompanying the questionnaire indicated that the survey was conducted solely for academic research. The participants were assured of the confidentiality of their responses, ensuring that their identities and data would remain anonymous and protected. To cater to the local language, the scales used in the study were written in Chinese. This decision was made to ensure that the participants were comfortable and could easily comprehend the questions and respond accurately.

The researchers’ efforts in distributing 467 questionnaires and receiving 450 responses, with a high return rate of 96.4%, are commendable as it reflects a substantial representation of the target population. This robust response rate enhances the reliability and validity of the data collected, increasing confidence in the study’s findings and their applicability to the general public exposed to mass media news on global issues in Taiwan. The study’s well-structured and comprehensive approach to participant recruitment and data collection ensured that the research was conducted ethically and effectively. The high response rate further supports the credibility of the study’s findings.

The study was conducted over a period of ten weeks, during which 450 responses were collected from participants. After addressing missing values in the data, a total of 435 responses remained for analysis. The presence of missing data poses several challenges that necessitate careful handling [ 45 ]. Missing values can reduce statistical power, which refers to the probability of correctly rejecting the null hypothesis when it is false [ 46 , 47 ]. Additionally, missing data can lead to biased parameter estimations, limited sample representation, and increased data analysis complexity due to the need for additional information [ 46 ]. To address this issue, we employed a data deletion approach to remove records with missing values, ensuring a complete dataset for analysis.

Another important bias to consider is social desirability bias. Participants may have responded in a manner they perceived as socially desirable, particularly for constructs related to doing good to others, potentially influencing the results. Social desirability bias can impact mean scores, constrain the variability of responses, and affect correlations between variables, leading to inconsistent conclusions [ 48 ]. Researchers should be aware of this bias and take measures to minimize its influence, such as using anonymity in data collection or employing techniques to assess and control for social desirability bias in the analysis. By acknowledging these potential biases and limitations, the researchers demonstrate transparency and awareness of data collection and analysis challenges. It is essential for researchers to address and mitigate biases to ensure the accuracy and reliability of their study findings [ 49 ].

3.2. Questionaire Design

The survey required active participation from the participants and involved completing a structured questionnaire. As the original questionnaire was in English and the target population spoke Chinese, the researcher conducted translations using the back-translation procedure [ 50 ]. This process ensures accurate and reliable translations by translating the questionnaire back to the original language version.

The questionnaire was divided into three sections. The first section collected data on the demographic traits of respondents, including age, gender, occupation, education, marital status, and income level. The second part of the questionnaire aimed to ascertain whether respondents had encountered or been exposed to mass media reports or communication-related topics such as natural disasters, environmental/climate matters, and pandemics. The third section of the questionnaire focused on measuring the correlations between various constructs of credibility, mass media exposure, social influence, perceptions, attitudes, and altruistic behavior by measuring them. This section aimed to determine the relationships and associations among these constructs, providing valuable insights into the study’s research objectives.

3.3. Measurement Items

The questionnaire design for the third section was primarily based on multiple-item measurement scales adapted from prior research on mass media exposure, credibility, social influence, perceptions, attitudes, and altruistic behavior. All measurement items were developed using 5-point rating scales with the following anchors: 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = agree, and 5 = strongly agree, except for the media exposure construct where the anchors were as follows; 1 = Never, 2 = Rarely, 3 = Occasionally, 4 = Often, 5 = Always. The research framework of this study consisted of six constructs, each with a designated number of items. Specific phrases were modified to better align with the scope of this research. Mass media exposure (ME) was defined as the attention or focus given to media outlets, such as television, newspapers, radio, and the Internet [ 18 ]. To measure this construct, a 5-point Likert scale was used to ask respondents how often they encounter mass media coverage regarding global crises and altruism from the four types of mass media: TV shows/news, newspapers, radio programs/news, and the web (α = 0.83). For this construct, the scale ranged from 1–5 where (1 = Never, 2 = Rarely, 3 = Occasionally, 4 = Often, 5 = Always) [ 12 , 18 ].

In this study, the credibility (PC) of a mass media source/message was assessed based on its ability to reflect reality and believability, using six measurement items [ 5 ]. Participants were asked to evaluate these items to determine their level of trust in the mass media’s reporting on critical world events, especially disaster-related news, and its validity (α = 0.81).

Social influence (SI) was measured using a four-item scale [ 7 ], where participants rated their agreement on a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Sample items in this construct include “Unless I can get favorable reactions from others, I see no reason to use mass media” and “My private views about mass media news are different from those I express publicly” (α = 0.78).

Public perceptions of mass media news (PU) were assessed using five items [ 7 ], previously used in another study [ 9 ]. Sample questions included “Mass media news provides accurate information about the needs of the public” and “Mass media news should be used to expose more public needs” (α = 0.84).

Attitudes toward mass media news were measured using a five-item scale [ 51 ], with items modified to suit the context of this study. Examples included statements like “It is a good and smart idea to use mass media platforms” and “Overall, my attitude towards mass media usage is favorable/positive” (α = 0.83).

Altruistic behavior/altruism was defined as intentional and voluntary behavior benefiting others without expecting external rewards, compensations, or avoiding punishment. A simplified 9-item SRA scale was used to measure altruism, as the original 20-item composition would be challenging to incorporate in the same questionnaire with other constructs [ 52 ]. Sample items included “I have ever given money to a charity organization” and “I have given goods or clothes to a charity as a result of the influence of news in the media” (α = 0.82). Negatively worded items were reverse coded before conducting reliability and validity tests and factor analysis on the scale items. This ensured that high values indicated the same type of response across all items. All data analyses were conducted in SPSS.

3.4. Data Analysis

Structural equation modeling (SEM) was the primary analytical tool used to test the hypotheses in this study. The Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS) software, specifically the Covariance-Based Structural Equation Modeling (CB-SEM) approach, was employed for the analysis. CB-SEM is particularly suitable for sample sizes greater than 50 and provides more precise estimates in such cases [ 53 ]. The choice of CB-SEM over Variance-Based Structural Equation Modeling (VB-SEM) was based on the nature of the study, considering the adequate sample size and normally distributed data. CB-SEM is a parametric approach that requires normally distributed data. In contrast, VB-SEM is a non-parametric procedure suitable for smaller sample sizes and does not require the assumption of normal distribution [ 54 ].

Additionally, CB-SEM was chosen for its confirmatory nature, making it suitable for testing predetermined hypotheses, unlike VB-SEM, which is more exploratory [ 55 ]. To analyze the mediation effect, bootstrapping macro-PROCESS V4.2 in the IBM Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 22 was used. Bootstrapping is a resampling technique that estimates indirect effects and mediation in the model, providing more robust results and accounting for potential bias in the mediation effect analysis.

3.5. Descriptive Statistics of Sample Structure

The sample structure of the participants was analyzed by examining various demographic characteristics, which also served as control variables in the study. The demographic items and control variables included gender, age, income, and education qualification. Regarding gender, participants were asked to state their gender by indicating 1 = Male or 2 = Female. Out of the 435 remaining responses, 198 participants identified as males, representing 45.5%, while 237 participants identified as females, representing 54.5%. In terms of age, participants were given the option to select from predefined age ranges. The age range of 18–25 had the highest frequency, with 286 participants, accounting for 65.7% of the sample

On the other hand, the age range of “43 to 50” had the lowest frequency, with only 18 participants, representing 4.1%. Monthly income was measured by asking participants to indicate the range to which their monthly earnings belong. The majority of respondents (40.2%) reported a monthly income below TWD 30,000, while only a small percentage (5.7%) reported an income between TWD 50,001 and TWD 60,000. In terms of education qualification, 87.6% of the respondents possessed a bachelor’s degree, making it the most prevalent level of education in the sample. Participants with a doctorate (PhD.) had the lowest response rate, with only 0.2% of the sample reporting this qualification. These descriptive statistics provide insights into the demographic composition of the sample, which can be used as control variables in the analysis to understand how different factors influence the study’s variables.

3.6. Multicollinearity Assessment

The Tolerance and Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) was conducted to assess multicollinearity issues, which can be a concern if the VIF value exceeds 10 [ 55 ]. The results of the multicollinearity analysis in this study indicated that all the collected constructs had VIF values of less than 10, signifying the absence of significant multicollinearity issues. The highest VIF value observed in the study was 2.390, well below the threshold of 10. Thus, the research was not affected by multicollinearity problems, ensuring the reliability of the study’s findings.

3.7. Common Method Bias

Harman’s single-factor test was conducted to rule out or check for common method bias (CMB). The test involves examining whether the variance extracted for the first factor is lower than 50%. If the explained variance of the first factor is less than 50%, it suggests that CMB is not a significant concern in the research [ 56 ]. In this study, 33 elements were extracted, and the first factor accounted for 27.117% of the explained variance. This result indicates no severe problem with common method bias in the dataset, as the explained variance of the first factor was below the 50% threshold. Therefore, the study’s findings are not likely substantially affected by common method bias.

4.1. Measurement Model Assessment

4.1.1. confirmatory factor analysis (cfa).

To assess the validity and reliability of the measures for the six constructs, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was conducted using Covariance Based Structural Equation Modelling (CB-SEM) in AMOS 21.0. The CFA was performed to evaluate the goodness of fit of the six-factor model before conducting hypothesis tests. The results of the CFA demonstrated a satisfactory level of fit for the model. The χ2 value was 943.51, with 359 degrees of freedom and a significance level of less than 0.001. Additionally, the Comparative Fit Index (CFI) value was 0.90, the Incremental Fit Index (IFI) value was 0.90, and the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) value was 0.06, indicating a reasonable fitness level. Previous research has suggested that an RMSEA score below 0.05 signifies a “good fit,” while a score below 0.08 suggests a satisfactory match between the model and data [ 57 ]. Therefore, an RMSEA value of 0.06 indicates a good correspondence between the model and the data in our study.

These outcomes suggest that the participants were able to differentiate between the concepts being analyzed, as indicated in Table 1 below. The CFA results provide support for the validity and reliability of the measures used in the study, ensuring the robustness of the subsequent hypothesis testing.

Results of Confirmatory Factor Analysis for the Measures of Variables Studied.

*** p < 0.001. Note: CFI = comparative fit index; IFI = Incremental Fit Index; RMSEA = root-mean-square error of approximation. Six-factor model: media exposure, credibility, social influence, perceptions, attitudes, and altruistic behavior. Five-factor model: media exposure and credibility combined. Four-factor model: perceptions and attitudes combined. Three-factor model: media exposure, credibility, and social influence combined. Two-factor model: perception, attitude, and altruistic behavior combined.

4.1.2. Composite Reliability, Discriminant, and Convergent Validity

Table 2 displays the Composite Reliability (CR) values for all constructs, ranging from 0.77 to 0.86, which indicates a high level of reliability. A CR value exceeding 0.7 ensures the reliability of all constructs [ 55 ], and our results demonstrate that all constructs meet this criterion. The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) was also calculated to assess the convergent validity of the model’s constructs. AVE measures the extent to which a construct accounts for variance compared to the variance resulting from measurement inaccuracies. AVE values higher than 0.5 are considered satisfactory for evaluating the convergent validity of the model’s constructs [ 55 ]. In some fields, AVE values higher than 0.4 may also be considered satisfactory [ 1 ].

Means, standard deviations, correlations, and reliability.

Note: N = 435; * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01 reliability coefficients are reported along the diagonal parentheses.

The test results in Table 2 show that most AVE values exceed the threshold of 0.5, indicating strong convergent validity for the majority of the constructs. However, a few values show a slight decrease below 0.5, reaching 0.45. It is worth noting that AVE may be a conservative estimate of the measurement model’s validity [ 54 , 55 ]. Some researchers argue that based on composite reliability alone, the convergent validity of a construct can be considered satisfactory even if more than 50% of the variance is attributed to error. Although a few AVE values fall slightly below the recommended level of 0.5, the composite reliability of all constructs is notably higher than the recommended level, providing further support for the reliability and validity of the measurement items.

The high CR values and satisfactory AVE values in Table 2 indicate that the constructs used in the study are reliable and have strong convergent validity. These findings enhance the credibility of the study’s measurement model and support the subsequent hypothesis testing.

4.2. Examination of Research Hypotheses

The study utilized structural equation modeling to examine the research hypotheses and investigate the relationships among the constructs. The analysis results provide insights into the expected strength and significance of the hypothesized linkages between the variables, either confirming or rejecting the research hypotheses. Path coefficients in structural equation modeling are rated on a scale from negative one to positive one. A value close to +1 indicates a strong positive correlation, while a value relative to −1 indicates a strong negative correlation.

As shown in Table 3 and Table 4 , all the relationships, except one (PU to AT), were positively related, with positive coefficient values. The results indicate that media exposure, perceived credibility, and social influence were significantly and positively associated with the public’s perceptions of mass media news, with coefficient values of 0.48 and 0.27 at p < 0.001 and 0.11 at p < 0.01, respectively. Therefore, these results provide supported hypotheses H1, H2, and H3.

Examination Results of Research Hypotheses.

Note: *** p < 0.001 ME = Media exposure, PC = Credibility, SI = Social Influence, PU = Perception, AT = Attitudes, AB = Altruistic Behavior.

Bootstrapping Results for Indirect Effects.

Note: PU = Perception of the public; AT = Attitudes; AB = Altruistic behavior.

Regarding the influence of peoples’ perceptions of mass media news on altruistic behavior (H4), the study found that perceptions about mass media news significantly and positively affect altruistic behavior (coefficient of 0.21, SE = 0.04 and p < 0.001). Therefore, hypothesis 4 was supported, indicating a direct relationship between perceptions about mass media news and altruistic behavior.

However, hypothesis 5, which suggested that perceptions about mass media news would influence people’s attitudes, was not supported. The results showed a negative relationship (coefficient of −0.18, SE = 0.06, and p < 0.003), which was inconsistent with the proposed hypothesis. To further investigate the relationship between perceptions about mass media news, attitudes, and altruistic behavior, the researchers conducted a bootstrap analysis to test hypothesis 6, which proposed the mediation effect of attitudes on the relationship between perceptions about mass media news and altruistic behavior. The results showed that the mediation effect was significant (estimate = −0.13, 95% CI [−0.20, −0.06]), supporting the existence of mediation.

Similarly, as hypothesized, people’s positive attitudes toward mass media news/messages were significantly and positively related to their altruistic behavior, with coefficients of 0.71, SE = 0.03 at p < 0.001. Thus, hypothesis 7 was supported, indicating a positive relationship between positive attitudes toward mass media news and altruistic behavior. Overall, the study provides evidence for the significant impact of perceptions about mass media news on altruistic behavior and the mediating role of attitudes in this relationship. The findings contribute to understanding the role of mass media in shaping individuals’ altruistic actions and responses to global crises.

Figure 2 represents the standardized path estimates for the structural equation model (SEM) used to test the proposed research framework. The standardized path estimates represent the strength and direction of the relationships between the different constructs in the model. The figure includes the standardized coefficients for each path, which indicate the strength of the relationship in terms of standard deviations. The figure also consists of the significance level ( p -value) of each path estimate.

Standardized path estimates for the structural equation model. Note: N = 435; ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001.

5. Discussion

Drawing on the cultivation theory and the TPB [ 9 , 12 ], this study aimed to investigate the factors that influence the public’s perceptions of the usage of mass media news regarding natural disasters, pandemics, and environmental issues. Further, the study aimed to examine the direct and indirect effects of these perceptions on public attitudes and altruistic behavior. The findings of the study have both theoretical and practical implications, which are discussed in this section.

