THE IMPACT OF MELODRAMATIC NEWS

COVERAGE ON INFORMATION RECALL

AND COMPREHENSION

Constanza Mujica and Ingrid Bachmann

In many countries, television newscasts are increasingly relying on personalization and emotion
exacerbation in their news coverage, arguably as a means to attract audiences. Such features
are prominent in Latin American cultural products based on melodrama, such as telenovelas.
While often deemed to be bad journalism, there is mixed evidence on the impact of such news treat-
ment on knowledge acquisition, especially with audiences more attuned to these formats. Based on
an experiment in Chile, this study tests the effects of melodramatic coverage on viewers’ recall and
comprehension of news items. Results show that melodramatic treatment favors recall, but not
comprehension of data included in the news reports. Comparisons across news treatment by
gender, age group, and socio-economic status suggest that rather than overall differences, specific
demographic groups are more affected by melodramatic news.

KEYWORDS Chile; experiment; information processing; melodrama; news; news formats; tele-
vision journalism

Introduction
A journalist asks the victim of a natural disaster how she feels after losing everything
with a close-up of her tears. The next story features a sick child while intensely emotional
music soars. Instances like these are not rare in news coverage worldwide, and in Chile they
have been discussed by the National Television Council, the National Media Ethics Council,
and the courts. All of these institutions have qualified such resources as detrimental to the
dignity of people shown in the news and harmful for news audiences (Consejo de Ética de
los Medios 2010; Mujica and Bachmann 2015b; Oyanedel and Alarcón 2010).
This is not only a Chilean phenomenon. Since the 1970s, the literature has discussed
the ways in which news coverage, especially on television, has ceased to inform about
socially relevant issues and instead has favored the coverage of superficial matters. Robin-
son, cited by Mutz and Reeves (2005), coined the concept of videomalaise to refer to nega-
tive attitudes toward politics as a result of high television consumption. Other scholars
speak of infotainment, the trend toward the exacerbation of entertainment in factual pro-
gramming, thus blending the informative and educational elements of journalism and the
appeal of entertainment (e.g., Lozano 2004; Nguyen 2012; Thussu 2008), and others prefer
to use the term tabloidization to refer to the decline of high-quality journalistic coverage
due to the appropriation of the style of popular media (e.g., Blumler and Gurevitch 1995;
McManus 1994). In the case of television, these trends have been linked to commercial
interests in the broadcasting industry, with increasing airtime given to spectacular, sensa-
tional, or melodramatic news even in public, non-commercial channels (Lozano 2004;
Journalism Studies, 2018
Vol. 19, No. 3, 334–352, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1190661
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 IMPACT OF MELODRAMATIC NEWS COVERAGE 335

Vettehen, Nuitjen, and Beentjes 2005), with emphasis on attractive visuals and emotions
over social significance (Lo and Cheng 2015; Thussu 2008), as a means to get higher ratings.
Along these lines, several authors criticize contemporary journalism for covering
issues of scarce social relevance, simplifying relevant issues through their focus on personal
stories, and the intensification of emotional content through a rhetorical treatment that
abuses close-ups and music (for a summary, see Franklin 2005). Such descriptions have
negative connotations. According to these accounts, the media have decreased in
quality, because this kind of journalism is not informative (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995)
and is trivializing public discourse (Thussu 2008). In turn, the omission of relevant events
is depicted as a neglect of the discussion of public affairs and the representation of
diverse viewpoints (García Avilés 2007) that would promote democratic engagement
(Gripsrud 2000).
However, examination of the effects of this type of coverage in the audience’s infor-
mation processing has rendered mixed results: while some scholars consider that it
decreases the capacity to retain information and comprehend complex issues (e.g.,
Grabe et al. 2000; Milburn and McGrail 1992; Prior 2003), others argue that the public pro-
cesses such information in different ways, suggesting that effects are on attitudinal changes
rather than factual knowledge (Kim and Vishak 2008; Moy, Xenos, and Hess 2005; Young
2004) given infotainment’s appeal to emotion over intellect (Puente 1997). Some of the
diversity of the results might be originated on diverse definitions of concepts like
“drama” and “emotional coverage,” or methodological approaches—including experimen-
tal designs and observation.
The present study pursues this line of inquiry and connects it to the Latin American
theoretical tradition on melodrama. Based on the results of an experiment with 142 partici-
pants in the capital city of Chile, it examines whether this melodramatic coverage is more
appealing to audiences and explores its effect on people’s capacity to recall and compre-
hend news facts.
Chile is a prosperous democratic Latin American country with a homogeneous media
system (Gronemeyer and Porath 2015). Given the cultural resonance of melodramatic cul-
tural products in Latin America—including, but not reduced to, telenovelas—(e.g., Straub-
haar 2000), understanding the impact of melodramatic features in news coverage can
inform a more nuanced assessment of news consumption in regions often ignored in scho-
larly research.

