Conceptualizing evaluations of the political relevance of media texts: The Politically Relevant Media Model

Abstract

Abstract Prior research acknowledges the potential implications of how media users evaluate media texts as being relevant to politics. Yet there are limitations to existing operationalizations of these evaluations due to how people use the words “politics” and “political.” What first appears as a measurement issue instead reveals a deficiency in the conceptualization of the evaluation being measured, as well as that evaluation’s relationships with its antecedents and consequences. This article fuses work from disparate fields such as political theory, media studies, media effects, and political communication to offer a multidimensional conceptualization of evaluations of the political relevance of media texts. It introduces the Politically Relevant Media Model (PRMM) connecting these evaluations to their text and user characteristic antecedents, as well as their cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes. Implications for various phenomena such as agenda setting, learning, selective exposure, message processing, narrative persuasion, reinforcing media spirals, and political polarization are discussed.