The research findings highlighted several factors influencing the public’s perceptions of mass media news. People are increasingly turning to mass media, particularly TV and radio, as a primary and crucial source of information on emerging issues [ 58 ]. The media has the potential to disseminate knowledge, raise awareness, and shape individuals’ attitudes and behaviors [ 58 ]. As the media extensively covers emerging topics, it can significantly impact people’s understanding and opinions, ultimately influencing their responses to crises and emergencies [ 20 ]. This study examined how mass media coverage affects the public’s perceptions and behaviors, recognizing the importance of media information during critical events, such as natural disasters.

During crises, individuals heavily rely on media coverage to make sense of their surroundings and stay informed about ongoing events. The mass media gradually influences people’s behavior, emotions, and thoughts in response to the information they receive [ 58 ]. The study’s findings contribute to a better understanding of how media messages can shape public perceptions and encourage altruistic behaviors, particularly in the context of crisis relief initiatives and charitable actions. This research underscores the importance of crafting media messages with care, especially during emergencies and global crises. Mass media can mobilize public support and engagement in response to pressing issues by conveying information and promoting altruism. Policymakers, organizations, and media practitioners can leverage the power of mass media to create public awareness, foster positive attitudes, and encourage collective efforts toward social good.

The results of this study support the proposed hypothesis that mass media exposure, the credibility of the news, and social influence significantly influence people’s perceptions of mass media usefulness, which, in turn, affect their attitudes and behaviors. These findings are consistent with previous research, which has also shown a positive correlation between exposure to mass media and the public’s perceptions of its usefulness. For instance, previous studies have found that individuals’ perceptions of disasters are significantly influenced by their exposure to mass media, with television being the most impactful and widely used medium [ 9 ]. This highlights the significant role that mass media plays in shaping how people perceive and interpret social realities, particularly regarding disaster-related news.

The cultivation theory, which posits that frequent exposure to mass media shapes individuals’ views of social realities, is supported by the findings of this study. The more individuals are exposed to mass media, the more their perceptions of the relevance and usefulness of the conveyed news or messages are influenced [ 9 ]. This is also reflected in other research on environmental issues, which found that mass media has a significant impact on the public’s perspectives [ 20 ]. Likewise, the study indicates that exposure to mass media has a stronger effect on the public’s perception of the usefulness of the news/message compared to the perceived credibility and social influence of the media, as evidenced by the higher coefficient value of 0.48 compared to 0.27 and 0.11 for credibility and social influence, respectively.

As expected, the study found a direct relationship between individuals’ perceptions of mass media credibility and their perceptions of its usefulness. When people trust the news or media sources they use, they are more likely to engage with and understand the information presented. This leads them to recognize the value of the message and its source, reducing their need to seek information from alternative sources. To build and maintain the confidence of their audience, media organizations should employ effective methods of disseminating information. One research emphasized the significance of audience trust in the media, underscoring the importance of ensuring that media organizations are viewed as trustworthy by their viewers [ 5 ]. Maintaining trust is crucial for media organizations as it influences the public’s perception of the usefulness and reliability of the information they provide. When individuals have confidence in the media, they are more likely to rely on it as a credible source of information, which can lead to positive attitudes and behaviors, such as engaging in altruistic activities and supporting charitable causes.

This study also revealed a significant and positive correlation between social influence and individuals’ perceptions of the effectiveness of mass media. This contrasts with previous studies, which demonstrated a negative impact of social influence on perceived usefulness [ 7 ]. One of the previous studies found no correlation between perceived use and social influence [ 30 ]. The disparity in findings can be attributed to the different settings of our study compared to the research focused on young clients in the banking industry [ 7 ]. The present study observed that social influence plays a crucial role in shaping individuals’ perceptions of mass media news. This aligns with the notion that people often orient their behavior based on social comparison and exchange, with socialization agents serving as important sources of observing and learning values, norms, attitudes, and behaviors. Among these socialization agents, mass media stands out as a significant influencer. Therefore, social influence indeed has an impact on how individuals perceive mass media news, subsequently influencing various behaviors.

The confirmation of hypothesis 4 affirms that people’s positive perceptions of mass media news regarding altruism directly impact their altruistic behavior. Mass media news has the power to foster optimistic attitudes toward generosity and assistance among individuals. Those who perceive the mass media’s crisis coverage as beneficial are more likely to be driven to help those in need and engage in altruistic behaviors. This finding aligns with the TBP, which asserts that a prior intention to act is crucial before engaging in a behavior. Therefore, people’s perceptions of behavior, collective expectations, and beliefs in its benefits influence their involvement in that behavior. In this case, positive perceptions of mass media news can encourage individuals to engage in acts of altruism.

However, the hypothesis that people’s attitudes toward mass media would be positively related to their perceptions of mass media news was disproven, as there was a negative relationship between the two variables. This means that the fifth hypothesis cannot be supported. This discovery contradicts previous investigations, which found a positive association between perceptions and attitudes [ 8 ]. Additionally, another study established that the most significant factors shaping one’s attitude are the evaluations of specific effects or perceptions [ 39 ]. In light of this negative relationship, it is suggested that personalized approaches should address individuals’ negative perceptions of mass media news rather than relying solely on mass communication [ 6 ].

The negative relationship between perceptions about mass media news and attitudes toward mass media news can be attributed to the age of the respondents, with the majority falling within the 18 to 25 age range. Young individuals tend to develop negative perceptions and attitudes towards traditional mass media and may prefer social media platforms. This preference for social media could lead to a perception of mass media news as untrustworthy, which can influence their media usage and behavioral responses. Additionally, the public might only trust certain information from mass media news during a crisis, leading to biased perceptions and negative attitudes toward the news [ 59 ].

On the other hand, the study has confirmed the existence of the mediation effect by attitudes toward mass media news in the relationship between public perceptions of mass media news and altruistic behavior, supporting hypothesis 6. This implies that individuals’ perceptions can influence their altruistic behavior through their attitudes toward mass media news. The negative mediation effect aligns with the negative relationship found in hypothesis 5. To encourage positive attitudes and promote altruistic behavior, mass media entities should focus on attracting the attention of young adults when disseminating news about altruism. This will help shape their future behavior and increase acts of altruism. Furthermore, during times of crisis, it is crucial for mass media entities to provide accurate and trustworthy information to ensure that the public can develop positive attitudes toward the news and be motivated to engage in altruistic behavior.

As hypothesized, attitudes toward mass media news positively influenced altruistic behavior. This implies that individuals with positive attitudes toward mass media news are more likely to engage in giving and helping behavior, while those with negative attitudes are less likely to do so due to perceptions of unreliability or lack of legitimacy. This finding is consistent with the TPB, which posits that people’s behavior is influenced by their attitudes, which is defined as how they view and evaluate an object [ 39 ]. According to the TPB, attitudes play a significant role in predicting people’s actions.

Previous research has also suggested that individuals with favorable views of mass media news/messages related to altruism are more inclined to participate in altruistic behaviors [ 40 ]. Therefore, this study provides further evidence to support the TPB’s argument that the public’s attitudes toward news and information disseminated by mass media play a crucial role in determining their level of involvement in altruistic activities. By understanding and shaping these attitudes, mass media entities can potentially promote and encourage more altruistic behavior among the audience.

6. Theoretical and Practical Implications

The research has made a noteworthy contribution to the study of altruism. This study’s significance can be demonstrated in both theoretical and managerial aspects. Theoretically, the study has contributed to the current body of literature by identifying the factors that can affect a person’s inclination toward altruistic actions. Previous research studies primarily concentrated on consumer behavior, with little attention paid to the humanitarian aspect, as evidenced by the limited studies on perceptions and attitudes.

The study’s contribution is significant both in theoretical and managerial aspects. Theoretically, this research adds to the existing literature by identifying factors influencing individuals’ inclination toward altruistic actions. Previous studies have primarily focused on consumer behavior, giving limited attention to the humanitarian aspect, especially perceptions and attitudes. By examining the relationships between different factors and their impact on perceptions, attitudes, and altruistic behavior, this study provides valuable insights into the role of mass media in disseminating information about emerging crises. It highlights how mass media influences people’s behavior, emotions, and thoughts during humanitarian efforts. Moreover, the study supports and extends the arguments related to the cultivation theory and the theory of planned behavior, adding evidence to these theoretical frameworks.

From a managerial perspective, the findings of this research can guide mass media entities in shaping their content to promote altruistic behavior among the audience. Understanding the factors that influence perceptions and attitudes can help media organizations create more effective messages that resonate with the public and encourage them to engage in acts of altruism. By leveraging the potential of mass media to disseminate information about humanitarian causes, media entities can play a significant role in fostering a more altruistic and compassionate society.

The example of the Da Ai TV Station of the Tzu Chi Foundation in Taiwan serves as a compelling illustration of the powerful influence that mass media can have on shaping public perceptions and inspiring altruistic behavior. Da Ai TV Station’s focus on broadcasting programs and news centered around good deeds and helping others has a profound impact on viewers’ perceptions and attitudes. Through its constant coverage of positive and altruistic actions, the TV station helps purify and change the perceptions of people in society. By consistently highlighting stories of kindness, compassion, and charitable activities, Da Ai TV fosters a sense of empathy and encourages viewers to embrace altruism as a core value. This media influence extends beyond mere perception changes: it motivates people to act and get involved in charitable activities. The station’s emphasis on promoting goodness and helping others inspires many volunteers to join the Tzu Chi Foundation, contributing their time, money, and efforts to support various charitable initiatives. The example of Da Ai TV demonstrates how a media platform focusing on promoting altruism and good deeds can have a transformative effect on public perceptions and behaviors. By leveraging the power of mass media for positive social change, organizations like Tzu Chi Foundation exemplify how media can inspire collective action and create a more compassionate and caring society.

The findings of this research emphasize the importance of reliable and trustworthy mass media news in promoting altruistic behavior. People’s perceptions and attitudes toward the news can significantly influence their willingness to engage in selfless actions. Therefore, mass media organizations should be mindful of their impact on their audience and aim to create positive views and mindsets toward humanitarian news. To achieve this, media entities should focus on delivering accurate and reliable information and employing effective strategies to gain the trust of their audience. Allocating more resources to mass media and thoroughly verifying sources can help enhance the credibility of the information disseminated, increasing the public’s confidence in the news.

Furthermore, media organizations should be cautious about the potential negative impact of exposure to negative messages. Negative perceptions of news may discourage individuals from participating in altruistic behavior. Therefore, media entities should strive to balance reporting on critical issues and providing positive, uplifting content that inspires altruistic actions. This study highlights the pivotal role that mass media can play in shaping public attitudes and behaviors toward humanitarian efforts. By leveraging this influence responsibly, media entities can contribute to building a more compassionate and altruistic society, fostering a collective willingness to provide aid and support during times of crisis.

Indeed, regular public education and dissemination of information through reliable media channels are necessary to foster people’s altruistic behaviors, especially in the face of emerging issues and crises. Media plays a crucial role in influencing public attitudes and actions, and as such, it should provide accurate and trustworthy information to encourage altruism among the audience. To achieve this, media entities must offer comprehensive reporting on various emerging topics, ensuring that the information is timely, accurate, and easily accessible to the public. This includes providing detailed coverage before, during, and after crises, allowing for people to understand the reasons, foreseeability, and consequences of emergencies.

Furthermore, delivering information in the native language is vital for effective communication and comprehension. This approach ensures that the message is accessible to a broader audience and fosters a deeper understanding of the issues at hand. By adhering to these principles, media organizations can effectively contribute to shaping positive perceptions of communication channels and promoting altruistic behaviors in society. As a result, people will be more inclined to engage in acts of kindness and humanitarian efforts, creating a compassionate and empathetic community that responds effectively to various challenges and crises.

7. Limitations and Future Research Directions

Like any other study, this study was not spared from having some limitations. One of the limitations that can be pointed out in this study is the generalizability of the findings as far as the sample size is concerned. The study’s sample consisted of only those with access to mass media (TV, radio, and newspapers) and those who had experienced social influence. Furthermore, while this study relied on a scientific sampling procedure, the sample cannot completely represent the general population in Taiwan. Our model was selective in nature, collecting data from Eastern Taiwan. Though diverse, this sample was not based on a nationwide sampling frame. The findings of this study were not generalizable to the entire population in Taiwan. Future studies may consider including all regions in Taiwan.

Indeed, the generalizability of the study’s findings is a valid limitation due to the sample size and its selective nature. The study’s reliance on participants with access to mass media and exposure to social influence may limit the applicability of the results to the broader population in Taiwan. While the study employed a scientific sampling procedure, the sample was restricted to Eastern Taiwan, which may only partially represent part of the population of the country. To improve the generalizability of future research, it is essential to consider including participants from diverse regions across Taiwan. A nationwide sampling frame would allow for a more comprehensive representation of the population, enhancing the external validity of the study’s findings.

Secondly, future research could redesign the model by linking factors affecting perceptions to altruistic behavior, potentially yielding different results, such as media exposure directly influencing people’s engagement in humanitarian acts. Similarly, the model could introduce moderators to gauge whether the relationship between perceptions/attitudes and altruistic behavior can be strengthened or weakened under certain circumstances. The study used a cross-sectional approach to collect data using a survey conducted only once; hence, it might have posed standard method bias issues. Future studies must consider collecting data using two-time lagged surveys or employing other designs like the longitudinal approach. Future research may also consider investigating media consumption by age and how this influences media users’ perceptions, attitudes, and altruistic behavior. This will allow for researchers to uncover which age group primarily engages in altruistic behavior.

8. Conclusions

The findings of the present study provide further support to previous research, indicating that media exposure plays a significant role in shaping people’s perceptions of mass media news, especially on various emerging topics. Furthermore, the study highlights the importance of credibility and social influence in shaping how individuals perceive mass media news. It is evident that attitudes toward mass media news have a substantial impact on individuals’ inclinations to engage in altruistic behavior. Moreover, the study reveals that attitudes toward mass media news mediate the relationship between public perceptions and altruistic behavior. However, contrary to our expectation, the public perception of mass media news was negatively related to attitudes towards mass media news, which contrasts with findings from previous studies.

The present study expands the application of behavioral theories in the context of altruism by incorporating the cultivation theory and the theory of planned behavior. Theoretically, this research contributes to the existing literature by investigating factors that influence the perception of mass media news, ultimately influencing altruistic behavior indirectly. Furthermore, the study adds value to the existing literature by emphasizing the role of mass media in disseminating information regarding emerging crises, which, in turn, influences people’s behavior, emotions, and thoughts. By doing so, this study provides valuable insights to mass media organizations, highlighting the importance of communicating reliable and trustworthy news to promote acts of altruism. This emphasis on responsible news reporting aims to foster positive views and mindsets among the audience, leading to an increased willingness to engage in humanitarian acts during times of crisis.

