Mark Boukes

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Amsterdam School of Communications Research ASCoR

Following the news is generally understood to be crucial for democracy as it allows citizens to politically participate in an informed manner; yet, one may wonder about the unintended side effects it has for the mental well-being of citizens. With news focusing on the negative and worrisome events in the world, framing that evokes a sense of powerl...

Although political discussion behavior is an important area of political communication research, analysis of the reliability and validity of political discussion survey measures has only recently begun. This study uses panel survey data to examine the effects of survey context on self-reported political discussion frequency measures (e.g., general...

This study investigates how Tichenor's hypothesized "knowledge gap" is affected differently by different modalities of news media. Measuring the acquisition of new surveillance facts in subsequent survey waves, we modeled how strongly people's level of knowledge grew over time and how this growth was affected by news consumption. Results show that...

The current study examines the persuasiveness of narrative richness in messages about acts of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Specifically, we apply theory about narrative persuasion to the domain of corporate communication. Focusing on Coca-Cola’s clean water project, a cross-national experiment (n = 659) was conducted in which the narrativ...

Normative theory on the functioning of the public sphere requires citizens to actively engage with the information that is provided to them. For a long time, however, the possibilities of user-content interactivity have been limited due to the one-directionality of the traditional mass media. Moreover, a re-occurring question is to what extent less...

This study examined agenda-setting relationships across the media, politics, and the public, while accounting for contextual boundaries from 1978 to 2018 in the United States. Our findings indicate that (1) for the overall model, the media and the public influence the prominence of economic concerns on the political agenda, but the political agenda...

The Covid-19 pandemic brought about an unprecedented cycle of digitally spread humor. This article analyzes a corpus of 12,337 humor items from 80+ countries, mainly in visual format, and mostly memes, collected during the first half of 2020, to understand the features and intended audiences of this “pandemic humor”. Employing visual machine-learni...

This article analyzes the domestic success and international growth of The Daily Show (TDS) targeting specifically the Jon Stewart period (Comedy Central, 1999–2015), It then focuses on the glocalization of the program resulting in an official Dutch version The Daily Show: Nederlandse Editie that appeared on Dutch Comedy Central in 2011 and two con...

A stained-glass ceiling? How the media report on female politicians of Outer-European origin Women from ethnic minority groups have become more prominent in politics. With this development comes the question whether they are treated the same by the media as other groups of politicians. While the influence of a politician’s gender and ethnicity on...

The differential satire effects across domestic and foreign audiences are largely unknown; yet, this is of growing relevance as political satire increasingly reaches international audiences. A two-country experiment was conducted in which satirical stimuli from the Netherlands with either a one-sided (only targeting the United States) or two-sided...

Strategy framing is usually studied in the context of news coverage about domestic Western politics. This study expands its application to news reports on the China-US trade war-an interstate conflict including a democratic and one-party dominant system-thereby adding an international dimension to the study of strategy framing. Through a manual con...

The media are important information disseminators in society. Particularly in uncertain times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, citizens are very “media dependent.” The way in which people are informed about the coronavirus heavily depends on the type of media they use. Especially on social media, the share of misinformation is considerable, which mi...

This study contributes to ongoing discussions on the societal role of satire as a platform for public debate. To this end, we analysed the metajournalistic discourse surrounding the Dutch television news satire show Zondag met Lubach to assess how it has been received and discussed in the Dutch media landscape. Through an analysis of 64 media appea...

This study tested the effectiveness of fact-check format (regular vs. satirical) to refute different types of false information. Specifically, we conducted a pre-registered online survey experiment (N = 849) that compared the effects of regular fact-checkers and satirist refutations in response to mis- and disinformation about crime rates. The find...

Aims Coronary atherosclerosis with a large necrotic core has been postulated to reduce the vasodilatory capacity of vascular tissue. In the present analysis, we explored whether total plaque volume and necrotic core volume on coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) are independently associated with myocardial ischaemia on positron emission...

Social media news is pervasively replacing traditional news outlets in people’s news diets. From an active-audience perspective, this study employed a factorial preregistered experiment with a pretest and mediators to examine how (1) low versus high expectations about social media’s potential to obtain information in an efficient way and (2) exposu...

Recently, scholars have started to investigate how the valence of user comments presented alongside online videos influences viewers’ experiences of and responses to those videos. The present experiment adds to this literature by investigating the role of user comments that accompany an online political satire video in particular. Moreover, it adva...

A survey experiment was conducted that exposed Dutch citizens to different scenarios that either emphasized the gains or the losses regarding the number of victims or the economic damage caused by SARS-CoV-2. Replicating prospect theory in an ecologically valid crisis context, we found that gain frames promoted risk-aversive preferences, whereas lo...

This study investigates the degree of news avoidance during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Netherlands. Based on two panel surveys conducted in the period April–June 2020, this study shows that the increased presence of this behavior, can be explained by negative emotions and feelings the news causes by citizens. Moreover, news av...

Political satire is often consumed on online platforms (e.g. YouTube) and the effects of its consumption may be highly conditional on the user comments that are surrounding it. By manipulating the valence of comments (positive vs negative) and the focus of these comments (hedonic entertainment value vs eudaimonic entertainment value vs informative...