Journalism and Melodrama

Several characteristics used to describe both infotainment and tabloidization are
similar to the attributes of melodrama, according to Latin American authors like Jesús
Martín-Barbero (1987, 1995) and Carlos Monsiváis (2000). Traditionally, this approach to
melodrama studies has served as a theoretical framework informing the analysis of
works of fiction, but it is a useful approach to study journalism and news production as
well (see the seminal work of Gripsrud 1992), beyond the exclusively negative connotations
often found in examinations of infotainment. In fact, past research shows that melodra-
matic representation can be found in diverse media and cultural manifestations, such as
literature, documentary films, religion, and popular music (e.g., Brooks 1995; Fuenzalida,
Corro, and Mujica 2009; Herlinghaus 2002). In that sense, the Latin American approach
336 CONSTANZA MUJICA AND INGRID BACHMANN

emphasizes the features of a genre that is culturally resonant and prominent in the region
(e.g., Straubhaar 2000).
With ties as a mass product to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French
theater, melodrama is a genre characterized by exacerbation of emotions with resources
such as background music. It relies on archetypal roles (e.g., the damsel in distress, the lover,
the villain, the hero) to address moral polarization, with the characters’ struggle for love and
happiness representing the battle between good and evil (Brooks 1995; Gripsrud 1992,
2000; Martín-Barbero 1987). This genre aims to produce pity among audience members in
response to characters’ suffering, which entails a detailed visual representation of such grief
(Aprea and Soto 1998; Gripsrud 2000; Mujica and Bachmann 2013). In his analyses of Latin
American television and telenovelas, Martín-Barbero (1987, 1995; Martín-Barbero and Rey
1999) understands melodrama as a mediation strategy between two poles—the pre-
modern realities that a majority of Latin American citizens experience daily, and the modern
expectations at the center of much of Latin American political discourse.
Following Gripsrud’s (1992, 2000) work, Mujica and Bachmann (2015a) argued that
two main attributes of the melodramatic genre could be found in journalistic work: perso-
nalization and emotionalization. The former refers to news that focus on private, personal,
and concrete affairs rather than public, social, or abstract issues (e.g., Bas and Grabe 2015;
Karvonen 2010; Rahat and Sheafer 2007; Schulz and Zeh 2005). The latter concerns both the
description or depiction of emotional states and the use of audiovisual resources aimed at
exacerbating emotional reactions such as empathy and sorrow (e.g., Bas and Grabe 2015;
Grabe, Zhou, and Barnett 2001; Grabe et al. 2000).
Scholars argue that focusing news on individual characters’ experiences and testimo-
nies not only allows audiences to empathize and identify with those people, but also serves
to get audiences interested in complex and abstract issues that they might not follow
otherwise (Macdonald 2000). Indeed, given the particularities of audiovisual language, per-
sonalization brings a sense of intimacy (Fuenzalida 2002) that might provoke emotional
contagion—the emotional convergence between the audience and the people on
screen—and identification with the experiences portrayed (Bas and Grabe 2015). While per-
sonalization has been operationalized in multiple ways, including information about private
lives (Van Zoonen 2005), number of facts reported about people (Pellegrini et al. 2011), and
human factors, that is, the centrality of personal stories (Schulz 1996), there is consistent
evidence of increasing personalization in news coverage of public issues, especially politics
and crime news (e.g., Karvonen 2010; Kovach and Rosenstiel 2001; Lo and Cheng 2015;
Schulz and Zeh 2005; Thussu 2008). Critics, however, argue that personalization fixates
on oversimplified archetypes—including the common melodramatic character types (Ala-
torre 1986; Real 2001).
On the other hand, emotionalization relies on audiovisual techniques to spur
emotional reactions among the audience, and thus has been linked to sensationalism
(Bailey, Fox, and Grabe 2013; Bas and Grabe 2015). Among the techniques that serve for
exacerbation of emotion are close-ups, which disrupt conventions of acceptable interper-
sonal distance; image or video editing that alters realistic representation, such as slow
motion or color modification; dramatic music added in post-production indicating the char-
acters’ emotional state or hinting at a dramatic situation; and narrations and voice-overs
laced with value judgments and qualifiers (e.g., Bailey, Fox, and Grabe 2013; Bas and
Grabe 2015; Fuenzalida, Corro, and Mujica 2009; Grabe et al. 2000; Pellegrini et al. 2011).
While not as pervasive as personalization, extant literature suggests that these resources
 IMPACT OF MELODRAMATIC NEWS COVERAGE 337

are on the rise on television reporting as well (Lozano 2004; Snoeijer, de Vreese, and
Semetko 2002).

