Hong Hyehyun
Chung-Ang University, South Korea
Public Underst Sci. 2015 Aug;24(6):697-711. doi: 10.1177/0963662514544919. Epub 2014 Aug 5.
Exemplifying a real person in news stories has become a popular journalistic technique to describe an event or issue. With the frequent appearance of medical news reports in local television in recent years, this news presentation style is widely believed to help audiences better engage in and understand complex medical information and to influence their perceptions and judgments. In terms of television news coverage of medical advances, this study investigates how audiences respond to embedded human examples (mainly patients who experience benefits from the advances) and to overall news stories, and how such responses are related to their perception of portrayed medical advances. The experimental results indicate that news stories with a human example were more likely to intensify the audience's positive emotions than those without, which in turn influenced favorable perceptions of the described medical advance. In addition, the extent to which the audience identified with a human example (in particular, sympathy) mediated the relationship between the audience's involvement in the news story and its perception of the portrayed medical advance.
在新闻报道中举例说明一个真实人物已成为一种流行的新闻技巧，用于描述某个事件或问题。近年来，随着医学新闻报道在地方电视台的频繁出现，人们普遍认为这种新闻呈现方式有助于受众更好地参与并理解复杂的医学信息，进而影响他们的认知和判断。就电视新闻对医学进展的报道而言，本研究调查了受众如何回应嵌入式真人实例（主要是从这些进展中受益的患者）以及整体新闻报道，以及这些回应如何与他们对所描绘的医学进展的认知相关。实验结果表明，包含真人实例的新闻报道比不包含的更有可能强化受众的积极情绪，这反过来又影响了对所描述医学进展的好感度认知。此外，受众对真人实例的认同程度（特别是同情心）在受众对新闻报道的参与度与其对所描绘医学进展的认知之间的关系中起中介作用。
