gstf journal on media & communications (jmc) vol.2 no.1 ... · to identify election issues and...

Mediated by TV Campaign News: Effects of Political Commercials on Voters’ Political Knowledge

Abstract— This study examined the relationships among voters’ attention to TV campaign news, attention to political

commercials and voters’ political knowledge. As a result, it was found that voters’ attention to political ads has a significant effect

on their political knowledge and the effect is mediated by their attention to political news. This research finding might shed light on the mechanism of integrated political communication with political news and political advertising as the two primary forms.

Keywords-Political news; political advertising; attention; political knowledge; integrated political communication

I. INTRODUCTION

U.S. political campaign costs have become enormous, political advertising, especially television, being the greatest expense. According to an AdWeek article, Wells Fargo analyst Marci Ryvicker estimated that political advertising spending for 2012 U.S. presidential election might reach five billion dollars (Bachman, 2012). As the primary means nowadays by which most modern American political campaigns try to persuade voters and mobilize probable supporters, political TV advertising has been an unparalleled research interest in political science and mass communication for the past two decades.

The notion that political TV advertising has effects on political campaigning has been widely accepted by political campaigners, advertising practitioners, as well as political and communication scholars. Since the first televised political advertisements were aired in 1952, numerous studies have been done to investigate the effects of political advertising on voters’ attitudes toward candidates, voting behavior, especially political knowledge, which has been the focus of political communication research after World War II, as scholars turned their research from a focus on political persuasion toward an examination of the relative levels of political knowledge (McQuail 1977).

One of the research streams regarding political advertising effects is that researchers consider the role of political advertising solely in political campaigns with a focus on negative political TV commercials. A political communication meta-analysis identified over 50 scholarly studies involving the impact of negative political TV advertising (Allen & Burrell 2002; Lau et al. 1999; also see Valentino et al. 2004). Another research stream takes both televised political advertising and various types of TV campaign news into account as two main forms of TV political communication. Comparing the informative power of political advertising and political

campaign news is a major aspect of this stream. The question of which TV political communication form, TV political campaign news or political TV commercials, is superior, in terms of their effects on voters’ political knowledge, has become the research focus, while the more central question of how political advertising and political TV news work together in informing voters of candidates’ issue positions has been ignored in literature.

As the first attempt to investigate how these two TV political communication forms function together as primary information sources for voters systematically, this study takes three variables—political TV advertising, political TV campaign news and voters’ political knowledge into account. This new proposition might shed some new light on political communication, which the researcher thinks is an integration of different communication forms, which is similar to the idea of integrated marketing communication. In fact, both political news and political advertising have become the main political information sources, from which voters learn candidates’ issue positions and form perceptions of political candidates. This study proposed and tested a mediation t model where political TV news serves as a factor mediating the effects of political advertising on voters’ political knowledge. The data from the fall 2002 Carolina poll about the North Carolina U.S. Senate campaigns in the same year were analyzed.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

Political advertising has developed from being used by presidential candidates exclusively to all levels of political campaigns and become an essential element of democracy in the United States. Its expense has skyrocketed in current years, which exceeded 1.45 billion dollars in 2004 and reached 5 billion dollars in 2012. On the other hand, researchers found that citizens are now exposed to huge amount of political advertising during every election cycle while their exposure to campaign news has declined over the same period (Bartels & Rahn 2000; Kern 1989). Accordingly, there has been a fundamental shift in the balance of political communication research from news to advertising over the last 2 decades (Valentino, et al. 2004).

A. Political News, Advertising and Political Knowledge

Political knowledge has taken place of political persuasion as the focus of political communication research since World War II (McQuail, 1977). Atkin and Heald (1976) define political knowledge as an individual’s ability to recall candidates’ names, personal characteristics, and qualifications;

Jusheng Yu

DOI: 10.5176/2335-6618_2.1.23

GSTF Journal on Media & Communications (JMC) Vol.2 No.1, December 2014

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Received 29 Jun 2014 Accepted 19 Aug 2014

©The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access by the GSTF

DOI 10.7603/s40874-014-0001-x

to identify election issues and current campaign developments; and to recognize connections between candidates and issue positions. Voters’ political knowledge about candidates’ issue positions has been used in numerous political campaign studies as a dependent or criterion variable to investigate the impact of general campaign communications on citizens. Valentino, Hutchings and Williams (2004) summarized previous studies of the issue informing function of political advertising, and found evidence suggesting that most televised political advertisements focus on substantive issues (Hofstetter & Zukin 1979; Joslyn 1980). Furthermore, political advertising appears to be effective in conveying candidate-issue positions (Ansolabehere & Iyengar 1995; Brians & Wattenberg 1996; Just, Crigler, & Wallach 1990; Patterson & McClure 1976; Pfau, et al. 2002; West 1994; Zhao & Chaffee 1995) and boosting the salience of important campaign issues (Atkin & Heald 1976; Benoit, Hansen, & Holbert 2002; Holbert, et al. 2002).

