Selection in a Snapshot? The Contribution of Visuals to the Selection and Avoidance of Political News in Information-Rich Media Settings

The psychological bases of the selection and attitudinal response to news media have received ample attention in political communication research. However, the interplay between three crucial factors in today’s online, high-choice news media settings remains understudied: (1) textual versus multimodal (text-plus-visual) communication; (2) attitude congruent versus attitude incongruent versus balanced content; and (3) political versus nonpolitical genres. Relying on an experimental study of refugee and gun control news in the United States (N = 1,159), this paper investigates how people select and avoid, and also the extent to which they agree with, congenial, uncongenial, and balanced political news in a realistic multimodal selective-exposure setting in which political news is presented alongside sports and entertainment news. Although the findings partially depend on the issue, we find that the presence of multimodal (compared to textual) entertainment and sport items can increase avoidance of political news. Multimodal (compared to textual) political news augments attitude congruent selective exposure instead of encouraging cross-cutting selective exposure. Once selected, multimodal political news articles evoke stronger emotions and lead to higher issue agreement than textual news, regardless of an article’s attitude congruence. By linking research on text-alone to multimodal selective exposure, this study shows that visuals in high-choice media environments can contribute to the selective avoidance of political news generally and cross-cutting political news more specifically.