Status Conferral and Topic Scope

Abstract

“Status conferral” is the notion that press coverage singles out and confers importance upon the person or group covered. If status conferral occurs, it has serious implications for traditional conceptions of how the press should function in a democracy. In two experiments, the author reported evidence supporting the existence of a status conferral effect. Status conferral was tested indirectly by varying the prestige of the news agency providing the coverage and observing differences in the perceived status of persons covered. However, there were ambiguities in previous results and the present experiment was intended to clarify them. Conferral differences appeared consistently on two of three indices in previous work—“Safety” and “Dynamism”—but not on the third, “Qualification.” In previous studies, the topics sources that were being recognized as qualified for discussion were always of broad, national application or scope. Thus if Qualification conferral were related to topic scope, no differences would have been observed because topic scope was constant. To test this, the present experiment varied both the news agency providing the coverage and the scope or application of the news topic. What the source said, substantively, remained the same. Scope was varied by having him say it about “US. cities” or the city in which the newspaper was published. In one of two replications of the design, the predicted topic scope difference was observed for Qualification but news agency conferral differences were also observed for Qualification. A fourth conferral index—“prominence”—was as sensitive as Qualification to news agency conferral differences.