The Causes and Consequences of Mass Media Content

大众媒体内容的原因和后果

• 批准号: 0617658
• 负责人: Jesse Shapiro
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: National Bureau of Economic Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-08-01 至 2009-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0617658&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Causes; Consequences; Mass; Media; Content

This project will apply economic tools to study the social impact of the media. Debates raging in the popular press, academic journals, and the halls of Congress point to effects of media on everything from test scores to murder rates to election outcomes. Despite the existence of large literatures across several disciplines, however, the empirical evidence on these effects remains largely inconclusive. The present research will make two broad contributions to filling this gap: (i) developing new data that will be a valuable new resource for the study of media effects; (ii) applying this data to study three specific topics of particular interest.The first part of the project will measure the effect of television viewing on the cognitive and educational development of children. A new dataset on the timing of television's introduction to different local markets, combined with 1964 test scores from the Coleman study, will identify the causal effect of preschool exposure to television on standardized test scores later in life. The second part of the project will study the determinants of "slant" in newspapers' political coverage. New data on newspapers' use of politically charged language, selective coverage of events, and citation of authorities will provide the first comprehensive picture of slant across newspapers and across time. Second-stage analysis will then identify the impact of slant on demand, the dependence of this impact on consumers' own political views, and the components of newspaper owners' objective functions.The third part of the project will ask how the profusion of news sources available online has impacted consumers' news consumption. Two leading theories--one viewing consumers as motivated by information, the other viewing them as seeking confirmation of their prior beliefs--make sharply different predictions about the response to an expanding choice set. Panel data on online news consumption are used to test these competing theories and ask how the expanding choice set has changed the distribution of political information across the electorate.Broader Impacts: Beyond its contribution to knowledge in the social sciences, this project will have several broader impacts. It will contribute to learning by providing information to educators and parents about the cognitive effects of television, as well as engaging undergraduate and graduate students as active participants in the research process. It will create important data resources that will be made freely available to other researchers, as well as a new methodological template for measuring political slant in news coverage. The results will be disseminated both through leading economics journals and through contacts with policy makers, practitioners, and the press. Finally, the findings will directly inform a number of ongoing debates with direct consequences for parents, educators, media industry participants, and policy makers.

本项目将运用经济工具研究媒体的社会影响。 在大众媒体、学术期刊和国会霍尔斯里，激烈的辩论指出了媒体对从考试成绩到谋杀率再到选举结果等一切事物的影响。 然而，尽管存在跨多个学科的大量文献，这些影响的经验证据在很大程度上仍然是不确定的。 目前的研究将作出两个广泛的贡献，以填补这一空白：（一）开发新的数据，这将是一个有价值的新资源的研究媒体的影响;（二）应用这些数据来研究三个特定的主题特别感兴趣的项目的第一部分将衡量电视观看对儿童的认知和教育发展的影响。 一个关于电视引入不同地方市场的时间的新数据集，结合科尔曼研究中1964年的考试成绩，将确定学龄前接触电视对以后生活中标准化考试成绩的因果影响。该项目的第二部分将研究报纸政治报道中“倾向性”的决定因素。 关于报纸使用政治语言、选择性报道事件和引用权威人士的新数据将首次全面反映报纸和时间的倾向。 第二阶段的分析将确定倾向性对需求的影响，这种影响对消费者自己的政治观点的依赖性，以及报纸所有者的目标函数的组成部分。项目的第三部分将探讨在线新闻来源的丰富性如何影响消费者的新闻消费。 两种主要的理论--一种认为消费者是被信息所激励，另一种认为他们是在寻求对他们先前信念的确认--对扩大选择集的反应做出了截然不同的预测。 在线新闻消费的面板数据被用来测试这些相互竞争的理论，并询问如何扩大的选择集已经改变了整个选民的政治信息的分布。更广泛的影响：除了在社会科学知识的贡献，这个项目将有几个更广泛的影响。 它将通过向教育工作者和家长提供有关电视认知影响的信息，以及让本科生和研究生积极参与研究过程，促进学习。 它将创建重要的数据资源，供其他研究人员免费使用，并为衡量新闻报道中的政治倾向提供新的方法模板。 研究结果将通过主要的经济学期刊以及通过与决策者、从业人员和新闻界的接触传播。 最后，研究结果将直接为一些正在进行的辩论提供信息，对家长，教育工作者，媒体行业参与者和政策制定者产生直接影响。