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Sex, Lies, and War: How Soft News Brings Foreign Policy to the Inattentive Public

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2004

MATTHEW A. BAUM
MATTHEW A. BAUM
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, 4289 Bunche Hall, Box 951472, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472 (mbaum@ucla.edu).
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Abstract

This study argues that, due to selective political coverage by the entertainment-oriented, soft news media, many otherwise politically inattentive individuals are exposed to information about high-profile political issues, most prominently foreign policy crises, as an incidental by-product of seeking entertainment. I conduct a series of statistical investigations examining the relationship between individual media consumption and attentiveness to several recent high-profile foreign policy crisis issues. For purposes of comparison, I also investigate several non-foreign crisis issues, some of which possess characteristics appealing to soft news programs and others of which lack such characteristics. I find that information about foreign crises, and other issues possessing similar characteristics, presented in a soft news context, has indeed attracted the attention of politically uninvolved Americans. The net effect is a reduced disparity in attentiveness to select high-profile political issues across different segments of the public.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 96 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 91 - 109
Copyright
© 2002 by the American Political Science Association

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