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Media-generated Shortcuts: Do Newspaper Headlines Present Another Roadblock for Low-information Rationality?

Department of Political Science, McGill University, Leacock Building, Room 414, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 2T7, blake.andrew{at}mcgill.ca.

This article identifies news headlines as media-generated shortcuts for heuristic information about politics. Functionally speaking, headlines are simplifying mechanisms that summarize and attract attention to what lies ahead (or below). Although previous research has demonstrated potentially powerful framing effects of headlines, comparatively little is known about the relationship actual news headlines have with the stories they introduce. This study aims to contribute to this area of research by comparing with their stories the content of newspaper headlines about the 2004 Canadian federal election campaign.The data set has been developed from a content analysis of news, opinion, and editorial articles about the election, drawn from five major Canadian daily newspapers during the campaign. Headlines and full-text stories both have been separately coded for emphasis (campaign oriented vs. issue oriented), party coverage, leader coverage, issues, and tone.The analysis shows a considerable difference between articles and their headlines in terms of emphasis and issue salience. It also demonstrates how the tone of election coverage appeared to change when viewed exclusively through the prism of the headlines versus the lens of full stories. Hence, voters who scanned headlines were supplied with a different set of heuristic cues than those paying closer attention.

Key Words: headlines • shortcuts • election news • low-information rationality

The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Vol. 12, No. 2, 24-43 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1081180X07299795


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