Melodramatic Traits in Latin American Journalism

The link between journalism and melodramatic genres like telenovela, popular music,
and serialized novels published in newspapers (folletines) has been addressed in reference
to the widespread presence of melodramatic traits in Latin American cultural products (e.g.,
Fuenzalida, Corro, and Mujica 2009; Mazziotti 1991).
Mainly from the critical studies standpoint, there is evidence of the use of melodrama
as a common schema in political coverage in Argentina (Hortiguera 2003), news about vio-
lence and armed conflict in Colombia (Ramírez 2012), and the Latin American crónica or
feature writing (Sierra Caballero 2012). Melodrama is recognized in the use of stereotypes
(famous lovers, exotic settings, glamor; see Hortiguera 2003) that perpetuate a moral polar-
ization of the world (Ramírez 2012). Sierra Caballero (2012) highlights that melodramatic
news coverage can also be understood as a mode of inclusion of subaltern characters
and speech.
Fuenzalida, Corro, and Mujica (2009) traced the emergence of melodrama in Latin
American television news to the history of television reporting, and exemplified it with
the Chilean case. The domestic setting in which television is often consumed favors
stories that underscore the personal and the emotional to the extent of becoming a main-
stay in Chilean television journalism.
Indeed, past research on Chilean newscasts shows that the use of emotionalizing fea-
tures is common, yet not largely extended. For instance, a content analysis of the main
newscasts of four networks showed that a third of news stories examined included at
least one emotionalizing feature, but their use was concentrated in two or three of these
resources in each news story (Mujica and Bachmann 2013). Similarly, information about
emotions was given through sources that provided information about their emotions,
had passionate tones, and showcased negative emotions through their body gestures
(Mujica and Bachmann 2013).
Another study found that between 2009 and 2011, the use of melodramatic features
increased in all four main newscasts in Chile, with a significant increase in the centrality of
personal stories and testimonial sources. There was also evidence of a process of homogen-
ization in news treatment among Chilean broadcasters in a context of commercialization
and competition (Mujica and Bachmann 2015a). These findings are consistent with prior
studies by Pellegrini and colleagues in the Chilean context (e.g., Pellegrini et al. 2011).
Editors at Chilean broadcasters acknowledge the use of these features in their news
coverage, but they define them as “dramatic,” reserving the term melodrama for an excess
or abuse of such treatment of news (Mujica and Bachmann 2015b). In in-depth interviews,
editors said that dramatic coverage is unavoidable, given the inherent characteristics of
audiovisual language, and because it serves to attract the attention of the audience
toward relevant issues.

Knowledge Acquisition: Recall and Comprehension of Information

The negative connotations ascribed to news coverage with melodramatic traits taps
into criticism about its ostensive effects on citizens’ acquisition of relevant information.
338 CONSTANZA MUJICA AND INGRID BACHMANN

Cognitive approaches to information processing distinguish at least three modes of