Cognitive complexity is a concept that allows scholars to distinguish unidimensional thinking from multidimensional thinking, which allows citizens to identify and integrate various perspectives of a topic. Especially in times of fake news, fact-free politics, and affective polarization, the news media would ideally foster such complex political un...

Sentiment is central to many studies of communication science, from negativity and polarization in political communication to analyzing product reviews and social media comments in other sub-fields. This study provides an exhaustive comparison of sentiment analysis methods, using a validation set of Dutch economic headlines to compare the performan...

The effects of episodic and thematic framing on the attribution of responsibility for societal problems have previously been investigated with experimental methods and mostly tested general effects on the public. The current work, instead, investigates episodic framing’s effect by linking a large-scale content analysis to data of a panel survey ( n...

This study investigates the effect of journalists’ gender on the perceived credibility of news articles. In an experiment, participants evaluated the credibility of two different news articles with a typical male and female topic either written by a female or male journalist. News articles written by male journalists were perceived as significantly...

Politicotainment and democratainment are concepts used to identify the relevance of popular culture for citizenship. Among the most prominent examples of these concepts are political fiction series. Merging political facts with fictional narratives, such series provide a unique opportunity to engage the audience with political matters in an enterta...

Scholars generally agree that there is a gap between lower- and higher-educated citizens on civic competence, which solidifies during adolescence. This two-wave panel study examines how an educational intervention focused on media literacy influences civic competence among lower-educated youth (age 16 to 26). Additionally, the level of civic involv...

The popularity of populist parties has increased worldwide, and disproportionate media attention for these parties arguably fueled their success. We empirically test our theoretical argument that political satire—with its humor, focus on internal contradictions, and lack of journalistic principles regarding objectivity and facticity—may be an effec...

This study examines the effect of gender bias awareness on journalistic decision-making. The study establishes a link between activating journalists’ awareness of their implicit gender bias and objective decision making. Using a randomised experimental setup, journalists were (or were not) administered an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to ascertai...

This article studies the asymmetric effects of credit and blame attributions in economic news on government evaluations. We rely on a dataset combining a manual content analysis of Dutch economic news (print, television, online; N = 5,630) with a three-wave panel survey (N = 3,240) that was fielded in 2015. Results show that people who are exposed...

The presence of news factors in journalistic products has been abundantly researched, but investigations into their actual impact on the news production process are scarce. This study provides a large-scale analysis of why news factors matter: Whether, how, and which news factors affect the prominence of news items and does this differ per outlet t...

The media landscape in the Netherlands, also known as Holland, has been characterized by the presence of a strong public broadcaster and the movement toward an independent press. This entry examines the historical development of Dutch media organizations, their affiliation with political ideologies, ownership and popularity, the role of the state,...

This article studies the impact of economic news on government support and the mediating role of people’s national (sociotropic) and personal (egotropic) economic evaluations. Employing two complementary studies, a large literature is contributed to by adding a media perspective to the economic voting hypothesis. The first study was fielded in 2015...

Building on the agenda-setting theory, this study investigates the effect of corporations’ visibility and tone in news coverage on reputation. More specifically, we examine the buffering role that prior reputation may have for the potential damaging impact of news coverage. Providing a stringent test of causality, data from an automated content ana...

This article scrutinizes the method of automated content analysis to measure the tone of news coverage. We compare a range of off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools to manually coded economic news as well as examine the agreement between these dictionary approaches themselves. We assess the performance of five off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools...

Previous studies using aggregate-level designs demonstrated that the tone of economic news affects consumer confidence. However, the individual-level mechanisms underlying this effect remain to be investigated: It is not clear which consumer confidence attributes are most susceptible to media effects. Theoretically, we integrate the economic voting...

This study provides a longitudinal, cross-national account of the relationship between negative news coverage and consumer confidence across all twenty-eight European Union (EU) member states for the period 2005–2017. We rely on an extensive data set of international news agency coverage and a range of economic indicators retrieved from Eurostat. E...

Infotainment is the umbrella term that covers the fusion of entertainment and journalism within different media genres. Concretely, infotainment can be understood as two related developments: (a) news becoming more entertaining, and (b) entertainment taking on political topics. This entry describes the reasons behind the increasing prominence and p...

This study focuses on immigration news as driver of anti-immigrant party support. Predicting the poll results of the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), we distinguish between (a) general immigration news, news in which immigration is linked to (b) crime, (c) terrorism, or (d) the economy, and (e) immigration news in which the Freedom Party is mentioned exp...

This study investigates how the use of Twitter and Facebook affects citizens’ knowledge acquisition, and whether this effect is conditional upon people’s political interest. Using a panel survey design with repeated measures of knowledge acquisition, this study is able to disentangle causality and to demonstrate that more frequent usage of Twitter...

This study investigates how Xinwen Lianbo, a prestigious TV news program and a key propaganda tool of the Chinese Communist Party, framed a bloc of Western countries in its foreign news coverage in the period 2010-2015. The results of the content analysis performed in this study revealed that mixed and diverse images of the West were portrayed by t...

