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Doris Graber’s Insights on Taming the Information Tide

In the 1960s University of Michigan political scientist Philip Converse famously proposed that despite the routine dependence of politicians, pundits, and journalists on the “liberal-conservative continuum” to make sense of politics, most citizens ignore it. The Converse Conundrum became a focal point for research on American political behavior for much of the last half of the 20th century. Among the most thoughtful and solidly researched responses to this puzzle was Doris Graber’s Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide (1984). It is not the case, she argues, that citizens simply missed the point about ideological perspectives. They have active, purposeful, and diverse strategies for making sense of the news. She draws on schema theory and the psychology of selective attention to more richly probe the complexities of political communication in mass politics In the tradition of Robert Lane and William Gamson she conducted over-time depth interviews with a small panel of residents (in this case, in Evanston, Illinois) exploring the reasoning, motivations, and informational strategies of her active audience. This work (especially in the second edition [Graber, 1988]) was among the first of her seminal explorations of how visual imagery in print and broadcasting influence political perceptions. Few scholars had explored the visual component of political learning, but Doris Graber demonstrated that, in fact, visual recall of political stories is dramatically higher than recall of verbally conveyed themes. She found that avoidance of information that might be cognitively dissonant, despite the intuitive attractiveness of this theoretical tradition, was not a prominent strategy among her respondents. That surprising finding would echo through a number of experimental and field studies to explore polarized information filtering in online media. Professor Graber conducted this work in the 1970s and 1980s when newspapers and television were still the dominating forces of political media. She saw the significance of the digital revolution and was among the first to address it in her scholarship. But she did not return to the field for extended depth interviews to replicate this important work and explore how taming the tide has evolved in the