Perceptions of Sensationalism among U.S. and Mexican News Audiences

Abstract

News researchers have used two somewhat different concepts of news sensationalism. Some work treats 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 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 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 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 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. …