How Media Manipulation Works
Research Based Analysis
This is the second part of a 5-part series. If you're new here start with Part 1.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Media Effect
Framing: Shaping Your Perception
Agenda Setting: Controlling the Narrative
Priming: Influencing Your Judgment
The Rise of User-Generated Frames: A New Dimension of Manipulation
Selective Exposure and Polarization
Resources
Introduction
While Part 1 outlined manipulative communication in its various forms as a tool for deception. In this continuation, we will look at academic research to understand how narratives are shaped and actively used by today's media landscape.
The book referenced below, which discusses this at length and includes numerous other research efforts from the past, is titled Making Sense of Media and Politics. Written and published in 2022 by Professor Gadi Wolfsfeld, an American-born professor who served as chair of the Department of Political Science and the Department of Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
A valuable piece of literature as it analyzes recent events, such as the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th, and also gives voice to other research efforts and studies. The book is linked below, so I will simply add the page number when referencing or quoting a specific section.
Media Effect
Before going into specifics, it is necessary to define the effects of media and the relationship between politics, reporting/broadcasting and power.
Simply put, political power can be translated into power over all forms of media. Prof. Wolfsfeld directly links the two and outlines how the loss of control over the political environment leads to the loss of control over the media (p. xix (Introduction)). Media reporting is equated with storytelling, and through this lens, any political story is inevitably biased. There is a major impact on political processes that the dedication to telling good stories has.
There is only one claim with which I ended up strongly disagreeing, and on which I doubt you will disagree with me. Wolfsfeld wants to make the argument that most media effects are unintended and unnoticed (p.125, xxii, xxiii, 106).
I need to explain what I disagree with here.
I believe that most effects are unnoticed. This fact motivated me to write this paper in the first place. But unintentional? As I went through the entire publication, I couldn't help but notice how well crafted and openly visible these efforts (on the media side) are. Wolfsfeld contradicts himself in his impressive analysis of the tools used by the media giants. However, he later returns to this claim and partially retracts it, while maintaining that he does not mean to imply malice.
While I don't believe that the media landscape is inherently evil, I do believe that this is a deliberate effort to blur the lines and thus ruin social cohesion.
Media outlets and their journalists are aware of their reach and influence on public discourse. The tools used to maximize engagement are also used to shape a particular mental image of the current political sphere and the state of the country. Each written or broadcast piece of media is constructed in a very specific way and revised multiple times to follow strict guidelines that go along with the news outlet's way of reporting and framing.
The following chapters will explain what I mean.
Framing: Shaping Your Perception
Wolfsfeld describes three media effects in his chapter “Media Effects and Users' Interactions” (p. 98). Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming. Understanding these will render the vast majority of narrative deception efforts useless.
Framing refers to the interpretive theme used to present information. The chapter also highlights three key points about framing effects (pp. 100-102). While it is difficult to pin down a specific definition of framing, it generally refers to the context and light in which something is presented (p. 102). Researchers agree on three statements:
The way events, candidates, and issues are framed in various forms of media can have a significant impact on how people think and behave politically.
There are a number of different factors that can influence how much different people are exposed to and influenced by different media frames.
There is an urgent need to better understand how user-generated frames can also influence different communities, as the number of politically engaged Internet users who play a more active role in constructing and generating frames continues to grow.
By understanding frames, you'll be able to interpret the effects on particular groups of people when presented with a particular narrative.
For example, echo chambers allow people to create information environments where they are only exposed to information that confirms their existing beliefs. While echo chambers can prevent one frame from dominating all political discourse, they can also prevent any meaningful dialogue from taking place. Members of echo chambers tend not to engage with opinions or ideas that contradict their own worldview. Pretty fertile ground for disinformation and extremism. This is how user-generated frameworks (online communities and content) can influence public opinion over time. This kind of evolution of public discourse can be observed around the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump's repeated framing of the election as an attack on democracy and the United States, and the massive ripples this created in online communities.
User-generated frames will become increasingly important to political processes in the future. We will return to user-generated frames and an in-depth analysis of January 6 later.
Agenda Setting: Controlling the Narrative
Agenda Setting is the ability of the media to influence what issues people consider important. This is especially important during elections, as the issues people think about can influence how they vote. This is done by highlighting some issues while ignoring others. In Wolfsfeld's words, the tagline for this effect is:
The news media may not tell us what to think, but they do tell us what to think about. (p.107)
And by extension. What not to think about.
