Media Effects on Voters’ Political Attention, Preference, and Judgment
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the TV news programs emphasizing that issue (.63–.88) than those exposed to the news
neglecting it (.39–.53).
Subsequent priming studies has followed this inceptive study about the news media
effects on the public’s political judgment, refining the priming research body under the
various natural and experimental political circumstances, including the Gulf War and the
Iran-Contra Connection (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987; Krosnick & Kinder, 1990; Sherman,
Mackie, & Driscoll, 1990; Krosnick & Brannon, 1993; Iyengar & Simon, 1993;
Mandelsohn, 1996; Willnat & Zhu, 1996; Pan & Kosicki, 1997). These previous studies,
however, like the first-level agenda-setting studies, mainly focused on the priming effects at
the issue level. The traditional priming studies deal with the influence of salient issues in
news coverage on the weight assigned to those specific issues in voters’ political judgments.
Testing priming effects at an attribute level may be a next, natural attempt.
Recently, a priming study at the level of attribute agenda has been done in the
context of a local development issue (Kim, Scheufele, & Shanahan, 2002). The researchers
found that the most salient attributes about the issue in the local newspaper, which were the
possible consequences of developing a local park into a commercial center, appeared to be
the significant regressors to explain the issue evaluation (pro and con) among the heavy
newspaper readers. Although this study examines a non-political issue, the results clearly
showed that news media attend to specific attributes of an issue and thereby influence the
standards of the issue evaluation of the audience.
Applying the conative dimension of priming effects to electoral communication, we
can expect that candidate attributes salient in news media will affect the weight ascribed to
Convention