Great amount of attention has been paid to the impact of political TV commercials on voters’ political knowledge as an information source. Campaign issue salience can be transferred to citizens through political advertising, as agenda-setting scholars believe, that is, the issues that the candidates often talk or debate in political TV commercials will be thought to be important by the public. The body of research literature regarding political advertising’s influence on public opinion formation and news coverage began to expand during 1990’s. At the local level of politics in the U.S., the agenda-setting effects of political advertising were observed in two elections in Victoria, Texas. Based on the findings in his study that the correlation between the voters’ pictures of the issue of sales tax in voters’ mind and the issue presentation in political advertising was significantly high, Bryan (1997) concluded that political advertising was the primary source of learning about this local issue (also see McCombs 2004). As a result from his study of the 2000 U.S. presidential election, Min (2002) found that political TV commercials had significant effects on the voters’ perception of issue importance. In short, those agenda-setting scholars believe political advertising can set agenda for voters.

An editorial of Journal of Advertising claimed that political advertising had surpassed news and other traditional political sources as the majority of the most important source providing voting information to voters in the last two decades of the twentieth century (Lariscy & Tinkham, 2002). After comparing the impact of political commercials and TV campaign news in the 1972 United States presidential election, Patterson and McClure’s (1976) concluded that voters learn issue information from television advertisements rather than from television news. This conclusion has been most frequently cited and regarded as a classic in the literature of political communication (Zhao & Chaffee 1995). Since then, more evidence has been added to this literature supporting the superiority of televised political advertising over TV campaign news in providing voters of information about campaign issues and candidates (Brians & Wattenberg, 1996; Drew & Weaver, 1998; Just, Crigler, & Wallach, 1990). As a result from a regression analysis of the 1992 American National Election Study data, Brians and Wattenberg (1996) found that citizens

recalling political TV commercials have the most knowledge of the candidates’ issue positions and are most likely to use domestic and foreign issues to evaluate the presidential candidates. Just, Crigler and Wallach (1990) reported that exposure to political commercials is associated with more accurate candidates’ issue positions than televised debates in their experimental setting.

Scholars have questioned this conclusion. Kraus and Davis (1981) argued that the proposition that political commercials are more informative than political news is not grounded in any general theory (p.278). Zhao and Chaffee (1995) believe “it runs counter to many people’s intuition—a feature that has probably helped attract attention to it” (p.42). Also, compared to news, as similar to business advertising in the public opinion, political commercials are less trustable source of useful information (West, 1997).

Two years after the publication of Patterson and McClure’s study, focusing on the same presidential (1972 U.S. presidential election), Hofstetter, Zukin and Buss (1978) challenged the superiority of the informative role of TV political advertising in political campaigns. They reported that TV campaign news contributes more political information than do campaign commercials. Zhao and Chaffee (1995) analyzed the data from six campaign surveys of voters in various election settings from 1984 to 1992 and, found that the significance of political TV news, as a predictor of issue knowledge is remarkably consistent across their six studies while attention to advertising is not a significant predictor in half of the surveys. The latest evidence against Patterson and McClure’s conclusion favorable toward televised political advertising may be from Drew and Weaver’s study (1998) of the 1996 U.S. presidential election. In their regression analysis model, Drew and Weaver treated voters’ campaign interest; radio, newspaper and television attention and exposure, talk show attention, and debate exposure as predictors, controlled for demographic data. The result shows that attention to television news is the strongest predictor of voters’ issue knowledge, although all these variables do not significantly improve the prediction of issue knowledge.