Funding Statement

This research was funded by Tzu Chi Cultural and Communication Foundation grant number 111340600-05-04.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The Ministry of Health and Welfare (Taiwan) clarified in a letter dated March 22, 2012 (Ref: MOHW Medical Letter No. 1010064538) that the “Human Research Act” Article 4 excludes “Social Behavioral Science research” and “humanities research”. The specific research in question is non-human contact, non-anonymous, and non-intrusive, conducted in a public setting. Consequently, based on the clarification, this research is categorized under the mentioned exclusions and may not need ethics approval for research review.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Open access
• Published: 26 July 2021

Large-scale quantitative evidence of media impact on public opinion toward China

• Junming Huang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2532-4090 1 ,
• Gavin G. Cook 1 &
• Yu Xie 1 , 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  8 , Article number:  181 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

20k Accesses

11 Citations

6 Altmetric

Metrics details

• Cultural and media studies
• Politics and international relations

Do mass media influence people’s opinions of other countries? Using BERT, a deep neural network-based natural language processing model, this study analyzes a large corpus of 267,907 China-related articles published by The New York Times since 1970. The output from The New York Times is then compared to a longitudinal data set constructed from 101 cross-sectional surveys of the American public’s views on China, revealing that the reporting of The New York Times on China in one year explains 54% of the variance in American public opinion on China in the next. This result confirms hypothesized links between media and public opinion and helps shed light on how mass media can influence the public opinion of foreign countries.

Similar content being viewed by others

United States politicians’ tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns

The speed of news in Twitter (X) versus radio

Evolving linguistic divergence on polarizing social media

Introduction.

America and China are the world’s two largest economies, and they are currently locked in a tense rivalry. In a democratic system, public opinion shapes and constrains political action. How the American public views China thus affects relations between the two countries. Because few Americans have personally visited China, most Americans form their opinions of China and other foreign lands from media depictions. Our paper aims to explain how Americans form their attitudes on China with a case study of how The New York Times may shape public opinion. Our analysis is not causal, but it is informed by a causal understanding of how public opinion may flow from the media to the citizenry.

Scholars have adopted a number of wide-ranging and even contradictory approaches to explain the relationships between media and the American mind. One school of thought stresses that media exposure shapes public opinion (Baum and Potter, 2008 ; Iyengar and Kinder, 2010 ). Another set of approaches focuses on how the public might lead the media by analyzing how consumer demand shapes reporting. Newspapers may attract readers by biasing coverage of polarizing issues towards the ideological proclivities of their readership (Mullainathan and Shleifer, 2005 ), and with the advent of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, traditional media are now more responsive to audience demand than ever before (Jacobs and Shapiro, 2011 ). On the other side of this equation, news consumers generally tend to seek out news sources with which they agree (Iyengar et al., 2008 ), and politically active individuals do so more proactively than the average person (Zaller, 1992 ).

Two other approaches address factors outside the media–public binary. The first, stresses the role of elites in opinion formation. While some, famously including Noam Chomsky, argue that news media are unwitting at best and at worst complicit “shills” of the American political establishment, political elites may affect public opinion directly by communicating with the public (Baum and Potter, 2008 ). Foreign elites may also influence American opinion because American reporters sometimes circumvent domestic sources and ask trusted foreign experts and officials for opinions (Hayes and Guardino, 2011 ). The second stresses how the macro-level phenomenon of public sentiment is shaped by micro-level and meso-level processes. An adult’s opinions on various topics emerge from their personal values, many of which are set during and around adolescence from factors outside of the realm of individual control (Hatemi and McDermott, 2016 ). Social networks may also affect attitude formation (Kertzer and Zeitzoff, 2017 ).

In light of these contradictory interpretations, it is difficult to be sure whether the media shape the attitudes of consumers or, on the other hand, whether consumers shape media (Baum and Potter, 2008 ). Moreover, most of the theories summarized above are tested on relatively small slices of data. In order to offer an alternative, “big data”-based contribution to this ongoing debate, this study compares how the public views China and how the news media report on China with large-scale data. Our data set, which straddles 50 years of newspaper reporting and survey data, is uniquely large and includes more than a quarter-million articles from The New York Times.

Most extant survey data indicate that Americans do not seem to like China very much (Xie and Jin, 2021 ). Many Americans are reported to harbor doubts about China’s record on human rights (Aldrich et al., 2015 ; Cao and Xu, 2015 ) and are anxious about China’s burgeoning economic, military, and strategic power (Gries and Crowson, 2010 ; Yang and Liu, 2012 ). They also think that the Chinese political system fails to serve the needs of the Chinese people (Aldrich et al., 2015 ). Most Americans, however, recognize a difference between the Chinese state, the Chinese people, and Chinese culture, and they view the latter two more favorably (Gries and Crowson, 2010 ). In Fiske’s Stereotype Content Model (Fiske et al., 2002 ), which expresses common stereotypes as a combination of “competence” and “warmth”, Asians belong to a set of “high-status, competitive out-groups” and rank high in competence but low in warmth (Lin et al., 2005 ).

The New York Times, which calls itself the “Newspaper of Record”, is the most influential newspaper in the USA and possibly even in the Anglophonic world. It boasts 7.5 million subscribers (Business Wire, 2021 ), and while the paper’s reach may be impressive, it is yet more significant that the readership of The New York Times represents an elite subset of the American public. Print subscribers to The New York Times have a median household income of $191,000, three times the median income of US households writ large (Rothbaum and Edwards, 2019 ). Despite the paper’s haughty and sometimes condescending reporting, it “has had and still has immense social, political, and economic influence on American and the world” (Schwarz, 2012 , p. 81). The New York Times may be a paper for America’s elite, and it may be biased to reflect the tastes of its elite audience, but the paper’s ideological slant does not affect our analyses as long as the its relevant biases are consistent over the time period covered by our analyses. Our analyses support the intuition of qualitative work on The Times (Schwarz, 2012 ) and show that these biases remain more or less constant for the decades in our sample. These analyses also illuminate some of the paper’s more notable biases, including the paper’s particular predilection for globalization.

The impact of social media on traditional media is not straightforward. While new media have certainly changed old media, neither has replaced the other. It is more accurate to say that old media have been integrated into new media and, in some ways, become a form of new media themselves. Twitter has accelerated the 2000s-era trends of information access that made it possible for news readers to find their own news and also enabled readers to interact with journalists (Jacobs and Shapiro, 2011 ), and the The New York Times seems to have made a significant commitment to the Twitter ecosystem. A quick glance at the follower count of The Times’ official Twitter account shows that it is one of the most influential accounts on the site, with almost 50 million followers. For comparison, both current president Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris have around 10 million followers. Most New York Times reporters additionally have “verified” accounts on the platform, which means that individual reporters may be incentivized to maintain public-facing profiles more now than in the past.

The media consumption patterns that made new media possible have changed the way The New York Times interacts with its audience and how it extracts revenue. The New York Times boasts a grand total of 7.5 million subscribers, but only 800,000 of them subscribe to the print edition. The Times’ digital subscription base has boomed since the election of Donald J. Trump, growing almost sixfold from a paltry 1.3 million in 2015 to a staggering 6.7 million in 2020 (Business Wire, 2021 ). The Times increasingly relies more on digital subscriptions and less on print subscriptions and ad sales for revenue (Lee, 2020 ). Ad revenue for most papers has been in sharp decline since the early 2000s (Jacobs and Shapiro, 2011 ), and this trend has only continued into the present. The New York Times now operates almost like a direct-to-consumer, subscription tech startup. New media have not replaced but have certainly changed old media. The full impact of these changes is beyond the scope of this paper, and we suggest it as an area for further research.

A small body of prior work has studied the The New York Times and how The New York Times reports on China. Blood and Phillips use autoregression methods on time series data to predict public opinion (Blood and Phillips, 1995 ). Wu et al. use a similar autoregression technique and find that public sentiment regarding the economy predicts economic performance and that people pay more attention to economic news during recessions (Wu et al., 2002 ). Peng finds that coverage of China in the paper has been consistently negative but increasingly frequent as China became an economic powerhouse (Peng, 2004 ). There is very little other scholarship that applies language processing methods to large corpora of articles from The New York Times or other leading papers. Atalay et al. is an exception that uses statistical techniques for parsing natural languages to analyze a corpus of newspaper articles from The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other leading papers in order to investigate the increasing use of information technologies in newspaper classifieds (Atalay et al., 2018 ).

We explore the impact of The New York Times on its readers by examining the general relationship between The Times and public opinion. Though some might contend that only elites read NYT, we have adopted this research strategy for two reasons. If the views of NYT only impacted the nation’s elite, the paper’s views would still propagate to the general public through the elites themselves because elites can affect public opinion outside of media channels (Baum and Potter, 2008 ). Additionally, it is a widely held belief that NYT serves as a general barometer of an agenda-setting agent for American culture (Schwarz, 2012 ). Because of these two reasons, we interpolate the relationship between NYT and public opinion from the relationship between NYT and its readers, and we extrapolate that the views of NYT are broadly representative of American media.

Our paper aims to advance understanding of how Americans form their attitudes on China with a case study of how The New York Times may shape public opinion. We hypothesize that media coverage of foreign nations affects how Americans view the rest of the world. This reduced-form model deliberately simplifies the interactions between audience and media and sidesteps many active debates in political psychology and political communication. Analyzing a corpus of 267,907 articles on China from The New York Times, we quantify media sentiment with BERT, a state-of-the-art natural language processing model with deep neural networks, and segment sentiment into eight domain topics. We then use conventional statistical methods to link media sentiment to a longitudinal data set constructed from 101 cross-sectional surveys of the American public’s views on China. We find strong correlations between how The New York Times reports on China in one year and the views of the public on China in the next. The correlations agree with our hypothesis and imply a strong connection between media sentiment and public opinion.

We quantify media sentiment with a natural language model on a large-scale corpus of 267,907 articles on China from The New York Times published between 1970 and 2019. To explore sentiment from this corpus in greater detail, we map every article to a sentiment category (positive, negative, or neutral) in eight topics: ideology, government and administration, democracy, economic development, marketization, welfare and well-being, globalization, and culture.

We do this with a three-stage modeling procedure. First, two human coders annotate 873 randomly selected articles with a total of 18,598 paragraphs expressing either positive, negative, or neutral sentiment in each topic. We treat irrelevant articles as neutral sentiments. Secondly, we fine-tune a natural language processing model Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) (Devlin et al., 2018 ) with the human-coded labels. The model uses a deep neural network with 12 layers. It accepts paragraphs (i.e., word sequences of no more than 128 words) as input and outputs a probability for each category. We end up with two binary classifiers for each topic for a grand total of 16 classifiers: an assignment classifier that determines whether a paragraph expresses sentiment in a given topic domain and a sentiment classifier that then distinguishes positive and negative sentiments in a paragraph classified as belonging to a given topic domain. Thirdly, we run the 16 trained classifiers on each paragraph in our corpus and assign category probabilities to every paragraph. We then use the probabilities of all the paragraphs in an article to determine the article’s overall sentiment category (i.e., positive, negative, or neutral) in every topic.

As demonstrated in Table 1 , the two classifiers are accurate at both the paragraph and article levels. The assignment classifier and the sentiment classifier reach classification accuracy of 89–96% and 73–90%, respectively, on paragraphs. The combined outcome of the classifiers, namely article sentiment, is accurate to 62–91% across the eight topics. For comparison, a random guess would reach an accuracy of 50% on each task (see Supplementary Information for details).

American public opinion towards China is a composite measure drawn from national surveys that ask respondents for their opinions on China. We collect 101 cross-sectional surveys from 1974 to 2019 that asked relevant questions about attitudes toward China and incorporate a probabilistic model to harmonize different survey series with different scales (e.g., 4 levels, 10 levels) into a single time series, capitalizing on “seaming” years in which different survey series overlapped (Wang et al., 2021 ). For every year, there is a single real value representing American sentiment on China relative to the level in 1974. Put another way, we use sentiment in 1974 as a baseline measure to normalize the rest of the time series. A positive value shows a more favorable attitude than that in 1974, and a negative value represents a less favorable attitude than that in 1974. Because of this, the trends in sentiment changes year-over-year are of interest, but the absolute values of sentiment in a given year are not. As shown in Fig. 1 , public opinion towards China has varied greatly from 1974 to 2019. It steadily climbed from a low of −24% in 1976 to a high of 73% in 1987, and has fluctuated between 10% and 48% in the intervening 30 years.

This time series is aggregated from 101 cross-sectional surveys from 1974 to 2019 that asked relevant questions about attitudes toward China with the year of 1974 as baseline. Years with attitudes above zero show a more favorable attitude than that in 1974, with a peak of 73% in 1987. Years with attitudes below zero show a less favorable attitude than that in 1974, with the lowest level of −24% in 1976. The time series is shown with a 95% confidence interval.

We begin with a demonstration of how the reporting of The New York Times on China changes over time, and we follow this with an analysis of how coverage of China might influence public opinion toward China.

Trend of media sentiment

The New York Times has maintained a steady interest in China over the years and has published at least 3,000 articles on China in every year of our corpus. Figure 2 displays the yearly volume of China-related articles from The New York Times on each of the eight topics since 1970. Articles on China increased sharply after 2000 and eventually reached a peak around 2010, almost doubling their volume from the 1970s. As the number of articles on China increased, the amount of attention paid to each of the eight topics diverged. Articles on government, democracy, globalization, and culture were consistently common while articles on ideology were consistently rare. In contrast, articles on China’s economy, marketization, and welfare were rare before 1990 but became increasingly common after 2000. The timing of this uptick coincided neatly with worldwide recognition of China’s precipitous economic ascent and specifically the beginnings of China’s talks to join the World Trade Organization.

In each year we report in each topic the number of positive and negative articles while ignoring neutral/irrelevant articles. The media have consistently high attention on reporting China government & administration, democracy, globalization, and culture. There are emerging interests on China’s economics, marketization, and welfare and well-being since 1990s. Note that the sum of the stacks does not equal to the total volume of articles about China, because each article may express sentiment in none or multiple topics.

While the proportion of articles in each given topic change over time, the sentiment of articles in each topic is remarkably consistent. Ignoring neutral articles, Figure 3 illustrates the yearly fractions of positive and negative articles about each of the eight topics. We find four topics (economics, globalization, culture, and marketization) are almost always covered positively while reporting on the other four topics (ideology, government & administration, democracy, and welfare & well-being) is overwhelmingly negative.

The panel reports the trend of yearly media attitude toward China in ( A ) ideology, ( B ) government & administration, ( C ) democracy, ( D ) economic development, ( E ) marketization, ( F ) welfare & well-being, ( G ) globalization, and ( H ) culture. The media attitude is measured as the percentages of positive articles and negative articles, respectively. US–China relation milestones are marked as gray dots. The New York Times express diverging but consistent attitudes in the eight domains, with negative articles consistently common in ideology, government, democracy, and welfare, and positive sentiments common in economic, globalization, and culture. Standard errors are too small to be visible (below 1.55% in all topics all years).

The NYT views China’s globalization in a very positive light. Almost 100% of the articles mentioning this topic are positive for all of the years in our sample. This reveals that The New York Times welcomes China’s openness to the world and, more broadly, may be particularly partial to globalization in general.

Similarly, economics, marketization, and culture are covered most commonly in positive tones that have only grown more glowing over time. Positive articles on these topics began in the 1970s with China–US Ping–Pong diplomacy, and eventually comprise 1/4 to 1/2 of articles on these three topics, the remainder of which are mostly neutral articles. This agrees with the intuition that most Americans like Chinese culture. The New York Times has been deeply enamored with Chinese cultural products ranging from Chinese art to Chinese food since the very beginning of our sample. Following China’s economic reforms, the number of positive articles and the proportion of positive articles relative to negative articles increases for both economics and marketization.