Not just the media, but also politicians. It is important to keep in mind that the media follows the lead of political signaling; while there is still a lot of agency on the part of the mainstream media in setting the agenda, the simple indexing of political leaders' talking points is becoming more common.
The advent of social media has changed the media landscape and the impact of building the agenda (p. 108):
Social media, as a distinctive mode of large-scale communication, enables topics not covered by traditional media.
Legacy media feeding off social media and vice versa in many cases
Priming: Influencing Your Judgment
Priming is the third concept, and it comes into play when the first two are in effect. Priming occurs when media coverage influences the factors people consider when evaluating political candidates and issues. The issues highlighted in broadcast programming then become the standards by which people judge candidates.
In the previous point, I mentioned that the media landscape doesn't explicitly tell us what to think about, but this important third concept challenges that claim.
By setting the agenda, thereby influencing what we are shown and where our priorities should be, combined with the additional framing of the coverage that emphasizes a narrative, the audience is primed and trained to think about a particular issue in a particular way for an extended period of time!
In the case of an election, for example, the audience will evaluate the candidates based on their stance on a current issue. The candidates would be forced to state their positions on that particular issue, reinforcing the effects of framing and agenda setting. And the cycle repeats itself. The agenda is set, the issue is framed, the audience is primed. This “changes the standards people use in making political judgments” (p.109).
The Rise of User-Generated Frames: A New Dimension of Manipulation
Professor Wolfsfeld emphasizes three aspects of media interaction:
Learning
Political participation
Persuasion
He goes into more detail, citing many studies. I'll just briefly recall these three outcomes of media interaction because they will be important later.
Learning from the media is about whether people who follow the media regularly are more politically knowledgeable. While legacy news can increase political knowledge, social media tends to have the opposite effect, leading to less political knowledge than those who rely solely on traditional/legacy media or a combined approach (p.113). This is true even for less researched and formal news channels, such as infotainment or soft news.
Political participation involves citizens taking action to make their voices heard, but social media has become the most effective tool for mobilization compared to, for example, attending protests (p. 101).
When it comes to persuasion on the part of the media landscape, as well as framing, agenda setting, and priming, Wolfsfeld argues that these effects are often unintentional, with many factors influencing the impact on audiences.
The fact that media effects are unintentional refers to the fact that, in most cases, journalists are not consciously trying to influence the way people think about politics. As emphasized throughout this book, their primary goal is to produce interesting and culturally acceptable stories that attract an audience. (p. 101)
I disagree with this. He does mention how more partisan media channels construct clearly slanted political stories and thus actively try to influence the audience. But I don't agree that partisan media is a small side note here. It makes up a large part of the Western mainstream media and carefully plans narratives. On all possible sides. There are good players, but there are definitely bad ones.
He claims that people are harder to manipulate out of their positions than we give them credit for. The conclusion Wolfsfeld leads us to here is that people aren't so easily persuaded, especially once they realize it's happening. The dangerous part, though, is that most people don't actually realize it's happening.
Selective Exposure and Polarization
Finally, there needs to be a reinterpretation of the audience concept. Instead of talking about an active audience, one has to start thinking about an active user. This does not fit into the classical paradigm of framing effects as a top-down effect from the media that is adopted by the audience.
Selective exposure is the concept that applies to echo chambers. It talks about the tendency of people to prefer media and media content that is consistent with their political attitudes (p.104). More selective exposure leads to more polarization.
What's even more interesting is Wolfsfeld's presentation of research that shows how political polarization can lead to more selective exposure among viewers and users. Thus, there may be a causal spiral in which people become more politically polarized, which leads to more selective exposure, which in turn increases the level of polarization within the public (p.105).
When scholars speak of an 'active audience,' they are also referring to people's ability either to pay more attention to ideological frames that complement their own and/or to reinterpret what they are being told. (p. 105)
This is called motivated reasoning. Citizens are more likely to follow a frame if it is promoted by their political party.
Now that the theoretical part is out of the way, the next parts will discuss specific media/political examples through this theoretical lens. The last part will be about escaping the rampant manipulation efforts on all fronts, be it legacy, alternative, or social media.
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