Apparently these studies are examination of the impact of various political communication forms separately, rather than how they work together influencing voters’ political knowledge, although both political advertising and campaign news were taken in account as main predictors of primary sources of learning. There are some weaknesses in the methods used in these studies. Analyses in early studies, including the one conducted by Patterson and McClure and the one by Hofstetter, Zukin and Buss, are based on raw correlations that represent individual differences without controlling demographic variables as a causal model. This raises a serious problem with the internal reliability of the studies. For instance, the learning process through political commercials and political TV news could be different because of viewers’ different levels of education. Multiple regression models with demographic variables in control were used in more recent studies. However, with the demographic variables in control, researchers usually put attention or/and exposure to political TV news and attention or/and exposure to political commercials in their multiple regression models together, and then reported the


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standardized regression coefficient for each one to see which one is more significant, or stronger if both are not significant. This raises another problem that reporting only the beta value for each predictor variable when they are put in the same regression model shows only the effects of news and ads separately, and then gives an answer to the question of which one is superior, but ignores the relationship between these two communication forms that how they work together as main voting information sources.

The researcher would argue that examining this new proposition is more central than comparing different political communication formats in the literature of political communication. As the researcher believes, like integrated marketing communication, political communication in all levels of political campaigns is integrated communication in which a variety of communication forms work together. Political candidates, campaign planners and advertising practitioners are interested in how to apply political commercials and news together strategically to make the communication as much effective and efficient as possible. Thus, investigating the mechanism of voter’s learning process through both political advertising and campaign news is crucial to political communication research literature. However, no such research has been done or published, although some intermedia agenda-setting studies contribute to this proposition in some degree.

The methods of data collection in these intermedia agenda-setting studies are similar. Both political advertising agenda and news agenda were identified by content analyses of advertisement content and campaign news stories. Time lag is a common technique used in tests of the relationship between political advertising agenda and campaign news agenda to identify which one is the agenda-setter, although scholars applied different data analysis models. That is, if the correlation between these two types of media agendas is significant, it can be concluded that the one in time one sets agenda for another in time two because the former is prior to the latter. In a classic intermedia agenda-setting study, Roberts and McCombs (1994) put TV political advertising agenda, TV campaign news agenda and newspaper news agenda in a cross-lagged correlation analysis model, and found a strong correlation between TV political advertising, and TV news and newspaper coverage. They concluded, “The advertising agenda is a parsimonious surrogate for the campaign as a whole in which the journalists are steeped.” By using bivariate linear regression analysis technique, Boyle (2001) examined the relationships among political TV commercials, three major newspapers, and TV network newscasts, and again, the influence of the major party candidate advertisements on the news agenda was found.

Intermedia agenda-setting concept suggests that political advertising and campaign news may work together influence voters’ campaign knowledge, perception of candidates and voting behavior. However, this view only focuses on the content of political advertisements and news agenda without consideration of voters’ media use behavior and control for demographic variables. On the other hand, in these studies, the examination of the influence of political advertising on news agenda is separated from the test of the effects of advertising

on voters. Therefore, intermedia agenda-setting fails to reveal the mechanism of campaign communication including political advertising, news and voters together as a whole.

B. Audience Measurement: Exposure vs. Attention

Measurement of political advertising and news is another controversial issue in political communication research. One of Zhao and Chaffee’s (1995) critiques of the method in Patterson and McClure’ study is that Patterson and McClure conducted a content analysis to determine how much voting information political TV news and political commercials convey to voters, which was measured by length of broadcasting time devoted to issue discussion. Zhao and Chaffee questioned the accuracy of the use of content analysis in this study. They criticize that the sample of news and ads for content analysis is not representative of voting information on TV, and therefore, they put higher value on the evidence from audience research.

Another critique is that attention rather than exposure to political commercials should have been used as the predictor of voters’ political knowledge in the study. Some scholars have proved the higher reliability of attention than exposure to political commercials to measure the prediction of voters’ knowledge about candidates’ issue positions (Chaffee & Choe, 1979; Chaffee & Schleuder, 1986; Drew & Weaver, 1998). In their study of the 1980 U.S. presidential election, Chaffee and Choe (1979) found a clear difference between newspaper and television as predictors of political knowledge, “exposure measures accounted for most of the effects of newspapers but attention measures accounted for most of the effects of television news” (see Chaffee & Schleuder, 1986, p79). Chaffee’s another study of measurement of attention to media news with Schleuder (1986) supports the stability of attention measures. The results also showed significant increments of knowledge gain associated with media attention, even after controlling exposure to the medium in their hierarchical regression analysis.