In contrast, welfare and well-being are covered in an almost exclusively negative light. About 1/4 of the articles on this topic are negative, and almost no articles on this topic are positive. Topics regarding politics are covered very negatively. Negative articles on ideology, government and administration, and democracy outnumber positive articles on these topics for all of the years in our sample. Though small fluctuations that coincided with ebbs in US–China relations are observed for those three topics, coverage has only grown more negative over time. Government and administration is the only negatively covered topic that does feature some positive articles. This reflects the qualitative understanding that The New York Times thinks that the Chinese state is an unpleasant but capable actor.

Despite the remarkable diversity of sentiment toward China across the eight topics, sentiment within each of the topics is startlingly consistent over time. This consistency attests to the incredible stability of American stereotypes towards China. If there is any trend to be found here, it is that the main direction of sentiment in each topic, positive or negative, has grown more prevalent since the 1970s. This is to say that reporting on China has become more polarized, which is reflective of broader trends of media polarization (Jacobs and Shapiro, 2011 ; Mullainathan and Shleifer, 2005 ).

Media sentiment affects public opinion

To reveal the connection between media sentiment and public opinion, we run a linear regression model (Eq. ( 1 )) to fit public opinion with media sentiment from current and preceding years.

where μ t denotes public opinion in year t with possible values ranging from −1 to 1. F k j s is the fraction of positive ( s  = positive) or negative ( s  = negative) articles on topic k in year j . Coefficient β k j s quantifies the importance of F k j s in predicting μ t .

There is inertia to public opinion. A broadly held opinion is hard to change in the short term, and it may require a while for media sentiment to affect how the public views a given issue. For this reason, j is allowed to take [ t , t  − 1, t  − 2, ...] anywhere from zero to a couple of years ahead of t . In other words, we inspect lagged values of media sentiment as candidate predictors for public attitudes towards China.

We seek an optimal solution of media sentiment predictors to explain the largest fraction of variance ( r 2 ) of public opinion. To reduce the risk of overfitting, we first constrain the coefficients to be non-negative after reverse-coding negative sentiment variables, which means we assume that positive articles have either no impact or positive impact and that negative articles have either zero or negative impact on public opinion. Secondly, we require that the solution be sparse and contain no more than one non-zero coefficient in each topic:

where r 2 ( μ , β , F ) is the explained variance of μ fitted with ( β , F ). The l 0 -norm ∥ β k , ⋅ , ⋅ ∥ 0 gives the number of non-zero coefficients of topic k predictors.

The solution varies with the number of topics included in the fitting model. As shown in Table 2 , if we allow fitting with only one topic, we find that sentiment on Chinese culture has the most explanatory power, accounting for 31.2% of the variance in public opinion. We run a greedy strategy to add additional topics that yield the greatest increase in explanatory power, resulting in eight nested models (Table 2 ). The explanatory power of our models increases monotonically with the number of allowed topics but reaches a saturation point at which the marginal increase in variance explained per topics decreases after only two topics are introduced (see Table 2 ). To strike a balance between simplicity and explanatory power, we use the top two predictors, which are the positive sentiment of culture and the negative sentiment of democracy in the previous year, to build a linear predictor of public opinion that can be written as

where F culture, t −1,positive is the yearly fraction of positive articles on Chinese culture in year t  − 1 and F democracy, t −1,negative is the yearly fraction of negative articles on Chinese democracy in year t  − 1. This formula explains 53.9% of the variance of public opinion in the time series. For example, in 1993 53.9% of the articles on culture had a positive sentiment, and 46.9% of the articles on democracy had negative sentiment ( F c u l t u r e ,1993,positive  = 0.539, F democracy,1993,negative  = −0.469). Substituting those numbers into Eq. ( 2 ) predicts public opinion in the next year (1994) to be 0.208, very close to the actual level of public opinion (0.218) (Fig. 4 ).

The public opinion (solid), as a time series, is well fitted by the media sentiments on two selected topics, namely “Culture” and “Democracy”, in the previous year. The dashed line shows a linear prediction based on the fractions of positive articles on “Culture” and negative articles on “Democracy” in the previous year. The public opinion is shown with a 95% confidence interval, and the fitted line is shown with one standard error.

By analyzing a corpus of 267,907 articles from The New York Times with BERT, a state-of-the-art natural language processing model, we identify major shifts in media sentiment towards China across eight topic domains over 50 years and find that media sentiment leads public opinion. Our results show that the reporting of The New York Times on culture and democracy in one year explains 53.9% of the variation in public opinion on China in the next. The conclusion that we draw from our results is that media sentiment on China predicts public opinion on China. Our analysis is neither conclusive nor causal, but it is suggestive. Our results are best interpreted as a “reduced-form” description of the overall relationship between media sentiment and public opinion towards China.

While there are a number of potential factors that may complicate our conclusions, none would change the overall thrust of our results. We do not consider how the micro-level or meso-level intermediary processes through which opinion from elite media percolates to the masses below may affect our results. We also do not consider the potential ramifications of elites communing directly with the public, of major events in US–China relations causing short-term shifts in reporting, or of social media creating new channels for the diffusion of opinion. Finally, The New York Times might have a particular bias to how it covers China.

In addition to those specified above, a number of possible extensions of our work remain ripe targets for further research. Though a fully causal model of our text analysis pipeline may prove elusive (Egami et al., 2018 ), future work may use randomized vignettes to further our understanding of the causal effects of media exposure on attitudes towards China. Secondly, our modeling framework is deliberately simplified. The state affects news coverage before the news ever makes its way to the citizenry. It is plausible that multiple state-level actors may bypass the media and alter public opinion directly and to different ends. For example, the actions and opinions of individual high-profile US politicians may attenuate or exaggerate the impact of state-level tension on public sentiment toward China. There are presumably a whole host of intermediary processes through which opinion from elite media affects the sentiment of the masses. Thirdly, the relationship between the sentiment of The New York Times and public opinion may be very different for hot-button social issues of first-line importance in the American culture wars. In our corpus, The New York Times has covered globalization almost entirely positively, but the 2016 election of President Donald J. Trump suggests that many Americans do not share the zeal of The Times for international commerce. We also plan to extend our measure of media sentiment to include text from other newspapers. The Guardian, a similarly elite, Anglophonic, and left-leaning paper, will make for a useful comparison case. Finally, our analysis was launched in the midst of heightened tensions between the US and China and concluded right before the outbreak of a global pandemic. Many things have changed since COVID-19. Returning to our analysis with an additional year or two of data will almost certainly provide new results of additional interest.

Future work will address some of these additional paths, but none of these elements affects the basic conclusion of this work. We find that reporting on China in one year predicts public opinion in the next. This is true for more than fifty years in our sample, and while knowledge of, for example, the opinion diffusion process on social media may add detail to this relationship, the basic flow of opinion from media to the public will not change. Regarding the putative biases of The New York Times, its ideological slant does not affect our explanation of trends in public opinion of China as long as the paper’s relevant biases are relatively consistent over the time period covered by our analyses.

Data availability

All data analyzed during the current study are publicly available. The New York Times data were accessed using official online APIs ( https://developer.nytimes.com/ ). We used their query API to search for 267,907 articles that mention China, Chinese, Beijing, Peking, or Shanghai. We downloaded the full text and date of each article. The survey data were obtained from three large public archives/centers, namely Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (ROPER), NORC at the University of Chicago, and Pew Research Center (Pew Research Center, 2019 ; Smith et al., 2018 ). See Supplementary Information for a full list of surveys. The source codes and pretrained parameters of the natural language processing model BERT are publicly released by Google Inc. on its github repository ( https://github.com/google-research/bert ). The finetuned BERT models and the inferred sentiment of The New York Times articles in our corpus are publicly available at Princeton University DataSpace. Please check the project webpage ( http://www.attitudetowardchina.com/media-opinion ) or the DataSpace webpage ( https://doi.org/10.34770/x27d-0545 ) to download.

Aldrich J, Lu J, Kang L (2015) How do Americans view the rising China. J Contemp China 24(92):203–221

Article   Google Scholar  

Atalay E, Phongthiengtham P, Sotelo S, Tannenbaum D (2018) New technologies and the labor market. J Monet Econ 97:48–67

Baum MA, Potter PB (2008) The relationships between mass media, public opinion, and foreign policy: toward a theoretical synthesis. Annu Rev Polit Sci 11(1):39–65

Blood DJ, Phillips PC (1995) Recession headline news, consumer sentiment, the state of the economy and presidential popularity: a time series analysis 1989–1993. Int J Public Opinion Res 7(1):2–22

Business Wire (2021) The New York Times company reports 2020 fourth-quarter and full-year results and announces dividend increase. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210204005599/en/

Cao Y, Xu J (2015) The Tibet problem in the milieu of a rising China: findings from a survey on Americans’ attitudes toward China. J Contemp China 24(92):240–259

Devlin J, Chang MW, Lee K, Toutanova K (2018) BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/181004805

Egami N, Fong CJ, Grimmer J, Roberts ME, Stewart BM (2018) How to make causal inferences using texts. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/180202163

Fiske ST, Cuddy AJ, Glick P, Xu J (2002) A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. J Personal Soc Psychol 82(6):878

Gries PH, Crowson HM (2010) Political orientation, party affiliation, and American attitudes towards China. J Chin Political Sci 15(3):219–244

Hatemi PK, McDermott R (2016) Give me attitudes. Annu Rev Political Sci 19:331–350

Hayes D, Guardino M (2011) The influence of foreign voices on US public opinion. Am J Political Sci 55(4):831–851

Iyengar S, Hahn KS, Krosnick JA, Walker J (2008) Selective exposure to campaign communication: the role of anticipated agreement and issue public membership. J Politics 70(1):186–200

Iyengar S, Kinder DR (2010) News that matters: television and American opinion, Chicago studies in American politics, updated edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Book   Google Scholar  

Jacobs L, Shapiro RY (eds) (2011) Informational interdependence: public opinion and the media in the new communications era. In: The Oxford handbook of American public opinion and the media. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Kertzer JD, Zeitzoff T (2017) A bottom-up theory of public opinion about foreign policy. Am J Political Sci 61(3):543–558

Lee E (2020) New York Times hits 7 million subscribers as digital revenue rises. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/new-york-times-q3-2020-earnings-nyt.html

Lin MH, Kwan VS, Cheung A, Fiske ST (2005) Stereotype content model explains prejudice for an envied outgroup: scale of anti-Asian American stereotypes. Personal Soc Psychol Bull 31(1):34–47

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Mullainathan S, Shleifer A (2005) The market for news. Am Econ Rev 95(4):1031–1053

Peng Z (2004) Representation of China: an across time analysis of coverage in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times . Asian J Commun 14(1):53–67

Article   ADS   Google Scholar  

Pew Research Center (2019) Global attitudes & trends. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/

Rothbaum J, Edwards A (2019) U.S. median household income was $63,179 in 2018, not significantly different from 2017. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/us-median-household-income-not-significantly-different-from-2017.html

Schwarz D (2012) Endtimes? Crises and turmoil at the New York Times, Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press, New York.

Smith TW, Davern M, Freese J, Morgan S (2018) General social surveys, 1972–2018. NORC, University of Chicago

Wang D, Xie Y, Huang J (2021) Latent attitude method for trend analysis with pooled survey data. Preprint at SocArXiv https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/atsq2

Wu HD, Stevenson RL, Chen HC, Güner ZN (2002) The conditioned impact of recession news: a time-series analysis of economic communication in the United States, 1987–1996. Int J Public Opin Res 14(1):19–36

Xie Y, Jin Y (2021) Global attitudes toward China: trends and correlates. J Contemp China

Yang YE, Liu X (2012) The ‘China threat’ through the lens of US print media: 1992–2006. J Contemp China 21(76):695–711

Zaller JR et al. (1992) The nature and origins of mass opinion. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Chesley Chan (Princeton University), Wen Liu (Renmin University of China), Yichun Yang (Renmin University of China), and Emily Yin (Princeton University) for coding The New York Times articles with the topic-specific sentiment. The authors thank Chih-Jou Jay Chen (Academia Sinica), Cheng Cheng (Singapore Management University), Shawn Dorius (Iowa State University), Theodore P. Gerber (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Fengming Lu (Australian National University), Yongai Jin (Renmin University of China), Donghui Wang (Princeton University) for valuable discussions. The authors thank Xudong Guo (Tsinghua University) for helping fine-tune the BERT model and analyze the calculation results. The authors thank Tom Marling for proofreading the manuscript. The research was partially supported by the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University and Guanghua School of Management at Peking University.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Junming Huang, Gavin G. Cook & Yu Xie

Peking University, Beijing, China

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yu Xie .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Large-scale quantitative evidence of media impact on public opinion toward china: supplementary information, rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Huang, J., Cook, G.G. & Xie, Y. Large-scale quantitative evidence of media impact on public opinion toward China. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8 , 181 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00846-2

Download citation

Received : 26 December 2020

Accepted : 22 June 2021

Published : 26 July 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00846-2

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

This article is cited by

Critical race theory and asymmetric mobilization.

• Pia Deshpande
• Scott Blatte
• David Wingens

Political Behavior (2023)

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

• Corpus ID: 153986731

Mass Media Research: An Introduction

• Roger D. Wimmer , Joseph R. Dominick
• Published 1983

2,718 Citations

Mass media research: an introduction, 9 th edition, the changing job of journalism: the impact of new and social media use on job satisfaction in a television newsroom, public relations models and dialogic communication in the twitterverse: an analysis of how colleges and universities are engaging their public through twitter, media coverage of six-party talks: a comparative study on media content and journalists' perceptions, a digital juggling act: a case study of new media's impact on the responsibilities of local television reporters, media representation of south africas female politicians : the case of the mail & guardian – 2010 to 2011, newspaper framing of devolution as a new development concept in kenya, 2013 - 2017, evaluating government-media relations in the namibian public service, kenyan journalists: a study of demographics, job satisfaction, news values and perceived autonomy, influencing interaction: does technology increase public participation on community journalism websites.

• Highly Influenced

8 References

Evaluation: a systematic approach, nonparametric statistics for the behavioral sciences, strategic advertising campaigns, pragmatics of human communication: a study of interactional patterns, pathologies and paradoxes, the mirror makers: a history of american advertising and its creators, the design of sample surveys, artifact in behavioral research, science and human behavior, related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

• A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Psychology

Volume 67, 2016, review article, media effects: theory and research.

• Patti M. Valkenburg 1 , Jochen Peter 1 , and Joseph B. Walther 2
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: 1 Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1012 WX, The Netherlands; email: [email protected] , [email protected] 2 Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, 637718 Singapore; email: [email protected]
• Vol. 67:315-338 (Volume publication date January 2016) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033608
• First published as a Review in Advance on August 19, 2015
• © Annual Reviews

This review analyzes trends and commonalities among prominent theories of media effects. On the basis of exemplary meta-analyses of media effects and bibliometric studies of well-cited theories, we identify and discuss five features of media effects theories as well as their empirical support. Each of these features specifies the conditions under which media may produce effects on certain types of individuals. Our review ends with a discussion of media effects in newer media environments. This includes theories of computer-mediated communication, the development of which appears to share a similar pattern of reformulation from unidirectional, receiver-oriented views, to theories that recognize the transactional nature of communication. We conclude by outlining challenges and promising avenues for future research.

Article metrics loading...

Full text loading...

