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In recent times, critics have charged that tabloid news emphasizes and sensationalizes criminal behavior - thereby violating the journalistic ideal of providing objective information to the citizens of a democratic society. Yet, these claims have not been subjected to systematic investigation. This study compares tabloid and traditional broadcast news magazine programs in terms of their emphasis on crime and the content of their crime narratives. Results indicate that tabloid shows are more likely than traditional shows to feature crime stories. Both types of programs give crime stories similar prominence, and the content is relatively similar. However, tabloid shows are more likely than traditional shows to present the criminal as belonging to the middle or upper class. By contrast, traditional shows are more likely to present the criminal as belonging to the working class.

Hate crimes against Muslims in the United States have been on the rise since 2016 (FBI, 2022), discouraging this group's participation in public life. Most Americans, therefore, encounter Muslims only via media representations. We investigated if two journalistic storytelling devices can kindle in white non-Muslim Americans empathy and supportive attitudes toward Muslim women who are victims of discrimination. Indeed, personalization and emotionalization of news stories increased empathy for Muslim victims among participants with high Muslim prejudice. Gender differences moderated the effect of emotionalization, with women participants reporting more empathy and willingness to help victims than men.

This content analysis investigates the genderization of political parties in network news coverage of U.S. presidential campaigns over the past 28 years. Based on Bem's seminal Sex-Role Inventory, classic news values and leadership qualities were operationalized as masculine, feminine, and gender-neutral. Republicans were presented as more masculine and less feminine and gender-neutral than Democrats. These trends fluctuated some, but the differences between parties intensified over the course of the 8 presidential elections. The findings have implications for future studies that investigate the viability of gendered and transgendered candidates against the backdrop of political party identity.

Mainstream U.S. news media stand accused of bias against the forty-fifth president, Donald Trump. The relentlessness and intensity of these accusations over the course of Trump's presidency are unusual and make for an opportunity to study perceptions of news bias. During the experiment reported here, participants ( N = 315) were exposed to biased (pro- and anti-Trump) news stories that were attributed to either CNN, Breitbart, or remained unattributed to a news brand. After reading the stories, participants rated the stories for their relative slantedness in favor of, neutral, or against the president. Findings reveal that news users are sensitized to the president's accusations of bias against CNN. For example, anti-Trump stories were rated as more slanted than pro-Trump stories when they were attributed to CNN. This was not the case when the same stories were attributed to Breitbart. Interestingly, unattributed biased news received the highest ratings for slantedness.

Political communication scholars have shown that nonverbal communication cues have the potential to influence political judgments. The bulk of this literature has focused on leader displays in the context of electoral politics. The study reported here aligns with that body of literature, but tests how facial displays of ordinary citizens might affect political participatory intentions among different demographic groups. The study reported here provides support for the idea that being exposed to audiovisual news that features emotional testimonies of people with firsthand experience of social issues encourages political participation. The findings from a mixed design experiment ( N = 80) examining story personalization, ideological strength, and education level offer evidence that participants from both higher and lower socioeconomic segments of society become equally motivated for political participation after viewing emotional testimony of fellow citizens. It is reasonable to start considering the potential of news that gives voice to ordinary people, showcasing their facial displays of emotion, for revitalizing the public sphere.

Emotion is often treated as unconducive to rationality and informed citizenship. For this reason, journalistic styles that personalize issues and elicit emotion are typically not taken seriously as information sources. The experimental study reported here tested these sentiments through the knowledge gap hypothesis. Eight investigative news stories, arguably important to informed citizenship (e.g., child labor, corruption in public housing administration, lethality of legal drugs), were each presented in two versions. One featured emotional testimony of ordinary people who experienced the issue, and the other did not—resembling the traditional view of news as cold hard facts. Emotional versions were associated with smaller knowledge gaps between higher and lower education groups. Moreover, the size of knowledge gaps varied across three memory measures: free recall, cued recall, and recognition. Contrary to the inimical role that is traditionally assigned to emotion, these findings suggest a facilitative role for emotion in informing citizens.

This experimental study tested the knowledge gap hypothesis at the intersection of audience education levels and news formats (newspaper versus online). The findings reveal a gap in public affairs knowledge acquisition between South Korean citizens ( N = 123) from different educational backgrounds. Moreover, the high education group comprehended news with the same level of efficiency across online and newspaper formats while low education participants gained more knowledge from reading a newspaper than using an online news source. Taken together, this study's findings confirm the knowledge gap hypothesis through experimental research and offer evidence of its potential contribution to the digital divide.

The experimental study reported here employed one of the most compelling visual cues of female sexual attractiveness (low waist-to-hip ratio) to test the influence of news anchor sexualization on audience evaluations of her as a professional and their memory for the news that she presents. Male participants saw the sexualized version of the anchor as less suited for war and political reporting. They also encoded less news information presented by the sexualized than her unsexualized version. Conclusions were drawn in line with evolutionary psychology expectations of men's cognitive susceptibility to visual sex cues. Women participants, on the other hand, did not vary across conditions in their assessments of the anchor's competence to report on war and political news. Moreover, they encoded more news information presented by the sexualized than unsexualized anchor condition.

The experimental study reported here investigated information processing of broadcast news at the intersection of audience gender (male versus female) and message valence (positive, negative, and ambiguous). Both audio and video dimensions of stimuli were manipulated to create the three valence frames. The data produced interactions between gender and message valence for self-reported arousal, as well as recognition memory and comprehension of news content. In particular, male viewers are associated with a negativity bias, reporting the highest arousal levels and producing the best recognition memory and comprehension scores for negatively valenced messages. Women, in contrast, show signs of an avoidance response to negatively framed news, rating positively valenced stories as more arousing as well as processing such messages more effectively than negatively framed messages. Within the information-processing paradigm these findings suggest that the gender variable deserves more research attention. The results also have implications for journalism practitioners.