knowledge acquirement through media content: the retention of a number of facts, the
capacity to organize and connect these facts with each other and with prior information,
and the ability to apply that knowledge (Eveland, Marton, and Seo 2004; Grabe, Bas, and
van Driel 2015; Lang et al. 1999).
For Lang et al. (1999), for instance, comprehension involves continuous and simul-
taneous operation of three sub-processes: encoding (short-term or working memory),
storage, and both retrieval of previously held information and association with newly
obtained information. Along these lines, Grabe, Bas, and van Driel (2015) distinguish
between encoding and comprehension. While the first is related to the recognition of dis-
crete information, the second is related to the integration of facts “into a meaningful system
of existing knowledge” (302) and being able to apply them in different contexts. These defi-
nitions have in common a distinction between the recall of individual data and the compre-
hension (elaboration) of that information through application. The present study also relies
on such distinction.
Furthermore, there are different ways to measure and quantify knowledge acqui-
sition, each functional to different modes of memory and comprehension (Eveland,
Marton, and Seo 2004; Grabe, Bas, and van Driel 2015; Grabe, Lang, and Zhao 2003;
Zhou 2005). Recognition of individual facts, subjects, or events through close-ended ques-
tions is often used to measure the accurate recall of individual data, whereas for retrieval
and comprehension of information, participants are often asked to remember whatever
they can after a news-viewing session, with researchers gauging the density of connections
between facts.
In the last two decades, several scholars have explored the effects on viewers’ recall
and comprehension of information of news stories presented in a melodramatic fashion
(e.g., Grabe, Bas, and van Driel 2015; Grabe, Kamhawi, and Yegiyan 2009; Grabe, Zhou,
and Barnett 2001; Grabe et al. 2000; Graber 1996; Lang et al. 1999; Zhou 2005). Lang
et al. (1999) consider the limited capacity model to argue that how many cognitive
resources are actually allocated by a viewer in a particular news report depends, on the
one hand, on story processing and the incorporation of rhetorical procedures that
suggest the viewer must pay attention (orienting responses), and, on the other hand, on
content characteristics such as relevance, difficulty, and presence of emotion. They test
the effects of pacing (i.e., the number of cuts in a message) and arousing content on
viewers’ processing of information. In that sense, emotionalization—conceptualized as
both the information about emotions and rhetorical devices that exacerbate them—can
be expected to have effects on news recall and comprehension.
From a theoretical perspective, authors like McManus (1994) state that the most
recurring argument against (melo)dramatic news is that dramatized coverage debilitates
the press’ role to illuminate democratic societies. Thus, entertainment goals through the
selection of emotional or even morbid stories told with the help of post-production features
might be more colorful, but not necessarily more informative (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995;
Franklin 2005).
In the case of television, some of the roots for this assessment can be found in the
characteristics of audiovisual language, and the structural features of newscasts. Graber
(1996, 2001) argues that in the case of political content, the briefness of most newscasts
makes it difficult to present the contextual and party information required in in-depth
stories. The need to present stories in a rigid format, between commercials, leads to the
 IMPACT OF MELODRAMATIC NEWS COVERAGE 339

presentation of unconnected, uncontextualized pieces of information that do not

promote critical reflection. This problem is coupled with the difficulty of dealing with
abstract concepts that are not easily translatable to the visuality that television
demands (Graber 1996, 2001). Fuenzalida (2002) describes audiovisual language as con-
crete visual signs, analogous to persons and things. The relationship between these signs
and the things they represent is unbreakable and the richness of audiovisual language is
precisely its capacity to convey multiple nuances with just a concrete image. More so,
images provoke emotions, memories, and associations that provoke an affective link
with audiences. Indeed, it is the capacity of images to promote emotional engagement
that might explain the perception that they “lack serious information value” (Grabe, Bas,
and van Driel 2015, 300).
The relationship between exposure to dramatic television stories and information
recall and critical analysis has been tested with dissimilar results. Milburn and McGrail
(1992) tested the effects of exposure to dramatic news in recall and complexity of analysis
of information on viewers. Based on the literary studies tradition inaugurated by Bertold
Brecht, they defined dramatic coverage in terms of dramatic acts (violence and emotion
on screen), actors (levels of personalization), structures (possible solutions, references to
common narratives), information density, and the role of the reporter (e.g., stating a
moral evaluation). In an experiment, they presented participants with stories with different
levels of dramatism, and then asked subjects to write what they recalled about what they
had watched. They found that the exposure to dramatic news diminished the audience’s
capacity to freely recall information and reduced the complexity of their analyses, that is,
the ability to recognize different points of view and perspectives, because such content
interferes with news learning by activating simplified schemas, drawing the viewers’
attention to the emotional elements of the story rather than other data (see also Klijn
2003; Zhou 2005).
On the other end, those who defend melodramatic narratives for news reporting
argue that these can contain contextual information relevant to information processing.
For example, personalized stories favoring emotional responses among audience
members have shown to increased information recall and recognition (Bas and Grabe
2015).
Other researchers (e.g., Nguyen 2012; Prior 2003) focus on the difference between
soft and hard news. They argue that entertainment contents do not promote accurate infor-
mation (Prior 2003) and have negligible effects on public attachment to news (Nguyen
2012). Soft news is understood as a kind of journalistic treatment—sensational, personal-
ity-centered, centered on incidents rather than processes. Such definition can be linked
to the notions of melodrama given in the present study and addressed in the current
experiment.
In this line of research, soft, emotional, entertaining news would promote a different
mode of information processing than hard news. Indeed, soft news encourages attitudinal
changes rather than factual knowledge (Kim and Vishak 2008; Young 2004). Further, even if
viewers do not always remember who has been shown on the screen, there is a higher
recall of personal information about sources and of sensations—especially in news with
high levels of personalization and emotionalization (Puente 1997).
Other considerations, such as the redundancy between verbal and visual information
(Lang 2000; Zhou 2005), the use of a dramatic arc—where the story is told through clearly
identified characters, in a clear cause–effect order and with a clear climatic point (López
340 CONSTANZA MUJICA AND INGRID BACHMANN

2001), and the reference to negative emotions (Miller and Leshner 2007), have all been
shown to have a positive impact on recall.
Other scholars suggest that socio-demographic variables such as education level also
affect information recall and comprehension. News consumers with lower education levels
tend to better recall television information, while higher-educated persons better recall
newspaper and Web content (Grabe, Kamhawi, and Yegiyan 2009). Bas and Grabe (2015)
found that people with lower education levels benefited more than those with higher edu-
cation levels from emotion-provoking personalization, actually narrowing knowledge gaps
between both groups. Fuenzalida (2011) found that less-educated groups tend to appropri-
ate non-fiction-based dramatic contents as educational, whereas high socio-economic
status (SES) individuals dismiss them as sensationalist.
These results suggest the need to further enquire into the effects of these types of
content in audience appeal, recall, and comprehension of information. The present study
addresses precisely that in the Chilean context.

Methods
To test the effects of melodramatic news treatment on news recall with an internally
valid test, a posttest-only experiment was conducted. An experimental design allows an
evaluation of the impact of variations in the presentation of media messages (Bryman
2008). This study used a 2 (news treatment, non-melodramatic and melodramatic) × 2
(story type, hard and soft news) basic design. Gender (male, female), age group (young
= ages 18–29; adult = ages 30–49, older = ages 50+), and SES (low, medium, and high, as
defined by econometric guidelines in Chile) served as an additional factor in three separate
models.
In order to have a homogenous distribution in terms of gender, age, and SES, 142
adult subjects were randomly assigned to one of two conditions after systematic stratifica-
tion.1 One group watched a hard-news story with low levels of melodramatization and a
soft-news story with high levels of melodramatization. The other group watched the oppo-
site treatment for each story type. Accordingly, each group served as the control group of
the other. The hard-news story was a report about the rising costs of private health insur-
ance plans and legal battles to stop quote increases; the soft-news story focused on a new
generation of young tennis players and their first steps in professional competitions. The
stories, in all their versions, were factually true and made according to television industry
standards, but edited by the research team to control the manipulation, and so that they
would appear as recent at the time of the study. Thus, while both versions of each story
type were almost equal in terms of duration and news density (e.g., total number of
facts reported), one had a non-melodramatic treatment (focus on the general/official/
socially relevant, with only verbal references to emotions and personalization), and the
other had a melodramatic treatment (focus on the personal/emotional, with only verbal
references to official/general facts). For instance, the melodramatic hard-news story
started with a visible angry man who had filed a lawsuit to stop his health company
raising the costs of his health plan. The report also had an animated graph that showed
the steep increase in revenue for health insurance companies in the last few years. The
non-melodramatic version, on the other hand, started with an off-narration describing
the actions of the litigant, and only listed each year’s revenues for health insurance
companies.
 IMPACT OF MELODRAMATIC NEWS COVERAGE 341

The story topics were selected considering the following criteria: (1) they were topics
that according to past research commonly appear in Chilean newscasts (e.g., Pellegrini et al.
2011), and (2) both of them allowed markedly different melodramatic and a non-melodra-
matic treatments. For example, a story about food allergies on children was dismissed after
pre-testing because participants regarded the images of a small child on his mother’s arms
as highly emotional, even if neither journalist nor sources spoke about emotions, and there
was no use of rhetorical devises such as close-ups or dramatic music.
All the stories used as stimuli were pre-tested, and a content analysis showed that
both versions of each topic were similar in formal features such as facts reported,
framing, and length. Also, two manipulation checks, with a total of 28 adults of all ages
and educational levels, were conducted to verify that the stories were indeed significantly
different in melodramatic levels. Each participant, recruited via the snowball sampling tech-
nique, watched two of the four stories, and then answered a questionnaire about their per-
ceptions about each treatment, including which one they thought had more music, showed
more emotion, and focused on personal experiences of news subjects. Then they engaged
in a focus group-like setting to discuss how melodramatic they deemed each story. There
was consensus understanding of each treatment in the expected direction.
The experiment took place in September 2014 and was conducted at the premises of
the authors’ university as a series of 18 focus groups on newscasts. After obtaining consent,
subjects were shown both of the two- to three-minute long clips of the manipulation and
were told these were from an upcoming newscast about to debut. After that, they com-
pleted a pen-and-paper questionnaire with 10 multiple choice questions about facts pre-
sented in the stories—five questions per each story type—as a measure of news recall. A
second test to measure news comprehension had participants pairing 10 different sets
of concepts—again, five for each story type—whose link was implied or concluded, but
never explicitly told in the videos. Participants also answered other questions about how
interested in each story they had been, and then they engaged in a discussion led by
either of the researchers about what they liked and disliked about newscasts, in general,
and the stories shown, in particular. The researchers also used these conversations to
explore whether the subjects had realized the purpose of the experiment, but none of
the participants was able to pinpoint what the study was exactly about. At the end of
each session, participants were debriefed about the experiment. In addition, all of them
received about US$20 as monetary compensation for their participation. To ensure that
the study followed ethical standards, the instrument and consent forms had been reviewed
and approved by the Ethics Committee of the authors’ university.
The overall sample was 52 percent female and 48 percent male. Sixty-eight partici-
pants watched the non-melodramatic hard-news story and then the melodramatic soft-
news story (48.5 percent of them female, mean age of 37.9 years). Seventy-four individuals
watched the opposite treatment for both story types (55.4 percent of them female; 37.8 as
average age). Most of respondents had at least a high school diploma. The average age of
respondents was 37.8 years (SD = 13.2).
Following the work of Delli Carpini in the context of political knowledge (e.g., Delli
Carpini and Keeter 2000), the analysis of the recall questions considered non-answers as
different to wrong answers, as it is different to admit that one does not know the
answer to a question than providing an inaccurate answer while thinking that it is the
right response. Thus, the questions were coded as correct (= 1), incorrect (= −1) or
non-answer (0), and then added into two separate indices for both hard-news recall and
342 CONSTANZA MUJICA AND INGRID BACHMANN

soft-news recall (each one ranging from −5 to 5). A similar approach was used with the
comprehension items, with two separate indices for hard and soft news as well. Compari-
sons of means then served to identify different effects of news treatments in both recall and
comprehension among different demographic categories under study. Table 1 summarizes
the sample size of each subset of analysis.

Results
Overall, participants were regular news consumers. On average, they declared watch-
ing television news six days a week, and reported reading a newspaper four days a week.
Also, participants found the hard-news story—about private health costs—more interest-
ing and appealing than the soft-news story—about young tennis players—regardless of
treatment, but tended to more accurately recall facts from the soft-news story. On
average, participants correctly recalled twice as many facts from the tennis story (mean
= 2.20, SD = 1.99) than from the health insurance story (mean = 1.01, SD = 2.37). Arguably,
the soft-news story reported facts that were easier to process and retain than the hard-
news story.
That said, news treatment did have a significant impact on news recall. As Figure 1
illustrates, participants who watched the melodramatic version of the hard-news story sig-
nificantly recalled more accurate facts about health insurance costs than those who
watched the non-melodramatic version (p < 0.05). The same thing happened with the
soft-news story. While overall the scores for the soft-news story were higher (on a scale
from −5 to 5), regardless of treatment, than those of the hard-news story, the difference
across groups is statistically significant.
More interestingly, while overall comparisons by gender, age group, and SES did not
show many statistically significant differences (except for gender and SES in the case of
non-melodramatic hard news, as well as gender in both treatments for soft news), compari-
sons across treatments did reveal significant differences, suggesting that certain specific
demographic groups are the ones more affected by news treatment. Rather than inter-
actions with entire variables, it is within some categories that differences are found.
Table 2 summarizes these differences for the hard-news story. While news recall did
not significantly differ for female participants who watched either version of the story about
health insurance costs, news treatment made a significant difference for male participants.

TABLE 1
Number of cases per experimental condition, by gender, age group, and SES

Melodramatic hard news and Non-melodramatic hard news

non-melodramatic soft news and melodramatic soft news Total
Gender Male 33 35 68
Female 41 33 74
Age Young 26 22 48
group Adult 25 26 51
Older 23 20 43
SES Low 27 23 50
Medium 23 23 46
High 24 22 46
 IMPACT OF MELODRAMATIC NEWS COVERAGE 343

FIGURE 1
Differences in news fact recall and comprehension by news treatment

Thus, while men who watched the non-melodramatic version of the hard-news story did
not accurately recall information from the story (mean = −0.63, SD = 2.29), those who
watched the melodramatic treatment recalled more facts (mean = 1.67, SD = 2.71). While
the differences do not seem large, they are statistically significant and in the predicted
direction (t-value = 3.7879; df = 66; p < 0.001).
The breakdown by age and SES shows a similar pattern. Participants aged 18–29, and
those with low SES exposed to the melodramatic hard-news story recalled significantly
more facts than their counterparts watching the non-melodramatic version (young
people: t-value = 2.3034, df = 46, p < 0.05; low SES: t-value = 2.2423, df = 48, p < 0.05). Inter-
estingly, for older people (ages 50 and older) the gap in accurate recall is such that the score
is higher for those who did not watch the melodramatic version of the story, but the other

TABLE 2
Gender, age group, and SES differences in hard-news fact recall, by news treatment

Gender Age group SES

Male Female Young Adult Older Low Medium High
Melodramatic 1.67 1.00 1.31 1.64 0.91 1.26 1.13 1.50
(2.71) (2.19) (1.99) (2.64) (2.71) (2.48) (2.75) (2.15)
Non-melodramatic −0.63 0.75 −0.09 0.96 1.20 −0.22 0.91 1.41
(2.29) (2.29) (2.22) (2.18) (2.33) (2.13) (2.13) (2.3)

Values are means with standard deviations in parentheses. Bold font indicates statistically
significant differences across news treatment for that specific group.
344 CONSTANZA MUJICA AND INGRID BACHMANN

news clip. While the difference is not statistically significant, it may hint to different data-
processing strategies from older cohorts. Arguably, older people are more used to news
presented in a more traditional, non-melodramatic fashion, and may be able to better
retain information reported in a non-emotional, non-personal way.
Another interesting finding is that for participants with higher SES the gap in hard-
news fact recall was negligible. For this topic, it seems, news treatment did not significantly
impact their abilities to retain and recall data reported in news stories.
A look at the soft-news story also shows consistent patterns (see Table 3). In this case,
female participants’ recall of facts from the tennis player story modestly improves if they
were exposed to the melodramatic version of the story (mean = 1.91; SD = 1.73) rather
than the non-melodramatic version (mean = 1.10; SD = 1.83). While overall women recalled
less accurately than men and the difference for females by news treatment only
approaches significance (t-value = 1.7894, df = 72, p < 0.10), the findings are in line with
the notion that melodramatic news treatment has a positive effect on recall.
Contrary to the case of hard news presented earlier, it is older people’s recall that sig-
nificantly improves with a melodramatic news treatment, while the effect is negligible for
the other age groups. Thus, older people who watched the non-melodramatic soft-news
story accurately recalled almost half as many facts (mean = 1.57, SD = 2.28) than those
who watched the tennis player story with a melodramatic treatment (mean = 3.05, SD =
1.85, t-value = 2.3142, df = 41, p < 0.05). This significant gap is similar to the one observed
among high-SES participants. In this case, high-SES people who watched the melodramatic
soft-news story recalled significantly more accurate facts (mean = 3.09, SD = 1.26) than
those exposed to the non-melodramatic news clip (mean = 1.87, SD = 2.03; t-value =
2.4222, df = 44, p < 0.05). This could be a combined influence of news treatment and the
particular story topic. Indeed, in the discussions after exposure to the stimuli, high-SES par-
ticipants often expressed finding the story about young professional tennis players more
personally salient than the news clip addressing the increasing costs of health insurance
plans. Conversely, lower-SES subjects stated lack of interest in a story about teenagers
who could consider playing a sport with a small fan-base as a valid career path.
When analyzing news comprehension (a more elaborate measure of people’s ability
to recover cause–effect relationships), the results present a more complex picture—one
that suggest that news treatment, overall, did not have a statistically significant effect on
this regard. As Figure 1 has already illustrated, for neither hard news nor soft news was
there a significant difference in terms of how much participants correctly elaborated on

TABLE 3
Gender, age group, and SES differences in soft-news fact recall, by news treatment

Gender Age group SES

Male Female Young Adult Older Low Medium High
Melodramatic 2.97 1.91 2.36 2.08 3.05 2.17 2.13 3.09
(1.67) (2.06) (1.91) (1.98) (1.85) (2.16) (2.13) (1.26)
Non-melodramatic 3.06 1.10 2.04 2.28 1.57 1.81 2.26 1.87
(1.73) (1.83) (1.78) (2.05) (2.28) (2.00) (2.12) (2.03)