Literature Cited

• Alba JW , Hutchinson JW . 1987 . Dimensions of consumer expertise. J. Consum. Res. 13 : 411– 54 [Google Scholar]
• Allen M , D'Alessio D , Brezgel K . 1995 . A meta-analysis summarizing the effects of pornography II: aggression after exposure. Hum. Commun. Res. 22 : 258– 83 [Google Scholar]
• Anderson CA , Bushman BJ . 2001 . Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: a meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychol. Sci. 12 : 353– 59 [Google Scholar]
• Anderson CA , Bushman BJ . 2002 . Human aggression. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 53 : 27– 51 [Google Scholar]
• Anderson CA , Shibuya A , Ihori N , Swing EL , Bushman BJ . et al. 2010 . Violent video game effects on aggression, empathy, and prosocial behavior in eastern and western countries: a meta-analytic review. Psychol. Bull. 136 : 151– 73 [Google Scholar]
• Atkin C . 1973 . Instrumental utilities and information seeking. New Models for Mass Communication Research P Clarke 205– 42 Oxford, UK: Sage [Google Scholar]
• Bandura A . 2002 . Social cognitive theory of mass communication. Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research J Bryant, D Zillmann 121– 53 Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum [Google Scholar]
• Bandura A . 2009 . Social cognitive theory of mass communication. See Bryant & Oliver 2009 94– 124
• Barlett CP , Vowels CL , Saucier DA . 2008 . Meta-analyses of the effects of media images on men's body-image concerns. J. Soc. Clin. Psychol. 27 : 279– 310 [Google Scholar]
• Bauer R . 1964 . The obstinate audience: the influence process from the point of view of social communication. Am. Psychol. 19 : 319– 28 [Google Scholar]
• Beentjes JWJ , van der Voort THA . 1988 . Television's impact on children's reading skills: a review of research. Read. Res. Q. 23 : 389– 413 [Google Scholar]
• Bem DJ . 1972 . Self-perception theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology L Berkowitz 1– 62 New York: Academic [Google Scholar]
• Berkowitz L . 1984 . Some effects of thoughts on antisocial and pro-social influences of media events: a cognitive-neoassociation analysis. Psychol. Bull. 95 : 410– 27 [Google Scholar]
• Berkowitz L , Powers PC . 1979 . Effects of timing and justification of witnessed aggression on the observers punitiveness. J. Res. Personal. 13 : 71– 80 [Google Scholar]
• Blumler JG . 1985 . The social character of media gratifications. Media Gratifications Research KE Rosengren, LA Wenner, P Palmgreen 41– 60 Beverly Hills, CA: Sage [Google Scholar]
• Boerman SC , Smit EG , van Meurs A . 2011 . Attention battle: the abilities of brand, visual, and text characteristics of the ad to draw attention versus the diverting power of the direct magazine context. Advances in Advertising Research: Breaking New Ground in Theory and Practice S Okazaki 295– 310 Wiesbaden, Ger: Gabler Verlag [Google Scholar]
• Boulianne S . 2009 . Does internet use affect engagement? A meta-analysis of research. Pol. Commun. 26 : 193– 211 [Google Scholar]
• Bradley MM . 2009 . Natural selective attention: orienting and emotion. Psychophysiology 46 : 1– 11 [Google Scholar]
• Bryant J , Miron D . 2004 . Theory and research in mass communication. J. Commun. 54 : 662– 704 [Google Scholar]
• Bryant J , Oliver MB . 2009 . Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research New York: Routledge, 3rd ed.. [Google Scholar]
• Bushman BJ . 1995 . Moderating role of trait aggressiveness in the effects of violent media on aggression. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 69 : 950– 60 [Google Scholar]
• Cacioppo JT , Petty RE , Feinstein JA , Blair W , Jarvis G . 1996 . Dispositional differences in cognitive motivation: the life and times of individuals varying in need for cognition. Psychol. Bull. 119 : 197– 253 [Google Scholar]
• Castells M . 2007 . Communication, power and counter-power in the network society. Int. J. Commun. 1 : 238– 66 [Google Scholar]
• Clark R . 2012 . Learning from Media: Arguments, Analysis, and Evidence Charlotte, NC: Inf. Age Publ. [Google Scholar]
• Corbetta M , Shulman GL . 2002 . Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 3 : 201– 15 [Google Scholar]
• Craig RT . 1999 . Communication theory as a field. Commun. Theory 9 : 119– 61 [Google Scholar]
• Culnan MJ , Markus ML . 1987 . Information technologies. Handbook of Organizational Communication: An Interdisciplinary Perspective FM Jablin, LL Putnam, KH Roberts, LW Porter 420– 43 Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage [Google Scholar]
• Daft RL , Lengel RH . 1986 . Organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design. Manag. Sci. 32 : 554– 71 [Google Scholar]
• Desmond RJ , Garveth R . 2007 . The effects of advertising on children and adolescents. Mass Media Effects Research: Advances Through Meta-Analysis R Preiss, B Gayle, N Burrell, M Allen, J Bryant 169– 79 Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum [Google Scholar]
• Donsbach W . 2009 . Cognitive dissonance theory—roller coaster career: how communication research adapted the theory of cognitive dissonance. Media Choice: A Theoretical and Empirical Overview T Hartmann 128– 49 New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Entman RM . 1993 . Framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. J. Commun. 43 : 51– 58 [Google Scholar]
• Eveland WP , Shah DV , Kwak N . 2003 . Assessing causality in the cognitive mediation model: a panel study of motivations, information processing, and learning during campaign 2000. Commun. Res. 30 : 359– 86 [Google Scholar]
• Ferguson CJ , Kilburn J . 2009 . The public health risks of media violence: a meta-analytic review. J. Pediatr. 154 : 759– 63 [Google Scholar]
• Festinger L . 1957 . A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Fikkers K , Piotrowski JT , Weeda W , Vossen HGM , Valkenburg PM . 2013 . Double dose: high family conflict enhances the effect of media violence exposure on adolescents' aggression. Societies 3 : 280– 92 [Google Scholar]
• Fishbein M , Cappella JN . 2006 . The role of theory in developing effective health communications. J. Commun. 56 : S1– 17 [Google Scholar]
• Fiske ST . 2002 . Five core social motives, plus or minus five. Social Perception: The Ontario Symposium SJ Spencer, S Fein, MP Zanna, JM Olson 233– 46 Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum [Google Scholar]
• Früh W , Schönbach K . 1982 . Der dynamisch-transaktionale Ansatz: Ein neues Paradigma der Medienwirkungen [The dynamic-transactional approach: a new paradigm of media effects]. Publizistik 27 : 74– 88 [Google Scholar]
• Gerbner G , Gross L , Morgan M , Signorielli N . 1980 . The mainstreaming of America: violence profile no 11. J. Commun. 30 : 10– 29 [Google Scholar]
• Gonzales AL , Hancock JT . 2008 . Identity shift in computer-mediated environments. Media Psychol. 11 : 167– 85 [Google Scholar]
• Grabe S , Ward LM , Hyde JS . 2008 . Role of the media in body image concerns among women: a meta-analysis of experimental and correlational studies. Psychol. Bull. 134 : 460– 76 [Google Scholar]
• Green MC , Brock TC . 2000 . The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 79 : 701– 21 [Google Scholar]
• Green MC , Brock TC , Kaufman GE . 2004 . Understanding media enjoyment: the role of transportation into narrative worlds. Commun. Theory 14 : 311– 27 [Google Scholar]
• Greenfield P , Farrar D , Beagles-Roos J . 1986 . Is the medium the message? An experimental comparison of the effects of radio and television on imagination. J. Appl. Dev. Psychol. 7 : 201– 18 [Google Scholar]
• Hall S . 1980 . Encoding/decoding. Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies S Hall, D Hobson, A Lowe, P Willis 128– 38 London: Hutchinson [Google Scholar]
• Hart W , Albarracin D , Eagly AH , Brechan I , Lindberg MJ , Merrill L . 2009 . Feeling validated versus being correct: a meta-analysis of selective exposure to information. Psychol. Bull. 135 : 555– 88 [Google Scholar]
• Hartmann T . 2009 . Media Choice: A Theoretical and Empirical Overview New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Harwood J . 1999 . Age identification, social identity gratifications, and television viewing. J. Broadcast. Electron. Media 43 : 123– 36 [Google Scholar]
• Holbert RL , Stephenson MT . 2003 . The importance of indirect effects in media effects research: testing for mediation in structural equation modeling. J. Broadcast. Electron. Media 47 : 556– 72 [Google Scholar]
• Holmstrom AJ . 2004 . The effects of the media on body image: a meta-analysis. J. Broadcast. Electron. Media 48 : 196– 217 [Google Scholar]
• Hornik R . 2003 . Public Health Communication: Evidence for Behavior Change Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum [Google Scholar]
• Hovland CI , Janis IL , Kelley HH . 1953 . Communication and Persuasion: Psychological Studies of Opinion Change New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Karutz CO , Bailenson JN . 2015 . Immersive virtual environments and the classrooms of tomorrow. The Handbook of the Psychology of Communication Technology SS Sundar 290– 310 New York: Wiley [Google Scholar]
• Katz E . 1959 . Mass communications research and the study of popular culture: an editorial note on a possible future for this journal. Stud. Public Commun. 2 : 1– 6 [Google Scholar]
• Katz E , Blumler JG , Gurevitch M . 1973 . Uses and gratifications research. Public Opin. Q. 37 : 509– 23 [Google Scholar]
• Katz E , Lazarsfeld PF . 1955 . Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications Piscataway, NJ: Trans. Publ. [Google Scholar]
• Kim S . 2004 . Rereading David Morley's The “Nationwide” Audience . Cult. Stud. 18 : 84– 108 [Google Scholar]
• Klapper JT . 1960 . The Effects of Mass Communication Glencoe, IL: Free Press [Google Scholar]
• Knobloch-Westerwick S . 2006 . Mood management: theory, evidence, and advancements. Psychology of Entertainment J Bryant, P Vorderer 230– 54 Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum [Google Scholar]
• Knobloch-Westerwick S . 2015 . Choice and Preference in Media Use New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Krcmar M . 2009 . Individual differences in media effects. The Sage Handbook of Media Processes and Effects RL Nabi, MB Oliver 237– 50 Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage [Google Scholar]
• Lang A . 2000 . The limited capacity model of mediated message processing. J. Commun. 50 : 46– 70 [Google Scholar]
• Lazarsfeld PF , Berelson B , Gaudet H . 1948 . The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign New York: Columbia Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Liebert RM , Schwartzberg NS . 1977 . Effects of mass-media. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 28 : 141– 73 [Google Scholar]
• Mangen A , Walgermo BR , Brønnick K . 2013 . Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: effects on reading comprehension. Int. J. Educ. Res. 58 : 61– 68 [Google Scholar]
• Mares M-L , Oliver MB , Cantor J . 2008 . Age differences in adults' emotional motivations for exposure to films. Media Psychol. 11 : 488– 511 [Google Scholar]
• Mares M-L , Sun Y . 2010 . The multiple meanings of age for television content preferences. Hum. Commun. Res. 36 : 372– 96 [Google Scholar]
• Mares M-L , Woodard E . 2005 . Positive effects of television on children's social interactions: a meta-analysis. Media Psychol. 7 : 301– 22 [Google Scholar]
• Mares M-L , Woodard EH . 2006 . In search of the older audience: adult age differences in television viewing. J. Broadcast. Electron. Media 50 : 595– 614 [Google Scholar]
• Marshall SJ , Biddle SJH , Gorely T , Cameron N , Murdey I . 2004 . Relationships between media use, body fatness and physical activity in children and youth: a meta-analysis. Int. J. Obes. 28 : 1238– 46 [Google Scholar]
• Matlin MW , Stang DJ . 1978 . The Pollyanna Principle: Selectivity in Language, Memory, and Thought Cambridge, MA: Schenkman [Google Scholar]
• McClelland DC , Atkinson JW . 1948 . The projective expression of needs: I. The effect of different intensities of the hunger drive on perception. J. Psychol. 26 : 205– 22 [Google Scholar]
• McCombs ME , Reynolds A . 2009 . How the news shapes our civic agenda. See Bryant & Oliver 2009 1– 16
• McCombs ME , Shaw DL . 1972 . The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opin. Q. 36 : 176– 87 [Google Scholar]
• McDonald DG . 2009 . Media use and the social environment. Media Processes and Effects RL Nabi, MB Oliver 251– 68 Los Angeles, CA: Sage [Google Scholar]
• McGuire WJ . 1986 . The myth of massive media impact: savagings and salvagings. Public Communication and Behavior 1 G Comstock 173– 257 Orlando, FL: Academic [Google Scholar]
• McLeod DM , Kosicki GM , McLeod JM . 2009 . Political communication effects. See Bryant & Oliver 2009 228– 51
• McLuhan M . 1964 . Understanding Media: The Extension of Man London: Sphere Books [Google Scholar]
• McQuail D . 2010 . McQuail's Mass Communication Theory London: Sage [Google Scholar]
• Nathanson AI . 2001 . Parents versus peers: exploring the significance of peer mediation of antisocial television. Commun. Res. 28 : 251– 74 [Google Scholar]
• Nikkelen SWC , Valkenburg PM , Huizinga M , Bushman BJ . 2014 . Media use and ADHD-related behaviors in children and adolescents: a meta-analysis. Dev. Psychol. 50 : 2228– 41 [Google Scholar]
• O'Keefe DJ . 2003 . Message properties, mediating states, and manipulation checks: claims, evidence, and data analysis in experimental persuasive message effects research. Commun. Theory 13 : 251– 74 [Google Scholar]
• Oliver MB . 2008 . Tender affective states as predictors of entertainment preference. J. Commun. 58 : 40– 61 [Google Scholar]
• Oliver MB , Kim J , Sanders MS . 2006 . Personality. Psychology of Entertainment 329– 41 Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum [Google Scholar]
• Oliver MB , Krakowiak KM . 2009 . Individual differences in media effects. See Bryant & Oliver 2009 517– 31
• Paik H , Comstock G . 1994 . The effects of television violence on antisocial behavior: a meta-analysis. Commun. Res. 21 : 516– 46 [Google Scholar]
• Pearce LJ , Field AP . 2015 . The impact of “scary” TV and film on children's internalizing emotions: a meta-analysis. Hum. Commun. Res. In press
• Peter J , Valkenburg PM . 2009 . Adolescents' exposure to sexually explicit internet material and notions of women as sex objects: assessing causality and underlying processes. J. Commun. 59 : 407– 33 [Google Scholar]
• Petty RE , Cacioppo JT . 1986 . The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology L Berkowitz 123– 205 New York: Academic [Google Scholar]
• Pingree RJ . 2007 . How messages affect their senders: a more general model of message effects and implications for deliberation. Commun. Theory 17 : 439– 61 [Google Scholar]
• Postmes T , Lea M , Spears R , Reicher SD . 2000 . SIDE Issues Centre Stage: Recent Developments in Studies of De-individuation in Groups Amsterdam: KNAW [Google Scholar]
• Potter WJ . 2012 . Media Effects Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage [Google Scholar]
• Potter WJ , Riddle K . 2007 . A content analysis of the media effects literature. J. Mass Commun. Q. 84 : 90– 104 [Google Scholar]
• Powers KL , Brooks PJ , Aldrich NJ , Palladino MA , Alfieri L . 2013 . Effects of video-game play on information processing: a meta-analytic investigation. Psychonom. Bull. Rev. 20 : 1055– 79 [Google Scholar]
• Pratto F , John OP . 1991 . Automatic vigilance: the attention-grabbing power of negative social information. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 61 : 380– 91 [Google Scholar]
• Prior M . 2005 . News versus entertainment: how increasing media choice widens gaps in political knowledge and turnout. Am. J. Polit. Sci. 49 : 577– 92 [Google Scholar]
• Raykov T , Marcoulides GA . 2012 . A First Course in Structural Equation Modeling New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Reber R , Schwarz N , Winkielman P . 2004 . Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience?. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 8 : 364– 82 [Google Scholar]
• Rideout VJ , Foehr UG , Roberts DF . 2010 . Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Found. [Google Scholar]
• Roberts DF , Bachen CM . 1981 . Mass-communication effects. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 32 : 307– 56 [Google Scholar]
• Rockinson-Szapkiw AJ , Courduff J , Carter K , Bennett D . 2013 . Electronic versus traditional print textbooks: a comparison study on the influence of university students' learning. Comput. Educ. 63 : 259– 66 [Google Scholar]
• Rosengren KE . 1974 . Uses and gratifications: a paradigm outlined. The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research JG Blumler, E Katz 269– 86 Beverly Hills, NJ: Sage [Google Scholar]
• Rubin A . 2009 . Uses-and-gratifications perspective on media effects. See Bryant & Oliver 2009 165– 84
• Savage J , Yancey C . 2008 . The effects of media violence exposure on criminal aggression: a meta-analysis. Crim. Justice Behav. 35 : 772– 91 [Google Scholar]
• Scheufele DA . 1999 . Framing as a theory of media effects. J. Commun. 49 : 103– 22 [Google Scholar]
• Schramm W . 1962 . Mass communication. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 13 : 251– 84 [Google Scholar]
• Schultz D , Izard CE , Ackerman BP , Youngstrom EA . 2001 . Emotion knowledge in economically disadvantaged children: self-regulatory antecedents and relations to social difficulties and withdrawal. Dev. Psychopathol. 13 : 53– 67 [Google Scholar]
• Shah DV , Cho J , Eveland WP , Kwak N . 2005 . Information and expression in a digital age: modeling Internet effects on civic participation. Commun. Res. 32 : 531– 65 [Google Scholar]
• Sherry JL . 2001 . The effects of violent video games on aggression: a meta-analysis. Hum. Commun. Res. 27 : 409– 31 [Google Scholar]
• Shoemaker PJ . 1996 . Hardwired for news: using biological and cultural evolution to explain the surveillance function. J. Commun. 46 : 32– 47 [Google Scholar]
• Short J , Williams E , Christie B . 1976 . The Social Psychology of Telecommunications London: Wiley [Google Scholar]
• Shrum LJ . 2009 . Media consumption and perception of social reality. See Bryant & Oliver 2009 50– 73
• Slater MD . 2007 . Reinforcing spirals: the mutual influence of media selectivity and media effects and their impact on individual behavior and social identity. Commun. Theory 17 : 281– 303 [Google Scholar]
• Slater MD . 2015 . Reinforcing spirals model: conceptualizing the relationship between media content exposure and the development and maintenance of attitudes. Media Psychol. 18 370– 95 [Google Scholar]
• Slater MD , Henry KL , Swaim RC , Anderson LL . 2003 . Violent media content and aggressiveness in adolescents: a downward spiral model. Commun. Res. 30 : 713– 36 [Google Scholar]
• Slater MD , Peter J , Valkenburg PM . 2015 . Message variability and heterogeneity: a core challenge for communication research. Communication Yearbook 39 EL Cohen 3– 32 New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Slater MD , Rouner D . 2002 . Entertainment-education and elaboration likelihood: understanding the processing of narrative persuasion. Commun. Theory 12 : 173– 91 [Google Scholar]
• Small GW , Moody TD , Siddarth P , Bookheimer SY . 2009 . Your brain on Google: patterns of cerebral activation during Internet searching. Am. J. Geriatr. Psychiatry 17 : 116– 26 [Google Scholar]
• Smith SM , Fabrigar LR , Powell DM , Estrada M-J . 2007 . The role of information-processing capacity and goals in attitude-congruent selective exposure effects. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 33 : 948– 60 [Google Scholar]
• Snyder LB , Hamilton MA , Mitchell EW , Kiwanuka-Tondo J , Fleming-Milici F , Proctor D . 2004 . A meta-analysis of the effect of mediated health communication campaigns on behavior change in the United States. J. Health Commun. 9 : 71– 96 [Google Scholar]
• Song H , Zmyslinski-Seelig A , Kim J , Drent A , Victor A . et al. 2014 . Does Facebook make you lonely? A meta analysis. Comput. Hum. Behav. 36 : 446– 52 [Google Scholar]
• Sproull L , Kiesler S . 1986 . Reducing social-context cues: electronic mail in organizational communication. Manag. Sci. 32 : 1492– 512 [Google Scholar]
• Stoolmiller M , Gerrard M , Sargent JD , Worth KA , Gibbons FX . 2010 . R-rated movie viewing, growth in sensation seeking and alcohol initiation: reciprocal and moderation effects. Prev. Sci. 11 : 1– 13 [Google Scholar]
• Sundar SS , Jia H , Waddell TF , Huang Y . 2015 . Toward a theory of interactive media effects (TIME). The Handbook of the Psychology of Communication Technology SS Sundar 47– 86 New York: Wiley [Google Scholar]
• Swanson DL . 1987 . Gratification seeking, media exposure, and audience interpretations—some directions for research. J. Broadcast. Electron. Media 31 : 237– 54 [Google Scholar]
• Taifel H . 1978 . Social categorization, social identity, and social comparison. Differentiation Between Social Groups: Studies in the Social Psychology of Group Relations H Taifel 61– 76 London: Academic [Google Scholar]
• Taifel H , Turner JC . 1979 . The social identity theory of intergroup behavior. Psychology of Intergroup Relations S Worchel, WC Austin 7– 24 Chicago: Nelson Hall [Google Scholar]
• Tannenbaum PH , Greenberg BS . 1968 . Mass communications. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 19 : 351– 86 [Google Scholar]
• Tichenor PJ , Donohue GA , Olien CN . 1970 . Mass media flow and differential growth in knowledge. Public Opin. Q. 34 : 159– 70 [Google Scholar]
• Toffler A . 1980 . The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow New York: Bantam [Google Scholar]
• Valkenburg PM . 2014 . Schermgaande jeugd [ Youth and Screens ] Amsterdam: Prometheus [Google Scholar]
• Valkenburg PM , Cantor J . 2001 . The development of a child into a consumer. J. Appl. Dev. Psychol. 22 : 61– 72 [Google Scholar]
• Valkenburg PM , Peter J . 2009 . The effects of instant messaging on the quality of adolescents' existing friendships: a longitudinal study. J. Commun. 59 : 79– 97 [Google Scholar]
• Valkenburg PM , Peter J . 2011 . Online communication among adolescents: an integrated model of its attraction, opportunities, and risks. J. Adolesc. Health 48 : 121– 27 [Google Scholar]
• Valkenburg PM , Peter J . 2013a . The differential susceptibility to media effects model. J. Commun. 63 : 221– 43 [Google Scholar]
• Valkenburg PM , Peter J . 2013b . Five challenges for the future of media-effects research. Int. J. Commun. 7 : 197– 215 [Google Scholar]
• Valkenburg PM , Peter J , Schouten AP . 2006 . Friend networking sites and their relationship to adolescents' well-being and social self-esteem. Cyberpsychol. Behav. 9 : 584– 90 [Google Scholar]
• Valkenburg PM , Vroone M . 2004 . Developmental changes in infants' and toddlers' attention to television entertainment. Commun. Res. 31 : 288– 311 [Google Scholar]
• Van Der Heide B , Schumaker EM , Peterson AM , Jones EB . 2013 . The Proteus effect in dyadic communication: examining the effect of avatar appearance in computer-mediated dyadic interaction. Commun. Res. 40 : 838– 60 [Google Scholar]
• Walther JB . 1992 . Interpersonal effects in computer-mediated interaction: a relational perspective. Commun. Res. 19 : 52– 90 [Google Scholar]
• Walther JB . 1996 . Computer-mediated communication: impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Commun. Res. 23 : 3– 43 [Google Scholar]
• Walther JB , Liang YH , DeAndrea DC , Tong ST , Carr CT . et al. 2011a . The effect of feedback on identity shift in computer-mediated communication. Media Psychol. 14 : 1– 26 [Google Scholar]
• Walther JB , Tong ST , DeAndrea DC , Carr C , Van Der Heide B . 2011b . A juxtaposition of social influences: Web 2.0 and the interaction of mass, interpersonal, and peer sources online. Strategic Uses of Social Technology: An Interactive Perspective of Social Psychology Z Birchmeier, B Dietz-Uhler, G Stasser 172– 94 Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Webster JG . 2009 . The role of structure in media choice. Media Choice: A Theoretical and Empirical Overview T Hartmann 221– 33 New York: Routledge [Google Scholar]
• Weiss W . 1971 . Mass communication. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 22 : 309– 36 [Google Scholar]
• Wellman RJ , Sugarman DB , DiFranza JR , Winickoff JP . 2006 . The extent to which tobacco marketing and tobacco use in films contribute to children's use of tobacco: a meta-analysis. Arch. Pediatr. Adolesc. Med. 160 : 1285– 96 [Google Scholar]
• Wood W , Wong FY , Chachere JG . 1991 . Effects of media violence on viewers' aggression in unconstrained social interaction. Psychol. Bull. 109 : 371– 83 [Google Scholar]
• Yee N , Bailenson JN , Ducheneaut N . 2009 . The Proteus effect: implications of transformed digital self-representation on online and offline behavior. Commun. Res. 36 : 285– 312 [Google Scholar]
• Zillmann D . 1996 . Sequential dependencies in emotional experience and behavior. Emotion: Interdisciplinary Perspectives RD Kavanaugh, B Zimmerberg, S Fein 243– 72 Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum [Google Scholar]
• Zillmann D , Bryant J . 1985 . Affect, mood, and emotion as determinants of selective exposure. Selective Exposure to Communication D Zillmann, J Bryant 157– 90 Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum [Google Scholar]

