Publications [#39824] of Ellen Mickiewicz

Journal Articles

  1. E. Mickiewicz. "Excavating Concealed Tradeoffs vol. 22:3, (July-September 2005), 355-380.." Political Communication 22.3 (Fall, 2005): 355-380.
    (last updated on 2005/12/28)

    Author's Comments:
    Best described by abstract.

    Abstract:
    ABSTRACT EXCAVATING CONCEALED TRADEOFFS Citizens in democracies are assumed to make better decisions if they understand policy tradeoffs. However, politicians rarely have incentives to communicate them; citizens are uncomfortable choosing among valued outcomes; and devising a common metric is difficult. It is not surprising that in the United States the environment provides relatively little cuing or priming of tradeoffs in television news. Russian citizens, on the other hand, face a media environment in which tradeoff cuing is intentionally suppressed by owners’ agendas, yet viewers detect concealed tradeoffs even in the absence of tradeoff priming and viewpoint diversity. Analysis of discourse among ordinary Russians in sixteen focus groups convened in four cities, differentiated by political reform and media market environments, finds that when watching news in which tradeoffs are thoroughly concealed, viewers challenge stories by offering a broad spectrum of uncued tradeoffs. Tradeoffs come from diverse policy domains and represent a range of cognitive strategies, some of which are considerably more abstract than others and link elements of their observations and assumptions (together with what they can extract from the stories) into complex reasoning outcomes. Key Words: tradeoff, Russia, television, cue, priming, environment, economics, focus group, discourse, agenda, media, content, message, viewer, strategy, cognition, policy, information, communication

Ellen Mickiewicz