Abstract
People report that television news is one of their primary sources of information about the larger world. But research suggests that people do not do a particularly good job of remembering what they hear on the news. This volume provides a comprehensive review of the now fairly extensive literature on people’s memory for television news. Dr. Gunter, who is professor of mass communication at the University of Leicester with a background in psychology, has played a major role in shaping the scholarship within this area of study for the past 35 years and is singularly qualified to write this volume.
The book provides an exhaustive review of this literature. Do people remember what they hear on the news? What factors mediate this relationship? The standard format for each chapter is to present a problem, review a wide-ranging set of studies, and then provide a discussion of the implications of the findings across these studies for designing news programs that are more memorable for the audience. Although it may appear that understanding people’s memory for the news is straightforward, this volume demonstrates that there are a number of important moderators of people’s memory for the news. For example, highly arousing or sensationalistic news can be more difficult to remember than less arousing news.
The volume does an impressive job of presenting what is a dizzying array of findings dealing with the interaction between the visual and verbal elements of news broadcasts. Although the visual element of broadcasting is often ignored by scholars, Gunter is not afraid of the complexity presented by considering the interaction of the visual and the verbal components of broadcast news. What are the effects of talking heads versus still pictures versus video? Likewise, how does the overlap between the content of the visual and the verbal influence people’s memory? There is an extensive literature on these problems, and this volume provides a thorough review of that literature. Furthermore, Professor Gunter, who worked in broadcasting before moving into academia, does an excellent job of discussing the implications for the myriad findings he reviews for news production. Indeed, this may be the more useful element of this book.
Although the book does an excellent job of discussing the results of a dizzying array of findings, I was disappointed with the volume for several reasons. First, our understanding of memory has advanced significantly during the past twenty years. Yet the volume seems to have as its foundation rather dated storage models of memory. So it is unclear how recent work in cognitive psychology has informed this area of research. Second, the volume does not do an adequate job of introducing relevant theories. For example, Annie Lang’s “Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing (LC4MP),” (Journal of Communication 2000 and 2006), is relevant to many of the results presented in this volume. To his credit, Dr. Gunter does discuss the LC4MP, but the presentation of the model is fairly simplistic and does not do service to it. Perhaps more importantly, I do not believe the description of the model highlights just how much this, and related models, could help producers of news to design newscasts that were more memorable. Likewise, I was surprised that there was limited discussion of comprehension processes as they related to understanding and remembering news stories. Certainly, people’s ability to comprehend the news and the myriad information that is necessary to process the news when there is a combination of verbal and visual cues play important roles in people’s memory for the news. But there is no discussion of comprehension in this volume. This was surprising because Dr. Gunter has done extensive work in this area. Although there has not been widespread research on comprehension processes as it relates to the news since Dr. Gunter’s Poor Reception: Misunderstanding and Forgetting Broadcast News appeared in 1987, there have been important advances in our understanding of how comprehension of news stories relates to people’s memory for the news since 1987. Finally, while the volume does provide fairly extensive methodological discussions, there are some issues such as signal detection theory that, I believe, should have received greater attention. Signal detection theory provides the theoretical foundation for measures of recognition memory. A more thorough explication of signal detection theory would have aided the reader in understanding some of the complexities underlying the research on recognition memory.
Ultimately, the value of this volume depends on the audience. If the audience comprises news professionals trying to understand how to construct newscasts that are better remembered by the audience, then this volume serves as the best review of that literature that is available today. If, however, the volume is intended for academics, then I believe it maybe somewhat disappointing because of the lack of serious theoretical explication into the processes that underlie people’s memory for news stories. Personally, I had hoped that Dr. Gunter would lay out his theoretical framework for understanding and studying these processes. There are certainly hints of an underlying theory that would tie together the extensive research on memory for the news; however, that theory is not formally presented within this volume.