News framing and preference-based reinforcement: Evidence from a real framing environment during the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 is a news issue that can be covered from many different angles. When reporting, journalists have to select, accentuate, or exclude particular aspects, which, in turn, may evoke a specific, and possibly constricted, perspective in viewers, a phenomenon termed the news-framing effect. Guided by the reinforcing spiral framework, we conducted a multi-study project that investigated the news-framing effect’s underlying mechanism by studying the dynamic of self-reinforcing effects. Grounded in a real-life framing environment observed during the pandemic and systematically assessed via a content analysis (study 1) and survey (study 2), we offer supporting evidence for a preference-based reinforcement model by utilizing a combination of the selective exposure (i.e., self-selected exposure) and causal effects (i.e., forced exposure) paradigms within one randomized controlled study (study 3). Self-selection of news content by viewers was a necessary precondition for frame-consistent (reinforcement) effects. Forced exposure did not elicit causal effects in a frame-consistent direction.