UNDERSTANDING HOW CHANGES IN THE WAY PEOPLE CONSUME MEDIA SINCE THE TURN OF THE CENTURY HAVE AFFECTED THE WAY THEY FORM OPINIONS & MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT PEOPLE AND EVENTS IN THE NEWS

Abstract

This thesis aimed to analyze how the different mediums through which people consume media affect the way they react to and formulate opinions on the content of that media. Over the past two decades there have been vast changes in where American media consumers have turned to for news and updates on the topics they care about – namely, seen by the advent of digital channels like social media gaining a tremendous amount of usage. Using insights from existing literature and research, I hypothesized that with variables such as news content and news sources held constant, I would be able to find significant differences in how people reacted to news stories they read through either Tweets or a traditional newspaper. I surveyed a sample of just over 600 attentive ‘average American media consumers’ through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, randomizing which of three mock news stories they read through the Tweets or digital version of a print newspaper. The results were null and did not confirm my hypothesis. The meanings of the results are subsequently analyzed and methods for further understanding this question are further discussed.