Data & Media loading...

• Article Type: Review Article

Most Read This Month

Most cited most cited rss feed, job burnout, executive functions, social cognitive theory: an agentic perspective, on happiness and human potentials: a review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, sources of method bias in social science research and recommendations on how to control it, mediation analysis, missing data analysis: making it work in the real world, grounded cognition, personality structure: emergence of the five-factor model, motivational beliefs, values, and goals.

Role of Mass Media and Communication during Pandemic Key Role at Crucial Stage: Categories and Challenges

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CREATIVE RESEARCH THOUGHTS Volume 8, Issue 5 May 2020 | ISSN: 2320-28820

5 Pages Posted: 12 Aug 2020

Amity University

Saurabh Sambhav

Date Written: August 8, 2020

Media works as a bridge between government and society. Media have been recognized as robust power to form how we experience this world. Whether a viewer or a reader, we just close our mind and open our eyes. In this crisis, media played a very significant role in making people aware about the situation, calm the junta and encourage them to do positive action. The different kind of media like digital media and print media with their impact have been presented in this paper. There are many challenges at ground level in spreading information to the people across the nation, some have been discussed in the latter part of this research article.

Keywords: Journalism, digital media, print media, mass communication

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Amity University ( email )

Saurabh sambhav (contact author), do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on ssrn, paper statistics, related ejournals, development of innovation ejournal.

Subscribe to this fee journal for more curated articles on this topic

Educational Technology, Media & Library Science eJournal

Mass communication & popular culture ejournal, psychology research methods ejournal, climate & environmental psychology ejournal, health communication ejournal, libraries & media ejournal.

Mass Media Research Paper

View sample mass media research paper. Browse other  research paper examples and check the list of history research paper topics for more inspiration. If you need a research paper written according to all the academic standards, you can always turn to our experienced writers for help. This is how your paper can get an A! Feel free to contact our custom writing service for professional assistance. We offer high-quality assignments for reasonable rates.

Mass media—modes of communications intended to reach large numbers of people—have played an important role in world history, rousing populations in various times and places to resist governmental or other oppression, and calling those in power to account.

Academic Writing, Editing, Proofreading, And Problem Solving Services

Get 10% off with 24start discount code.

Communications media that are geared to reaching the masses—mass media—has been a force in social, political, and cultural change throughout history. It is not surprising that in many countries rulers have refused to permit a free press, and journalists have even been killed for speaking out. In some countries the media are nothing more than the official voice of those in power, whereas in others, the media have served as the voice of resistance or even revolution.

The First Print Mass Media

Perhaps the first newspaper was the Acta Diurna (Daily Transactions) in ancient Rome. Julius Caesar decided to make the proceedings of the government available to the citizenry, and starting in 59 BCE, they were posted in public places. Later versions were called the Acta Urbana (Transactions of the City) or the Acta Senatus (Transactions of the Senate). These news sheets were hand-copied by scribes, probably on papyrus, and they were undoubtedly subject to government oversight and control. Good news about the Roman Empire was much more likely to appear in writing than bad news. In addition to the daily doings of those in power, the Acta contained birthday and wedding announcements and information about new buildings being dedicated. Later emperors expanded the role of the Acta, using them to disseminate favorable stories about themselves or unfavorable stories about particular rivals. The Acta seem to have been very popular and to have reached a wide audience; those who could not read stood waiting until someone (a professional town crier or literate passerby) would read the news aloud. The orator and historian Tacitus (c. 56–c. 120 CE) wrote in his Annals that people from all walks of life eagerly read the various Acta, and political leaders found them an invaluable resource.

Another ancient empire that made use of something resembling a newspaper was Tang-dynasty China (618–907 CE), where the Di bao (Court Gazette) contained news gathered by various members of the governing elite. Originally intended for members of the imperial court, it was later expanded to include the intellectuals, but unlike the Acta, it was not posted anywhere that the general public could read it. By the time of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), newspapers received wider dissemination, but the elites still wanted information restricted to a select few and wanted control over what the general public read. It was not until the 1800s that the newspaper industry in China began to flourish.

Early European Mass Media

Although the Chinese inventor Bi Sheng had developed a method of printing using movable wood blocks around 1041, Europe did not make use of moveable type until Johannes Gutenberg developed his printing press around 1438.

Prior to the mid-1800s, European publications that reported on news events were called by various names. One of the oldest forms of publication to survive is the coranto; the first coranto was published in Amsterdam in December 1620 and was more of a pamphlet than what we would today call a newspaper. Most of the corantos were published in Dutch. They focused on business news and on political news that might affect business. Amsterdam was a very cosmopolitan city, with merchants who traveled throughout the known world. They wanted to know what was going on in other countries where they might engage in commerce. As a result, corantos became very popular; at one period in the mid-1600s there were as many as eight weeklies or biweeklies, bringing news from Africa, Asia, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere.

In Italy there was the gazette, a weekly news sheet that seems to have originated in Venice in the mid- 1500s (although some historians question the date, as they also question whether the sheet really took its name from the coin gazeta with which one paid for it). Gazettes, like corantos, contained business and political news and were read both by the general public and by the many merchants who came to Italy. In Germany there were weeklies as early as 1615, and a daily newspaper, the Leipziger Zeitung (Leipzig Newspaper), began in 1660. These newspapers covered politics, culture, and science, and provided important information during the Thirty Years’ War. But the German press was frequently subjected to restrictions by the government.