Drew and Weaver (1998) provided another evidence of the effects of attention superior to exposure to media on viewers’ political knowledge. In their regression model analyzing the date from the survey of the 1996 U.S. presidential election, attention to television news was found to have the stronger regression coefficient than exposure to TV news. Based on the results from their analysis of the 1990 North Carolina data about the U.S. Senatorial campaign, Zhao and Bleske (1995) reported that the viewers who were merely exposed to political commercials would not benefit much from the information in the ads, but those who paid attention were able to compare, contrast, and hence derive more useful knowledge from ads than from the news. In fact, Zhao and Chaffee (1995) only used attention as the predictor of voters’ political knowledge in their analysis of the data from six surveys.

Based on the findings and discussions in previous studies, this study proposes a research hypothesis below:

H1: Attention to television political news mediates the effects of attention to television political advertising on citizens’ political knowledge.


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III. METHOD

The data used in this study are from the fall 2002 Carolina Poll, which is a statewide telephone survey on the public opinion about the 2002 North Carolina Senate race. Interviews with 659 adults of 18 and older were carried out in the week before the U.S. Senate election in November 2002.

Six items regarding the candidates’ positions and their stances on issues were developed to measure viewers’ political knowledge, the dependent variable: (1) Do you remember which of the two candidates was at one time a chief of staff in the White House? (2) Do you remember which of the two candidates was at one time a secretary of labor and secretary of transportation? (3) Do you remember which candidate has emphasized cutting taxes? (4) Do you remember which candidate has emphasized opposition to free trade laws? (5) Do you remember which candidate supports the President's Fast Track Authority to negotiate free trade deals? and (6) Do you remember which candidate favors letting people invest some social security funds in the stock market? The scores for responses to all six questions were combined together and formed a measurement with 7-point scale, from zero to six, where zero means the respondent knows nothing about the candidates’ position and their stances on issues, whereas six means the respondent’s knowledge about the candidates’ position and their stances on issues is at the highest level. A reliability test (α = .716) indicates the measurement is acceptable (Nunnally, 1978).

Self-report measures of attention to political TV news and political TV commercials were used to measure the independent variables, TV political advertising and TV campaign news. This technique was commonly used in previous related studies. Zhao and Chaffee (1995) argued that asking, “How much attention do you pay…?” stimulates equally a respondent’s recall of mental effort directed toward news and toward ads (p.46). In this study, responses to two questions, “How much attention have you paid to television news/commercials about the Senate race?” were measured with a 4-point scale—none, little, some and a lot. Six demographic variables—education level, party identity, age, race, gender, and income level—were treated as control variables in our multiple-regression models. Education level was determined by interviewees’ responses to a question: “What was the highest grade in school or level of education you have completed?” For party identification, each respondent was classified into one of four categories—democrat, republican, independent, and other.

From the perspective of the mechanism of campaign communication as a whole, one of common weakness in previous studies, the researcher argues, is that reporting only the beta weight for each of predictor variables—television political news and television political advertising the same regression model, fails to reveal the subtle relationship between these two predictors. Another weakness, especially in intermedia agenda-setting studies, is that researchers only tested the correlation between political advertising agenda and campaign news agenda, without taking TV viewers into account. To solve this problem, a mediation test model was made to examine the mediating effect of television political news on voters’ issue information learning from television political advertising.

IV. RESULTS

Following Baron and Kenny’s (1986) suggestion, the mediation model including two multiple-regressions and one correlational analysis was tested. In the first step, the variance inflation factor (VIF) for the predictor and mediator variables as well as the equivalent statistic for the model was computed to determine whether multicollinearity adversely influenced the stability of the R2 estimates. Via the guidelines of Freund and Wilson (1998), the researcher found no evidence of strong multicollinearity as VIF values for both the predictor (VIF = 1.04) and the mediator (VIF = 1.06) are below the equivalent statistics for the corresponding model (VIF = 1.11). This finding plus the quite high variance (R2 = .312) of the model indicate that this model reliably and strongly express the relationships among TV political advertising, TV campaign news and voters’ political knowledge (see Table 1). Also, the change statistics shown in Table 1 indicate the variance (R2 = .312) explained by measures of the integration of TV political advertising and TV campaign news beyond the base controls (R2 = .233) significantly. Besides, as shown in table 1, among six control variables, except party identity, five variables predict voters’ political knowledge quite well: The regression coefficients are .223 (p < .001) for education, .133 (p < .001) for race, .147 (p < .001) for gender, .081 (p < .05) for age, and .161 (p < .001) for income level.

