The Oprah Effect

The Oprah Effect is the phenomenon in which consuming soft news causes the politically unaware to vote more consistently with their own views, articulated by Matthew A. Baum and Angela S. Jamison in their 2006 study, "The Oprah Effect: How Soft News Helps Inattentive Citizens Vote Consistently". The findings and conclusions of the study centered around the distinction between hard and soft news as written about by Baum, and the complex interactions both types of news have on people with low and high political awareness. The term was pioneered by Oprah Winfrey.
The increase of soft news content available has led some scholars to question its value in informing the public, and therefore question whether the media is properly fulfilling its duty to inform the citizens. The Oprah Effect was demonstrated by testing a dependent variable of voting consistently versus an independent variable which measured how often the voter watched daytime talk shows. Voting consistency measures the consistency between a voter's preferences and their vote. For the context of this experiment, the measure of voting consistently was created by applying Lau and Redlawsk's model of "correct" voting to data from the 2000 National Election Studies. Increased consumption of soft news caused low information voters to vote more consistently, but had no significant effect on more aware voters. Exposure to hard news modestly increased the voting consistency of politically aware individuals, but had no significant effect on those with low political awareness.
While Baum and Jamison agree that soft news contains lower quality political information, they conclude from their analysis that soft news fulfills a valuable duty by providing information to apolitical individuals. This is because soft news still exposes those individuals to the political information that they need to cast a vote for the candidate which best reflects their personal interests, even if it doesn't contain highly complex political information. They theorize that exposure to soft news has this effect on low information individuals because most people with little political knowledge have no interest in harder news, making their decision to consume soft news one between consuming soft news or consuming no news. Even though soft news may not be highly informational, it's still beneficial compared to consuming no news. They also go even further, contending that even if an individual with little political knowledge were to consume hard news, the more complex political information would be difficult for them to comprehend, and they would get relatively little out of it. As a result, they conclude their results should give some pause to critics of the increase soft news content in the media, because it increases the voting consistency of those with little political knowledge.

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