In Paris, as early as 1488, there were occasionnels— government leaflets about four pages in length. Mostly published in Lyon and Paris, they were mainly brief summations of what the government was doing. From about 1529 there were also the canards, publications of a more sensational and sometimes polemical nature. French exiles living in Amsterdam published broadsides that criticized the intolerance of King Louis XIV; these publications were called lardons (“jibes”), and the exiles, mostly Huguenots, had them smuggled into France during the late 1690s. Early in 1777, Paris gained its first daily newspaper, the Journal de Paris (Newspaper of Paris), but the government maintained strict control over what could be printed. An underground press existed for dissenting voices. There were also some women who participated in journalism, publishing a monthly newspaper called the Journal des Dames (The Ladies’ Newspaper),which first appeared in 1759. Its editors believed in “the female public’s right—and obligation—to be informed about controversial matters” (Landes 1988, 58–59) Unfortunately, as with other newspapers of that time, it frequently encountered government censorship, as well as resistance to its call for greater female participation in public life. It ceased publication in 1778.

In Spain under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, all printers had to be licensed. The first Spanish newspaper was probably the Correos de Francia, Flandres y Alemania (News of France, Flanders and Germany), founded by Andres de Almansa y Mendoza in 1621. In Spain’s colony in Mexico, the Gaceta de Mexico y Noticias de Nueva Espana (Mexico Gazette and the News of New Spain), regarded by some as Mexico’s first newspaper, appeared in January 1722, published by Juan Ignacio Maria de Castorena y Ursua, who later became Bishop of Yucatan.

In England the earliest surviving newspaper, from September 1621, is the Weekely Newes from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, France and the Low Countreys. It followed the format of the Dutch corantos and at first carried mostly business news, although gradually it expanded to include natural disasters, wars, and so forth. In 1641 reports from Parliament were issued for the first time. The first daily was the Daily Courant, founded by Samuel Buckley in March 1702. Magazines such as the Tatler also began to proliferate around this time; they offered opinions about current events. As demand for newspapers and news publications continued to increase, so did government restrictions, sometimes indirectly, through excessive taxes on printers, and sometimes directly, with dissenting presses being shut down entirely. After a brief period of relative freedom during the 1640s, when journalists could even criticize the king and hundreds of pamphlets and news sheets were seen in London, press censorship was reimposed by Oliver Cromwell in 1655. The same sort of control occurred in the British colonies. The first newspaper in North America, Publick Occurences, was published in September 1690 and was immediately shut down. The next colonial American newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, appeared in 1704 and had to submit itself to the British censors in order to continue publishing. It survived for the next seventy-two years by avoiding controversy and not criticizing the monarchy. Several newspapers that began in colonial times are still publishing today: the New Hampshire Gazette was founded in Portsmouth in 1756, and the Hartford [Connecticut] Courant began in 1764. European immigrants to North America from other countries also established newspapers. The first to appear, a German-language paper, was Philadelphische Zeitung (Philadelphian Newspaper), which was begun in 1732.

Print Media in the British Empire

Throughout the British Empire, English was the preferred language for journalism, since entrepreneurs from Great Britain founded most of the newspapers. This excluded everyone who could only read in the vernacular, but it did help any local journalists who were fluent in English to get hired. In Calcutta, India, James Augustus Hickey started the Bengal Gazette in January 1780. To help cover the expenses of publishing, he began taking advertisements, but the newspaper still lasted only two years, due in large part to Hickey’s controversial reporting about the governor-general. Even in a faraway place, the British government took a dim view of criticism by the press. Although the Bengal Gazette is regarded by some as the first Indian newspaper, other sources note that in 1777 a member of the Parsi community named Rustomji Kashaspathi founded a newspaper called the Bombay Courier. A few newspapers in local languages did begin to emerge in the 1800s, but the most influential newspapers were English-language papers. Among the best-known was the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, founded in 1838; today it is known as the Times of India, a name it began using in 1851.

In Canada the first newspaper appeared in March 1752; the Halifax (Nova Scotia) Gazette began as a two-page tabloid, with news from England, Europe, and other British colonies. Its founder was the printer John Bushell. Although it was published in Canada, it did not cover local births, deaths, or marriages until about 1769; most of what it printed at first was material aimed at government officials, merchants, and the military. More local in its focus was the Toronto Globe (today the Globe and Mail), founded by Scottish emigre George Brown in 1844. The Globe sent correspondents all over eastern Canada to cover the news. And in Montreal, the Gazette began in 1778 as a French-language newspaper, switched to a bilingual format, and finally became all English in 1822.

In Australia one of the first newspapers was the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, founded in 1803. Three British men who had worked there, Alfred Stephens, Frederick Stokes, and William McGarvie, went on to found the Sydney Herald (today the Sydney Morning Herald) in 1831. The Herald, originally a weekly and only four pages long, expanded and became a daily in 1840.

Cape Town, South Africa, had a newspaper as early as 1800; the founders of the Cape Town Gazette were Alexander Walker and John Robertson, and it published articles in both English and Afrikaans. There was no black newspaper in South Africa until 1884, when Imvo Zabantsundu (Xhosa: Native Opinion) appeared for the first time. Founded by black journalist John Tengo Jabavu, it published in the Xhosa language and English, and was unique in addressing current events and politics from a black perspective and in giving black poets and essayists a way to get their ideas into print.

Historical Censorship of Print Media

The excuse often given for government censorship of the press has been that journalism is unreliable, and in its formative years, there may have been some truth to this claim, since some of the news sheets were filled with unfounded rumors, and some writers used sensationalism to attract an audience. But the real problem for the ruling classes was that the press began taking sides in political issues. Many readers saw the newspapers as a way to learn perspectives that differed from the official version given by those in power. Then, as now, the powers-that-be sponsored “official” publications. The rulers often hoped theirs would be the only version, but in England, to give one good example, other publications developed, some of which questioned the government. There were ongoing tensions between the rulers and the publishers: rulers didn’t mind getting some positive publicity from a newspaper, such as when in 1622, King James I of Britain explained in print why he had decided to dissolve parliament. But monarchs often tried to shut down newspapers that they perceived as too critical. In France, printers and publishers were sometimes arrested and flogged for publications deemed seditious or defamatory. In at least one case, in England in 1584, a Catholic printer, William Carter, was sentenced to death because it was believed that an allegorical story he had written in one of his widely disseminated books was really an attack on the queen’s Protestant faith.

Despite the best efforts of various European monarchs to muzzle the press, journalists continued to make their opinions known, and as the years passed, reporters and columnists showed they could shape public opinion. In England the influence of the press grew so much that by the early 1800s, British journalists were being referred to as the “fourth estate,” in reference to the three classes (or estates) of society: the nobility, the clergy, and the common people. It was suggested that in addition to the original three, there should be added a fourth, the journalists, who were in some ways the most influential of all, since their telling of a story could bring praise or disapproval from thousands of people.

Mass Media, Freedom of the Press, and Sensationalism

The idea of freedom of the press was advocated by scholars and poets from at least as early as the poet John Milton’s famous Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England, in 1644, but it wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1700s that any countries created laws to formally protect journalists. Scandinavia led the way in 1766, with Sweden being the first country to abolish censorship and introduce a law guaranteeing freedom of the press, followed by Denmark and Norway in 1770. Freedom of the press became part of the newly independent United States’ Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to its constitution—which was ratified in 1791.

Earlier centuries had seen the occasional publication of unfounded rumors or sensationalist stories, but in the nineteenth century, as newspapers proliferated, so did some of those excesses. Perhaps the most disturbing was “yellow journalism.” Named after a character in a U.S. comic strip, the “Yellow Kid,” in its milder forms it was just a preoccupation with scandal, rumor, and sensationalism. The Canadian journalist James Creelman was well known in the late 1800s for his dramatic and hyperbolic writing. As a correspondent for several New York newspapers, he reported from dangerous places, while interviewing some of the most controversial newsmakers of his day in a “you are there” style. The style of writing was very exaggerated and filled with words that made it seem as if the writer was in mortal danger just for writing the story. Creelman was what his age would have considered shocking—when he wrote about atrocities during the Sino-Japanese war, for example, his narratives were so graphic that people could not believe such horrible things were true. He was among that era’s best known correspondents, and saw himself as a truth-teller. In England, William T. Stead, the publisher of London’s Pall Mall Gazette, reacted against what he saw as the blandness of the British press by creating a strategy to appeal to the working-class person rather than the educated elite. He began using screaming headlines and more illustrations, as well as actively crusading against a variety of social problems that affected the poor; for example, in the mid-1880s, the Gazette did a series on child prostitution, at that time called “white slavery,” showing how easy it was for poor children to be exploited. At that time standards were quite different, and even writing about prostitutes was considered in questionable taste. The pages of the Gazette enabled Stead to advocate for a number of causes, including women’s suffrage and his era’s antiwar movement. Yellow journalism was eventually seen as negative by the public when journalists began to compete with each other at being more sensational and more graphic—again, within the limitations of the era, in which “bad language” was not permitted no matter what.

Sensational reporting sold newspapers, but yellow journalism could also have serious consequences. In an era before the concept of objective reporting had been enshrined in the journalist’s vocabulary, many newspapers were unashamedly partisan. This could be a mixed blessing. In Hungary, for example, there was revolution in the air in 1848, as many Hungarians wanted independence from Austria. It was the press that led the charge, thanks in large part to Lajos Kossuth, a lawyer whose views were considered radical by those in power. A fiery orator and writer, Kossuth used his position as editor-in-chief of the underground Pesti Hirlap (Newspaper from Pest) to promote nationalism and lead the drive for independence. While encouraging nationalism had a positive result in this case, there were other occasions when stirring up nationalistic fervor did more harm than good. The Spanish-American war in 1898 was largely attributed to newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst, who encouraged his reporters to inflame the U.S. public to support a war that most modern historians agree need never have been fought.

Telegraphy and Wire Services as Mass Media

The mid-to-late 1800s saw further expansion of journalism throughout the world. Technology was partly responsible: Steam driven locomotives now carried people to other cities more quickly, which was good news for reporters trying to cover an assignment. Better news was the invention of the telegraph, which made communicating from distant points infinitely faster. In both Europe and North America, new companies were founded to serve as resources for gathering news. The first news agency was founded in 1832 by Charles-Louis Havas; named Agence Havas, it originally translated the newspapers from foreign countries but by 1835 expanded to cover events around the globe. The government continually monitored it, but Agence Havas became a reliable resource for French-language newspapers. It survives to this day under the name of Agence France Presse. In May 1848 the Associated Press (AP) opened in New York. Founded by David Hale and James Gordon Bennett, it offered its U.S.-affiliated newspapers access to news dispatches from all over North America. In 1858 AP was able to receive dispatches from Europe for the first time, via transoceanic cable.

As use of the telegraph expanded, it became possible for the newspapers to receive and disseminate news on the same day, even from distant colonial outposts. This contributed to the impact journalism had on a society that increasingly sought more information about world events. In Europe, in October 1851, a German immigrant working in London, Paul Julius von Reuter, began sending stock market quotations between London and Paris via cable. Prior to telegraphy, he had used the so-called pigeon post, sending the information via carrier pigeons. His new company, Reuters, quickly expanded, offering newsgathering services similar to those of the Associated Press. Members of the British press were among his first customers, but soon Reuters had affiliates throughout Europe. In 1865, Reuters was the first European news service to have the story that President Lincoln had been assassinated. Other European countries also established their own news-gathering organizations, often because of demands from businesses for global information that might affect them. Outside of Europe, the new technology was slow to arrive, so newspapers such as Australia’s Sydney Herald still relied on news from ships until transoceanic cables were successfully laid and telegraph connections were established in major Australian cities, between 1858 and the mid-1870s.

A lack of modern telegraphy was also a problem in China. The Qing government appeared not to see the need for telegraph cable until it fought a war with Russia in the 1870s. Lack of speedy communication hampered treaty negotiations and led to several unfavorable treaties. The public was outraged, and this provided the impetus to begin expansion: from 1884 to 1899, 27,500 kilometers of cable was laid. The encroachment of other countries on China’s sovereignty and territory led to a feeling of nationalism that manifested itself in the establishment of many newspapers and magazines from the 1860s through the 1880s. In the rest of the world, certain Latin American countries laid down telegraph lines in the 1850s, as did the Ottoman Empire, and lines were laid down in European colonies as well.

Radio and Television as Mass Media

The 1900s brought yet another dramatic change in journalism, as a result of another technological advance. The inventors Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla were both experimenting with wireless communication, or what would later be called radio. It is generally agreed upon that the first broadcast was an experiment done by a Canadian engineer, Reginald Fessenden, in Massachusetts, but the exact date is not certain and is in fact the subject of much debate: some sources say it was on Christmas Eve 1906, whereas others place it earlier.

Some of the earliest commercial radio stations worldwide were operated by corporations, with the hope of selling merchandise or radio equipment. In North America, one of the first stations was XWA (later CFCF) in Montreal, owned by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company; it went on the air in December 1919. Another early station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was owned by Westinghouse, which manufactured electronic equipment, while another, 8MK (later WWJ) in Detroit, Michigan, was owned by a newspaper, the Detroit News. At least one early North American station—WIAE in Vinton, Iowa—was owned in 1922 by a woman, Marie Zimmerman. Mexico got its first station in December 1923, when CYL took to the air, owned jointly by two businessmen, Raul and Luis Azcarraga, and the Mexico City newspaper El Universal (The Universal). Puerto Rico’s first commercial station, WKAQ, went on the air from San Juan in 1922, started by Joaquin Agusty, who was well known for his work with amateur radio. And one of the first radio stations in Cuba was PWX, owned by the Cuban Telephone Company in Havana; American radio fans reported hearing its powerful signal in 1922.

News was broadcast at a few stations in 1921 and 1922, and live sporting events were also broadcast during that time. But the staple of American programming was music. At first, because many of the owners were from the upper class, they felt their duty was to educate and to offer “good” music (opera and classical, as opposed to jazz, which they felt was vulgar), but gradually the public demand for dance and popular music won out at most stations. Radio was unique because it was the first mass medium to bring people an event as it was happening, and it also provided the poor and people of color access to places from which they were often excluded. With radio, people could hear the greatest vocalists, learn from famous professors, or just enjoy the hit songs in the privacy of the home. Radio helped to create a common culture, as certain songs or certain performers became popular across the country.

Early radio broke down borders in other ways too. Signals carried great distances, and listeners competed to see who could receive stations from the farthest away. In 1921 Eunice Randall, the first women announcer in Massachusetts, told a newspaper that she had received fan mail from people who heard her in London. Radio magazines such as Radio News began printing lists of stations from foreign countries, so that listeners could write down the ones they heard. And it was not just in North America that radio changed people’s lives. Radio News reported in September 1925 how broadcasting was affecting the peasants in an impoverished Russian village. A radio and loudspeakers had been set up in a public listening room so that people could gather and hear the news of the world; crowds eagerly awaited these broadcasts so they could find out what was happening outside the confines of their village. Meanwhile, the government had just begun permitting private ownership of radio sets in Moscow, and already over 50,000 receivers were in use. By the mid-1920s, many European cities were hosting radio expositions at which the public could meet radio broadcasters and see the newest radio receiving equipment.

