Content area
Full Text
How do researchers talk to the media about the media? How is research about the media portrayed by those responsible for reporting objective findings? This article summarizes the efforts of the American Psychological Association's Public Policy Office on violence in the media in the late 1990s. By looking at the range of dynamics at play (school shootings blamed on popular music, rapidly evolving technology, a Presidential Campaign), this article explores the complexity of accurately representing psychological research in a medium where the findings could impact profits.
Keywords: media violence; news; research; television
Psychology is uniquely situated to contribute to the debate on influences on children by our society. However, the role of research becomes muddled when media researchers talk to the media about the media. When politicians and industry trade representatives get involved, many confusing arguments are made. When is media research good research? How many studies make a difference? What is the relationship between correlation and cause/effect for popular society? Is there such a thing as media effects? By examining the history of the American Psychological Association's Public Policy Office's involvement in the recent national debate on media violence and television ratings, it is seen that politicians, industry representatives, and others with vested interests use psychological research in a variety of ways. Personalities, skewed interpretations, the media's "invisible hand" in determining what is news, and the necessity of good research have played a part in shaping how basic and applied psychological research has influenced and changed the current media culture.
As a senior legislative and federal affairs officer for the Public Policy Office of the American Psychological Association (APA), I am, in simpler terms, a lobbyist, but not just any lobbyist, I am psychology's lobbyist. It is our job in the Public Interest Section of the Public Policy Office to translate research into a simpler form, more easily understood by the layperson. Usually, for our purposes, those laypersons are members of Congress or federal agencies.
We toil over large methodological tracts and bodies of research to elucidate the finer points of psychological endeavors and experience to our audience. For members of Congress, this means that everything has to be boiled down to one page because, frankly, they don't have time to review anything...