Shattering the Late Night Glass Ceiling: Samantha Bee

News media ideally help citizens to achieve a better political understanding. Political sophistication, accordingly, is a central concept in the media effects literature, but its operationalizations rarely align well with its theoretical definition. The current paper introduces the approach of cognitive mapping to measure how sophisticated citizens...

Agenda-setting has mostly been investigated as the cognitive process set in motion by the salience of political issues in the traditional news media. The question, though, remained whether political entertainment shows—political satire, specifically—can also set the agenda. The current study investigates whether two episodes of Dutch satire show Zo...

By means of a large-scale manual content analysis of Dutch economic news coverage in 2015 (n = 4251 articles), we compare the use of “every day” sources by online and offline outlets. The use of those sources is argued to increase news consumers’ attentiveness to the news item. We investigate whether online outlets use the “ordinary citizen” less f...

This study develops a model that contributes to our understanding of the complex relationship between economic motivations and anti-Muslim attitudes by analyzing the underexplored role of news consumption. Using a large-scale Dutch panel dataset (n = 2694), we test a structural equation model theoretically grounded in group conflict theory, in whic...

Infotainment has increasingly become pervasive in the triangle of relationships between politics, citizens, and the media. While the consumption of traditional news formats has declined, the popularity and importance of entertaining news genres have rapidly grown. Several types of media formats fall under the umbrella term of infotainment; for exam...

While prior studies investigating immigration news typically documented a dominant focus on negativity and threats, only limited empirical research is available which scrutinizes the way real-world developments affect these patterns in immigration news. This study aims to fill this void. First, we report results of a large-scale and longitudinal co...

This article studies the tripartite relationship between the economy, economic news, and public economic perceptions. Our analysis is twofold: We investigate the impact of the real economy on economic news in Dutch newspapers (2002-2015, N = 127,120); second, we analyze the impact of economic news on public economic perceptions. Our empirical appro...

Focusing on two distinct dimensions of similarity and difference (political identity, political opinions), this study uses a within-subjects experimental design implemented in an online survey to examine preferences for discussion partners and groups that are similar to (same party and same opinion) or different from (different party and different...

In media effects research a fundamental choice is often made between (field) experiments or observational studies that rely on survey data in combination with data about the information environment or media coverage. Such studies linking survey data and media content data are often dubbed “linkage studies.” On the one hand, such designs are the sta...

Journalists use news factors to construct newsworthy stories. This study investigates whether different types of news outlets emphasize different news factors. Using a large-scale manual content analysis (n = 6489), we examine the presence of seven news factors in economic news across four different outlets types (i.e. popular, quality, regional, a...

Addressing the call to move beyond a simple genre classification of TV shows as either substantive (hard) news or non-substantive (soft) infotainment, we propose using social media reactions to determine a program’s political relevance. Such an approach provides information that goes beyond genre or content characteristics and reflects what really...

This study examines how the economic climate of the East African Community was covered in Chinese and Western news media between 2005 and 2015. Framing devices measuring risk, opportunity, morality and valence were detected and analysed in four news agencies. A content analysis showed that both the Chinese and Western news media featured opportunis...

Despite the scholarly popularity of important developments of political communication, concepts like soft news or infotainment lack conceptual clarity. This article tackles that problem and introduces a multilevel framework model of softening of journalistic political communication, which shows that the 4 most prominent concepts—(a) sensationalism,...

News coverage has become more visual and research suggests that news images affect assessments of political candidates. This study experimentally investigates the effects of textual versus visual on assessments of politicians' competency and integrity, differentially for males and females. The results show that differences in visual favorability, c...

During election campaigns, politicians regularly feature on entertainment talk shows in which they are typically approached in uncritical and positive manners. To test how such appearances affect trust in politicians, we conducted an online experiment with a Dutch adult sample in which participants were randomly allocated to see an entertainment ta...

This study constructs and tests a conceptual model of how and for whom political satire affects political attitudes. With an experiment, we show that young adults compared to older people are more absorbed in satirical items than in regular news. Subsequently, absorption decreased counterarguing such that the attitude toward the satirized object wa...

The possibly detrimental consequences of soft news are subject of popular and academic debate. This study investigates how watching particular news genres—soft versus hard—relates to cynicism about politics among Dutch citizens. A nuanced and novel scale measuring relative exposure to soft versus hard news is introduced using nonparametric unidimen...

http://jmq.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/11/21/1077699014558554 Journalists increasingly use personal exemplars in news stories about political issues. This study experimentally investigated how such human interest framing indirectly affects political attitudes via the way people attribute responsibility of an issue. Results show that exposure to...

Opinionated news targets communities of likeminded viewers, relies on dramaturgical storytelling techniques, and shares characteristics with political satire. Accordingly, opinionated news should be understood as a specific form of political entertainment. We have investigated the mechanisms underlying the effects of opinionated news on political a...

This study aims to contribute to an emerging literature that seeks to understand how identity markers on social networking sites (SNSs) shape interpersonal impressions, and particularly the boundaries that SNSs present for articulating unconstrained "hoped-for possible selves." An experiment employing mock-up Facebook profiles was conducted, showin...