Main description:

This book explores the effects of both old and new conservative media on political attitudes and attitude-consistent behavioral intentions. The author combines the latest neuro-cognitive research and theories on information and misinformation processing and attitudinal development with extensive scholarship on media priming, framing, agenda-setting, and cultivation effects, to put forth a new working media effects theory.

Drawing on three longitudinal experimental studies from the US and UK, the book promotes an interdisciplinary and complex-systems based model of media effects that explains how conservative media mixes with cognitive-psychological, cultural-political, social interactional, and situational factors, contexts, and mechanisms to influence political beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours. Informing the development and application of new social and digital research methods with improved ecological validity, the study will contribute new experiment-based findings on how old and digital news media can mediate or moderate electoral decisions.

This truly interdisciplinary study draws on the fields of media studies, communication, political sociology and cognitive science, and will be of interest to scholars and students working in these fields as well as media psychology, new media and journalism.

Contents:

Introduction 1. How Your Brain Forms And Maintains Political Positions 2. The Insidious Ways News Content Inflects People's Politics 3. Does Digital Fake News Change Voting Choices? A Priming Experiment 4. Old Vs New Right-Wing Media's Fomentation Of Xenophobia: A Framing Experiment 5. UK Tabloids & Public Support For Immigration: A Cultivation Experiment 6. On The Importance Of Journalism Ethics For A Democratic Society