Do People Believe What They See on TV?

My initial search was not a good one. I always seem to have trouble with your journal assignments because I never know where to start. This time was no different from the last, I couldn’t think of where to start. I put in stuff about college students and TV and nothing caught my eye. As all searches do, it got off on a tangent and I came across this article that is getting written up. (Cappella and Tsfati, 2003) It interested me because I am one of the many who think that there is more to the story than what is reported on the news. Either that or maybe there is a biased opinion coming out of the reported story. My chosen sub-discipline was the mass media and this relates because this is an article about the mass media and how much people buy into the message that is getting sent. 

The authors of my article are Yariv Tsfati and Joseph N. Cappella. The article is trying to find out if there is a direct relation between skepticism toward the media and audience exposure patterns. This article is an example of primary research. The authors came up with three hypotheses for this experiment. The three are; mainstream media skepticism will be associated with lower nonmainstream news exposure, mainstream media skepticism will be associated with higher nonmanstream news exposure, and skepticism will be associated with news media diets: the higher the nonmainstream component in audiences’ media diets.