News Media Environment, Selective Perception, and the Survival of Preference Diversity within Communication Networks

There is a natural tension between the effects on public opinion of social networks and the mass media. It is widely believed that social networks tend to harmonize opinions within them, but the presence of media may accentuate diversity by inserting discordant messages. On the other hand, in a totalitarian state where the government controls the media, social networks may mitigate the homogenizing pressure of a regime’s propaganda. The tendency of opinion to follow the “official line” may be mitigated because opponents of the government interact on a personal level and bolster one another’s views. This paper explores the dynamics of opinion adjustment taking into account the influences of social networks and the mass media. It develops a conceptual framework to integrate different components in the communication process. It presents an agent-based simulation model in which individual agents are embedded within networks of interpersonal communication, but they also have access to messages from widely disseminated mass media. The model offers us the opportunity to observe changes at three levels—within individuals, in social networks, and the entire society. We begin with a consideration of opinion dynamics when there are no mass media, and then proceed to compare the dynamics observed when there are diverse media messages with those obtained when agents are allowed to access only a monolithic (state controlled) media that broadcasts a single, consistent message. We also explore the impact of two competing models of individual interpretation of messages obtained from the media. The results indicate that the overall impact of the introduction of the mass media is contingent on the diversity of the messages offered by the media as well as the willingness of agents to accept media messages at face value.