By late 1926 the United States’ first national network was on the air—the National Broadcasting Company, or NBC. It was able to offer its affiliates excellent programs with famous performers because the network was entirely supported by advertisers, who often chose the talent and decided what got on the air—a prerogative that resulted in women being relegated to stereotypic roles and minorities seldom being hired at all. By the end of the 1920s, few of the small entrepreneurs who had put the first stations on the air were able to afford to operate a radio station.

In many countries it was the government that operated the stations, which were supported by a receiver fee that listeners had to pay in order to own a radio receiving set. Great Britain was one such country. The British Broadcasting Company was founded in 1922, and the first station, 2LO, went on the air in November of that year. Right from the beginning, government interests tried to limit how much news could be broadcast, fearing that radio could influence the public’s political views; newspapers also lobbied the government to restrict radio from doing news at all, since print journalists saw radio as competition.

As in Britain, in France, Denmark, and Germany the government quickly established control of broadcasting in the early 1920s. In at least one place, radio broadcasting was entirely controlled by the Catholic Church: Vatican City’s first station was built in late 1930; the station would enable the pope spread his message worldwide.

In Argentina, a commercial station, Radio Argentina, was licensed in November 1923, and a high powered station, LPZ in Buenos Aires, was on the air in 1924. Argentina was also an excellent market for American-made radio receivers. In Peru, as early as July 1921, a government-run shortwave station in Lima was put on the air at the request of President Augusto Leguia; it mainly broadcast weather reports and other information useful to the military and the police. The first commercial station in Peru was probably OAX in Lima, which went on the air in June 1925, broadcasting entertainment and educational programming. Many stations in Latin America were run by private companies, and although they were sometimes subjected to government censorship, in general, they were free to broadcast.

Radio broadcasting came slowly to Asia. In fact, there were fewer than thirty stations in all of Asia in 1927, whereas in North America, there were hundreds. In China, American and British businessmen seem to have set up the earliest radio stations; one of the first was in Shanghai in 1922. But the government did not allow radio broadcasting to become widespread; by 1931 there were only eighteen stations operating in the entire country. A national radio service, operated by the Communist party, did not begin until 1940. In Hong Kong, then a British colony, the government was equally cautious: amateur radio fans proposed a station as early as 1923, but it wasn’t approved till 1928. Hong Kong only had that one station till the mid 1930s. In contrast, radio was welcomed in Japan, where the amateurs had been demanding it since the early 1920s. Tokyo’s JOAK was the first commercial station, going on the air in March 1925 and quickly followed by stations in Osaka and Nagoya. Nippon Hoso Kyokai (the Japan Broadcasting Association, or NHK) was established as the official national broadcasting company of Japan in 1926. Modeling itself after the BBC, it took control of the three stations on the air and continued to expand throughout the country.

During the 1930s, NHK was also involved with experiments in early television, as was the Soviet Union, which conducted experiments with television as early as 1931. There were TV broadcasts in the Netherlands in 1935, and Great Britain inaugurated its national service in November 1936: the first British television broadcast featured a song called “Magic Rays of Light,” which certainly expressed the amazement people who witnessed it must have felt. Even prior to the establishment of electronic television, Great Britain was home to very primitive mechanical stations that broadcast sporadically in the late 1920s. A Scottish-born inventor, John Logie Baird, is regarded as the father of mechanical television in Great Britain, and he received considerable publicity despite the poor quality of the picture his system produced. In the United States, the inventor Charles Francis Jenkins was the father of mechanical television, and he too supervised some stations in the late 1920s. But it was the development of a far superior technology, electronic television (credited in the United States sometimes to an independent West-Coast inventor named Philo Farnsworth and sometimes to a corporate inventor who worked for RCA, Vladimir Zworykin), that eventually led to the United States’ successful television industry.

Colonialism played a major role in the history of international broadcasting. Colonial governments set up radio stations (and later TV stations) and controlled their content, as they had with newspapers. Even stations that were set up as noncommercial were operated by and often benefited corporate interests. The British Marconi Company, which wanted to sell receiving sets, attempted to open stations in Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta, India, as early as 1922. An amateur organization in India, the Radio Club of Bombay, did some programming beginning in 1923, but the first commercial stations did not begin till 1927. When it became evident that World War II was on the horizon, interest grew in expanding the radio broadcasts to give the public more news and entertainment during difficult times. But a national service (All India Radio) did not flourish till India achieved independence in 1947. And in Central America, the United Fruit Company had great influence on what was broadcast, making sure news reports were favorable and nobody challenged the company’s control over the banana industry. Even under colonial administration, nationalism could lead to conflicts about what should or should not be broadcast. In the British mandate of Palestine (present-day Israel), the British set up the Palestine Broadcasting Service in March 1936. Although BBC announcers trained the staff and programming was offered in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, neither Jews nor Arabs were happy with what was on the air. The same problem occurred in a number of other ethnically divided countries, where ethnic tensions played out in a struggle for control of the country’s radio stations.

The Mass Media Divide: Comparing Rich and Poor Nations

One organization that has been monitoring trends in international media is UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), which held its first international conference on communication policies in 1974 in Costa Rica. At that conference, a declaration was issued, urging that in crafting their communications policies, nations should take into account national realities but also the promotion of free expression of thought and respect for individual and social rights. In subsequent conferences, declarations were made about the necessity of protecting the rights of journalists and giving all people—not just the rich and the powerful—access to information. An international commission, with members from fifteen countries, convened in 1977 and began issuing reports on the state of the media. Their first report, Many Voices, One World, was issued in 1980 and was the first in-depth study of the media in both rich and poor countries. It identified disparities in access to media: in Africa, for example, 1976 statistics showed that only 3 percent of the population owned a radio, which was troubling because “[r]adio is of vital importance to developing countries because of [the] low penetration of newspapers into rural areas and . . . because of illiteracy on a mass scale” (MacBride 1980, 122–127). The commission also identified the countries that had kept pace with advances in communication technology—Japan, for example, composed only 5 percent of Asia’s population yet it had “66 percent of the press circulation, 46 percent of the radio receivers, 63 percent of the television sets and 89 percent of the telephones” (MacBride 1980, 122–127), according to 1979 research. The study found that while India had 835 different newspapers, eight African countries had no daily newspaper at all, while others had only a weekly or a biweekly that was not distributed outside of main centers of population. Even in developed countries that had radio or newspapers or television, most of the coverage was about what was going on in the biggest cities. And although media consolidation was not the issue in 1980 that it is today, there was already evidence that a handful of elites controlled the communication in many countries. As the commission noted, issuing a declaration about press freedom or equal access did not mean that those goals would be reached or that governments would cooperate.

Since that first UNESCO report, more countries now have technology, and a growing number have Internet newspapers. Perhaps the first in Africa was the Mail and Guardian Online, started in South Africa in 1994. Saudi Arabia began an English-language service, ArabNews Online, around 1998; it was an offshoot of the English-language daily newspaper, Arab News, which had been established in 1975. What the average Saudi has access to remains limited. The ability to communicate in English was desirable primarily for the elite, who were taught the language in private schools so they could engage in commerce with the West. The average person mainly went to religious schools, but the educated elite then and now were taught English. The fact that the on-line Arab News publishes in English provides it with the ability to reach out to educated Saudi expatriates as well as to American and British diplomats. The ruling class and the clerics in Saudi Arabia at first opposed modernizations such as radio, which by all accounts did not start till the 1930s—the clerics only accepted radio when King Abd al Aziz tied its use to the religious purpose of airing scriptural lessons and teaching illiterate people more about their religion. For those who have access to it, the Internet can provide a means of resisting tyranny. Women human rights activists in Afghanistan founded RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) and made use of online communication and a website to mobilize supporters worldwide during the repressive Taliban regime of the 1990s. Even in countries in which the average citizen lacks access to the Internet, exiles are often able to use it to spread the word of what is happening in their country. It has become harder for repressive regimes to control information or prevent it from being disseminated, but it can still be done: in Burma (Myanmar), the autocratic government has been successful in keeping dissenting voices from being heard, and in Iran, when protesters questioned the legitimacy of the elections in 2009, the government banned Western TV and radio reporters, and shut down most internet sites, while limiting access to social networking sites.

Mass Media and Violence

Being a journalist can be a dangerous occupation. The International Press Institute in Vienna stated that in 2003, sixty-four journalists were killed; nineteen of them died in Iraq and nine in Columbia. Also in 2003, the Committee to Protect Journalists named Iraq, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, and Bangladesh as the most unsafe places for journalists. According to the CPJ, while Iraq was a war zone and any reporting from a war zone can be dangerous, the other countries had repressive governments that lock up and in some cases torture journalists whose opinions they do not like. By 2008, conditions for journalists remained unchanged—once again, sixty-four journalists were killed, with Iraq and Pakistan having the most deaths. In some countries, journalists have just disappeared, usually after reporting on a story the government disliked, or uncovering the activities of organized crime. That was the case in Mexico is 2007 when investigative reporter Rodolfo Rincon Taracena vanished after reporting on local drug trafficking. Reporters covering drug-related crime in Latin America were also frequently in danger: in Peru in 2006, forty journalists were attacked, and in Columbia, three were killed and many others had to go into hiding. In Haiti, where news is still spread by teledjol (word of mouth) and illiteracy is rampant, radio remains the most important mass medium: according to some reports, about 92 percent of Haitians own a radio and the country has over three hundred stations. For that reason, the government has sometimes tried to suppress the country’s radio stations: Jean Dominique, director of a popular language station, denounced the government and accused it of rigging the elections; he was gunned down in April 2000. There are reports that Haitian radio stations have gradually gained more freedom since then, although journalists have admitted to practicing self-censorship. In some countries, the media have also been used by those in power to incite the population to violence. One especially egregious example of this occurred during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when a government radio station, RTML, encouraged Hutus to murder members of the Tutsi minority. Radio broadcasts referred to Tutsis as “vermin” and “cockroaches” and repeatedly demonized them. Transcripts show that some announcers even pointed out where Tutsis were living and encouraged Hutus to kill them.

The Future of Mass Media

In the Muslim world, the arrival of the cable news television station Al-Jazeera (Arabic for The Peninsula) in 1996 has been dramatic. Critics have called the Quatar-based station sensationalistic and biased and have accused it of stirring up anti-Jewish and anti-American sentiments in the Arab world. But many Muslims counter that it is the first network to report from a pro-Arab point of view. Unlike CNN or Fox, American cable networks with a decidedly American and Western viewpoint, Al-Jazeera has called American forces in Iraq “occupiers” and referred to those who were fighting against the Americans not as “militants” but rather as “resistance fighters” or “martyrs.” Al-Jazeera has grown in size and influence in the years since its founding; since 2003, it has competition from Dubai-based Al-Arabiya, which also offers news from a pro-Arab point of view, but is perceived by Western observers to be more moderate in its coverage. It will be interesting to see the direction these stations take in the years to come. Cable television has become a growing presence in a growing number of Arab countries in the first decade of the twenty-first century. And while many Arab stations, both radio and TV, are religious in nature, there are also stations that broadcast a wider variety of programming, including popular movies. One example is ART (the Arab Radio and Television Network), which was founded in Saudi Arabia back in 1993.

While globalization has affected how business is done worldwide, it has also affected the mass media. In the United States, deregulation of broadcast media began in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, culminating with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, signed by President Bill Clinton. The Telecom Act lifted restrictions on how many stations could be owned by one company. Rather than encouraging competition as proponents claimed it would, the end result was consolidation of power into the hands of a few giant media conglomerates, several of which (Clear Channel Communications, which at one point owned over a thousand radio stations and a major concert promotion company; and News Corporation, owner of cable channel Fox News as well as numerous newspapers and magazines) had ties to conservative politics and the Republican party. In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, critics accused these conglomerates of stifling dissenting views and only broadcasting coverage in favor of going to war.

Similar media consolidation occurred in Canada, where in the period from 1985 to 2000, consolidation occurred in dramatic fashion. By 2000, 68 percent of all television stations were controlled by five giant companies, and one conglomerate, the Hollinger Corporation, soon owned or had a financial interest in 80 percent of Canada’s daily newspapers. Eventually, financial problems caused Hollinger to sell off many of those newspapers, but they were bought up by another conglomerate, CanWest.

Media consolidation is also a fact of life in parts of Europe. In England, there has been increasing pressure on the government to relax media ownership laws. One major proponent of removing the limitations is Rupert Murdoch; in addition to owning the American conglomerate News Corporation, he also owns several British newspapers (including the Times of London and a tabloid, the Sun) and a satellite programming service called BSkyB (British Sky Broadcasting), as well as media properties in Australia. Murdoch has been accused by his critics of censoring news stories that are contrary to his political views. Meanwhile, in Italy, the controversial prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, also had ties to media ownership; companies owned by his family dominate Italian television, and he has attempted to pass legislation that would permit his conglomerate to expand its ownership of newspapers. He has also used his influence to make sure the state-run broadcaster RAI is controlled by a board of directors that is favorable to him. Critics have accused him of using his wealth to manipulate media coverage, in order to avoid having his questionable financial dealings scrutinized.

In other countries too, a similar trend towards consolidation can be seen. Where media were at one time comprised of government-run monopolies, the new concern is that commercial media conglomerates are stifling opposing voices in the same way that the state-run media once did.

There are some hopeful media signs in countries where repression used to be a part of life. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, an era of comparative freedom of the press began in Russia. While the press was reined in somewhat by the government of President Vladimir Putin, who was in office (2000– 2008), it is still far more free than it was in the era of Soviet rule. But being a journalist in Russia can still be dangerous: the Committee to Protect Journalists notes that when journalists are murdered there, the killers are seldom if ever brought to justice. The news is more positive for journalists in Haiti. Radio stations that were shut down by the government have quietly reopened since the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. And in Rwanda a new radio service promotes not hatred but friendship and entertainment. Similar to pop music radio stations in the United States, Rwanda Radio in Kigali has opportunities for listeners to call in, a morning talk show, modern pop music, and even a children’s trivia contest in which the winners get to talk on the air. Young and articulate announcers offer listeners helpful information about health, and they also teach tolerance. Where radio had once been part of the problem, it is now trying to be part of the healing process.

Bibliography:

• Berg, J. S. (1999). On the short waves, 1923–1945: Broadcast listening in the pioneer days of radio. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.
• Ginsborg, P. (2004). Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power & Patrimony. London: Verso.
• Glaister, Dan. (2006, February 13). Media: Shooting the messengers: Journalists in Latin America face increasingly violent intimidation from drug gangs who do not want to see their activities in print. Guardian, p. 1.
• Hayes, J. E. (2000). Radio nation: Communication, popular culture and nationalism in Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
• Hilliard, R. L., & Keith, M. (1996). Global broadcasting systems. Boston: Focal Press.
• Landes, J. B. (1988). Women and the public sphere in the age of the French revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• MacBride, S. (Ed.). (1980). The MacBride Report: Many voices, one world. Paris: UNESCO publications.
• McChesney, R. (2000). Rich Media, Poor Democracy. New York: New Press.
• O’Sullivan, T., Dutton, B., & Raynor, P. (1994). Studying the media: An introduction. New York: Routledge.
• Read, D. (1992). The power of news: The history of Reuters. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
• Scannell, P., & Cardiff, D. (1991). A social history of British broadcasting. London: Basil Blackwell.
• Stevens, M. (1997). A history of news. Boston: Harcourt Brace.
• Vipond, M. (1992). Listening in: The first decade of broadcasting in Canada, 1922–1932. Montreal, Canada: McGill Queen’s University Press.

ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER