Percpetions of sensationalism among U.S. and Mexican news audiences

Newspaper Research Journal, Winter 2002 by Perry, David K

News researchers have used two somewhat different concepts of news sensationalism. Some work treats sensationalism as a researcher-defined property of communication contents, such as bloody graphics or crime news. Content analysis can measure such contents quite readily.1 The other concept emphasizes audience reactions or perceived sensationalism, of which Danielson et al. provided one influential conceptualization:

Sensationalism means that stories in a publication are underdistanced: ... they supply more sensations and emotional reactions than we desire emotionally or that society has deemed proper ... It ... has to do with the psychological distance we wish to keep between ourselves and our perceptions of events in the world.2

Based on this definition, Tannenbaum and Lynch devised "Sendex,"3 a measure that compares a person's perception of content with the meaning of sensationalism to him or her. Initially applied to "constructed" news stories, the technique has been used recently to measure changes in perceptions of U.S. newspapers after Rupert Murdoch acquired them.4 Those studies' findings indicated that in addition to shifting to more "sensational" layouts and news selection, Murdoch's newspaper acquisitions had also shifted to greater local coverage.5 Thus the readers' perception of shifts toward greater sensationalism could have been as much a function of exposure to more local content as it was a function of layout and news-selection. If perception of "underdistanced" news reflects greater perception of sensationalism, then the "underdistance" (i.e., proximity) of local news has something to do with perceived sensationalism. Indeed, proximity has been long considered a strong determinant of news selection.6

This study (a) compares conceptions of news sensationalism among residents of Mexico and of the United States, and (b) tests a hypothesis that residents of each country will perceive coverage of events in their home country as particularly sensational.

Method

The study used a 2 (nationality) x 4 (news story) experimental design. Respondents were students at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara in Mexico (N=107) and at a Southern university in the United States (N=125). Students received a booklet containing a news story. The students were told (through an interpreter in Mexico) that the study concerned perceptions of news sensationalism and that they would read an Associated Press story distributed to newspapers worldwide. Actually, the stories were composite wire service news accounts from the past.7 In the booklet, participants were initially asked to define the term "sensationalism" via 12 bipolar adjectives (accurate-inaccurate, good-bad, responsible-irresponsible, wise-foolish, acceptable-unacceptable, colorful-colorless, interesting-uninteresting, exciting-unexciting, hot-cold, active-passive, agitated-calm and bold-timid). Those semantic differential scales, on which a subject can rate his/her concept of sensationalism, represent the core of the "Sendex" technique?

Students then read the news story (one of four treatments that concerned violent gangs or airplane crashes). The news accounts were chosen for their symmetry relative to the United States and Mexico and for their ordinal geographic distance from either group of students. The stories were typeset in newspaper-style columns without headlines. Randomized combinations of booklets were used to assign each subject to a story. Full details of the complete stories are available from the authors. Briefly, the news-story variable was manipulated as follows:

* Mexico--far from border, near Mexican study site:

Crash of an airplane bound for Puerto Vallarta, fairly near to Guadalajara. Graphic detail of observers' accounts and grief of survivors.

* Border--Mexican side:

Story about a drug smuggling cult that had killed many people near Matamoros, on the U.S. border. Reportage of gruesome sacrificial and black magic practices.

* Border--U.S. side:

Story about violent bandits operating on the border, preying on illegal aliens. Examples of savage attacks and difficulties the police experience in trying to prevent them.

* United States--far from border, near U.S. study site:

Crash of an airplane bound for Tampa, fairly close to the study's U.S. site. Witness accounts and attempts to rescue survivors.

Next, the students used the same 12 bipolar adjectives to rate the story. Consistent with Tannenbaum and Lynch,9 we used the generalized distance function, D^sub 2^ (square of distance), an index of similarity between two profiles of judgment across several dimensions. For each set of bipolar adjectives, we squared the difference between a respondent's description of sensationalism and his or her perception of the story; then we obtained the sum of the 12 squares. The smaller this total D^sub 2^, the more sensational the story to that person.

Results

Mexican and U.S. responses were first compared on each of the 12 sets of the bipolar adjectives used to define sensationalism. Significant differences emerged for eight bipolar adjectives (good-bad, wise-foolish, acceptableunacceptable, colorful-colorless, interesting-uninteresting, exciting-unexciting, hot-cold and active-passive). In each case, the Mexican respondents described sensationalism as closer to the adjective representing either a lesspositive or a less-active conception.