The Media's Influence On Public Opinion

Methodological Critique The media has a tremendous influence on public opinion and how individuals perceive certain countries and political figures. News corporations are able to manipulate stories and control the messages their viewers are receiving. It is no wonder that countless studies have been conducted to determine how much influence the media exerts over its audience. Nicolas Isak Dragojlovic, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, decided to test the influence that Canadian media had on its audience by testing if a relationship existed between the percentage of the news dedicated to President Barack Obama and the public’s opinion of the United States.1 This study is unlike others in the media priming field since instead …show more content…
He presented three hypotheses which all attempt to draw correlations between the priming of Obama and the way Canadians observe the United States. His third hypothesis focused on the respondents’ levels of political awareness and predicted that individuals that had intermediate levels of awareness would be the most susceptible to the Obama priming effect. The data collected supports this hypothesis and further indicates that individuals with high and low awareness levels were not affected by the priming of President Obama while those in the middle were much more likely to have altered …show more content…
Dragojlovic noted that the United States and Canada have a very close and unique relationship, which makes this study somewhat difficult to replicate with a foreign country that does not have a similar relationship with the United States. But nonetheless, “the findings suggest that if the U.S. President is popular and desires to improve the United States’ public image in another country, he would be well advised to take whatever measures were available to him to increase his media visibility in that