Table 1 shows the results from multiple-regression model 1 and 2. In the first test model (regression II), after controlled for demographic variables, the influence of attention to TV political commercials on voters’ knowledge is statistically significant (τ = .192, p < .001) (see Model-1). This matches the requirement in the second step of the mediation test process. In the third step, the correlation (α) of attention to TV political commercials and TV campaign news was calculated, which turned out to be .553 (p < .001). The significance of the correlation between the predictor and the mediator is a necessary step for testing mediation on one hand, and the not-too-high correlation (much less than .80) guarantees both the predictor and the mediator can be independent variables in the same model. Furthermore, the influence of the mediator on the criterion was tested. In this step or the second multiple-regression model, Y was used as the criterion variable in a regression equation and X and M as predictors (see Model-2). It should be noticed that it is not sufficient just to correlate the mediator with the criterion. The reason is that the mediator and


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the criterion might be correlated because they are both caused by the predictor variable X, attention to TV political commercials. Thus, the predictor variable must be controlled in establishing the effect of the mediator on the criterion (Barron & Kenny 1986; Judd & Kenny 1981). Table 1 shows the positive result that the effect of the mediator on the criterion is significant (β = .290, p < .001), after controlled the predictor.

Table 1 Hierarchical Regression Analysis of Voters’ Political

Knowledge (Betas, N = 659)

Predictor

Regression I

Regression II (Regression model 1)

Regression III (Regression model 2 )

Democrat .103 .102 .041 Republic .195* .192 .118 Independent .044 .043 .025 Education .231*** .230*** .223*** Race (White) .117** .115** .133*** Gender (Male)

.148*** .150*** .147***

Age .109** .110** .081* Income

.163*** .164*** .161***

TV Ad Attention

.192*** (τ) .025 (τ′)

TV News Attention

. 290*** (β)

R² .223 .257 .312 Adjusted R² .211 .245 .299 R² Change .223 .035 .089 Sig. of Change

< .001 < .001 < .001

* p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001

Finally, to establish that the mediator mediates the relationship between the predictor and the criterion variable, the effect of the predictor variable on the criterion variable controlling for the mediator should be zero or insignificant. The result from regression III analysis (Model-2) shows the regression coefficient (τ′) for the correlation of attention to TV political commercials and political knowledge is not significant (Beta = .025, p = .561) controlling for attention to TV campaign news, which satisfies the requirement. Up to now, the indirect effect of TV political advertising mediated by TV campaign news on voters’ political knowledge is clear, which equals to .16 resulting from αβ, and the total effect including TV political advertising and campaign news is approximately .19 resulting from τ′ + αβ. Figure 2 illustrates such mechanism of campaign communication.

V. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

This study examined the mechanism of how voters get campaign information through TV political advertisements and TV campaign news. The results suggest that the effect of TV political advertising on voters’ political knowledge is mediated by TV campaign news. Specifically, the results show that the mediation model is strong predictive and reliable (R2 = .312, VIF < 1.1); TV political advertising is positively correlated with voters’ political knowledge without controlling TV campaign news (Beta = .192, p < .001); TV political advertising is positively correlated with TV campaign news (γ = .553, p <.001); TV campaign news is positively correlated with voters’ political knowledge when controlling for TV political advertising (Beta = .29, p < .001). However, when TV campaign news plays a mediating role in the relationship between TV political advertising and voters’ political knowledge, the significant relationship between TV political advertising and voters’ political knowledge (Beta = .192, p < .001) becomes insignificant (Beta = .025, p = .563).

The positive relationship between TV political advertising and TV campaign news reveals in this study may not be fresh, as some intermedia agenda-setting studies prior to this research have brought findings that political advertising agenda is positively associated with campaign news agenda. However, the examination of this relationship in this study is from the audience perspective psychologically, as attention to TV political commercials and news was used to measure the predictor variables, whereas intermedia agenda-setting research is based on the media content or agenda. Thus, such strongly supported positive relationship suggests that both TV political advertising and TV campaign news should be considered simultaneously in order to obtain a complete picture of how these two important political communication forms work together.

