Processing the News

Doris A. Graber's seminal study Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide, represents a landmark in political communication research. First published in 1984, the study shed new light on major questions concerning the political consequences of media use and audience behavior.

This carefully conducted, pioneering research eschews the generalizations that characterize media effects as either nonexistent or all powerful. Instead, Graber illustrates the complexities of media uses and effects on individuals' mental stores of information by bringing schema theory into the field of political communication. Media influence on schemas is evident in the way Graber's interviewees talk about politics, but media influence cannot be categorized simplistically in all-or-nothing terms.

Schema theory draws heavily on cognitive psychology, and Graber argues that when people encounter [Page 656]new information they integrate parts of it into existing schemas. Schematic thinking, Graber argues, is rather well informed; affectively consistent and interdependent; based in more abstract conceptualization; and stable over time.

The book is based on a yearlong panel study with a sample of 21 randomly selected registered voters from Evanston, Illinois. Through careful analysis of media diaries and 10 depth interviews with each of her 21 respondents over the course of a year, Graber offers a valuable research design and methodological approach to studying media uses and effects on political knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. The study offers new insights on how citizens obtain information via print and broadcast media in comparison with learning about politics from friends or personal networks. Graber shows how citizens synthesize information from various sources to make sense of the news. She finds that citizens are active users of the media and not passive recipients of media content. Personal situations and criteria predispose people to be selectively attentive to some information in the media and to ways of organizing and processing that information.

Graber's study goes deep into the individual experience to challenge some of the traditional expectations of media effects research, such as the “two-step flow hypothesis” and the power of agenda setting. She draws upon her depth interviews to discuss the applicability of major concepts in the field of media effects research, such as uses and gratifications, agenda setting, and more, with concrete examples from her fieldwork.

Processing the News is one of Graber's 15 books published to date. Her most recent study, Processing Politics: Learning from Television in the Internet Age (2001) received the Goldsmith Book Prize for Best Academic Political Communication book of 2003. Processing Politics continues where Processing the News left off on the topic of information processing and provides exciting insights from neurobiology research to show how the brain processes visual and verbal information. Graber is also known for her classic texts in the field: Media Power in Politics (5th ed., 2006) and Mass Media and American Politics (7th ed., 2006) are popular volumes rich with detail and attention to the latest in political communication scholarship.