Furthermore, as the focus of this research, the mediating role of TV political news in influencing the effect of TV political advertising on voters’ political knowledge has been proven. That is, when TV campaign news works, the effect of TV political advertising becomes indirect. This indicates that if voters ever learn campaign information from TV political advertising, such information reaches audiences through TV campaign news. There could be various explanations for this communication phenomenon. From the view of the media, findings in combination of intermedia and traditional agenda-setting studies may be able to provide some cues. Intermedia


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agenda-setting researchers found the positive correlation between political advertising agenda and campaign news agenda while a lot of traditional agenda-setting studies have provided evidence that news coverage sets agenda for the public. Thus, it is reasonable to believe that the TV campaign communication process could be voters learn the campaign issue agenda from TV campaign news coverage, and such news agenda is partly from TV political commercials. Another explanation from the audience perspective could be voters confirm or change the campaign information they learned from TV political commercials when watching news about the campaign on television. This explanation might be related to another research topic—trustability of political advertisements. West (1997) pointed out that the public does not seem to trust political advertisements as a source of useful information.

In addition to seeking reasonable explanations for the mediation phenomenon in TV political communication, it is necessary to discuss the weakness in this study for better research in future. In psychology area, researchers usually use experimental data for cause-effect analysis. This research uses telephone survey data instead of experimental data to develop and test the mediation model. Without manipulation of the predictor, mediator and criterion variables may raise a question of reverse causal effects in the mediation model. Kenny (2006) argues that sometimes reverse causal effects can be ruled out theoretically. That is, a causal effect in one direction does not make sense, although ideally, the mediator should be measured temporally before the outcome variable. More specifically, in a non-experimental study, weaker inferences about the plausibility of causal relations can be made if certain assumptions can be shown to hold (Shrout & Bolger, 2002). Bollen (1989) summarized the assumptions as 1) association (X and Y are related), 2) direction (X is prior to the Y, not vice versa), and 3) isolation (the association between X and Y is not due to another variable or process). Thus, Shrout and Bolger (2002) argued that when directional relation of X to Y is to be used with non-experimental data, a clear theoretical rationale for the possible causal relation of X to Y is needed, and it is the development of this rationale that often brings non-experimental researchers to mediation analysis (p.423).

In this study, the rationale for the causal relations in the mediation model is based on two assumptions. One is that normally citizens learn campaign issues and candidates’ issue positions (the criterion variable Y) from mass media including political advertising (the predictor X) and political news (the mediator M), but not vice versa. Many scholars in mass communication and political science have provided a lot of evidence supporting this assumption. Also, theoretically, media’s conveying the information about campaign and candidates is prior to people’s learning of the political campaign information. The other is that political advertising (X) influences political news coverage (M), but not vice versa. This assumption is reasonable, since political advertising is sort of propaganda in some sense, and political advertising planners design and air their ads according to candidates’ willing or their own belief that the way they are doing is able to reach the maximal advertising effects, but not influenced by news coverage which tries to be neutral. Intermedia agenda-setting

scholars have proved that political advertising sets agenda for political news coverage, but not vice versa.

Although these two assumptions support the mediation model with telephone survey data in this study, the researcher acknowledges that, still, it is more idealistic to use experimental data for mediation analysis. However, this paper is to call for attention to the concept of integrated political communication, which is surprisingly ignored by communication and political science scholars. Furthermore, future experimental studies are necessary to be involved to provide more evidence for or challenge the mediation model in political communication.

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[35] TNS Media Intelligence/CMR (2004). U.S. political advertising spending reaches $1.45 billions reports TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. Available at http://www.tns-mi.com/news/11012004.htm

[36] Valentino, N. A., Hutchings, V. L., & Williams, D. (2004). The impact of political advertising on knowledge, Internet information seeking, and candidate preference. Journal of Communication, 54(2), 337-354.

[37] West, D. M. (1997). Air wars: Television advertising in election campaigns, 1952-1996. (2nd ed.). Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly.

[38] Zhao, X., & Chaffee, S. H. (1995). Campaign advertisements versus television news as source of political issue information. Public Opinion Quarterly, 59, 41-65.

AUTHOR’S PROFILE Dr. Jusheng Yu is an assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communications at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and his M.A. in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, and his B.A. in Advertising and Journalism from Zhejiang University, China. His primary research interests are in the areas of media effects, consumer cognitive process of marketing communication information, and social media marketing.


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