Values are means with standard deviations in parentheses. Bold font indicates statistically
significant differences across news treatment for that specific group.
 IMPACT OF MELODRAMATIC NEWS COVERAGE 345

causes and effects established in the news stories they watched. More interestingly,
however, is the direction of the (admittedly small) difference. For both story types, it is
the non-melodramatic version that seems to favor better comprehension.
Similarly to the case of news recall, while further breakdown by gender, age group,
and SES did not show overall statistically significant differences (except in the case of
age group for non-melodramatic hard news and melodramatic soft news), the comparisons
across treatments suggest that whether the stories were presented with high or low levels
of melodramatization had an impact.
Table 4 shows the comprehension differences for the story about health insurance.
The differences for both male and female participants, overall, are minimal (and indeed,
not significant), but young people seem to have taken more advantage of the melodra-
matic news treatment for the hard-news story. Younger participants who watched the
non-melodramatic version of the hard news failed, for the most part, to correctly link
several causes and effects (mean = −1.36, SD = 2.21); those who watched the melodramatic
treatment were more successful in making these connections (mean = 0.38, SD = 3.43). The
difference are not too large, but they suggest that when it comes to hard news, a melodra-
matic treatment might help young people to better comprehend what they are watching
(t-value = 2.0454; df = 46; p < 0.05). It is also worth noticing the contrasting trend in terms of
comprehension in the age group breakdown—whereas comprehension decreases in each
age group with a melodramatic treatment of the news story, the opposite occurs with the
non-melodramatic version of the health insurance story. That is, the older the participants
are, the less they comprehend from a hard-news story with higher levels of
melodramatization.
The breakdown by SES shows a similar finding. People with lower SES seemed to
better comprehend hard-news stories when they were presented in a melodramatic way
(mean = 0.07, SD = 2.05) than when they watched the same story with low levels of melo-
dramatization (mean = −1.52, SD = 2.21). This difference is statistically significant as well (t-
value = 2.0772; df = 48; p < 0.05). Furthermore, this effect was the opposite with participants
with a high SES, to the extent that they seemed to better comprehend the health insurance
story when they watched the non-melodramatic version.
The analysis of the soft-news story also suggests that story type and news treatment
affected comprehension differently. In this case, there were no statistically significant differ-
ences across treatment, and more surprisingly, in almost every single case participants

TABLE 4
Gender, age group, and SES differences in hard-news comprehension, by news treatment

Gender Age group SES

Male Female Young Adult Older Low Medium High
Melodramatic −0.51 −0.63 0.38 −0.76 −1.48 0.07 −0.43 −1.46
(2.80) (3.02) (3.43) (2.53) (2.39) (3.05) (2.50) (3.00)
Non-melodramatic −0.83 −0.88 −1.36 −0.81 −0.35 −1.52 −0.56 −0.45
(2.28) (2.23) (2.21) (2.38) (2.06) (2.21) (2.29) (2.15)

Values are means with standard deviations in parentheses. Bold font indicates statistically
significant differences across news treatment for that specific group.
346 CONSTANZA MUJICA AND INGRID BACHMANN

seemed to better comprehend the non-melodramatic version of the story about tennis
players. Table 5 summarizes these findings.
Arguably, for a soft-news story, a melodramatic treatment is more detrimental to
comprehension and might indeed distract television viewers in such a way that they
cannot accurately link the causes and effects presented in the story.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this experiment, the editorial treatment of two different types of stories proved to
have important consequences. Exposure to different levels of melodramatization on news
reports had an impact on the extent to which participants accurately recalled different facts
reported on these stories, and how much they comprehended the causes and effects por-
trayed. More importantly—and in accordance with news professionals’ arguments that
they rely on higher levels of melodramatization for the sake of the audience—it is the melo-
dramatic treatment that positively affects how many facts individuals correctly remember
from the stories they had just viewed. Comprehension, on the other hand, does not seem to
be affected overall by treatment—although the results tend to indicate that if there were a
significant effect, it would be in the opposite direction.
Additionally, these effects varied according to socio-demographic variables while
these variations had different outcomes depending on story type (hard or soft news). In
the case of hard news, males, young, and low-SES participants benefited the most from
exposure to melodramatic news, as their recall was significantly higher. Conversely, for
soft news, significant effects were found for female, older, and high-SES participants. In
the case of younger and low-SES viewers, melodramatic news treatment also positively
influenced how much people comprehended the hard-news story.
The hard-news items in the posttest questionnaire seemed to be harder to be accu-
rately recalled by all participants, whereas the soft-news questions were more easily
remembered. The gender gap seen in the hard-news recall could be a consequence of
the well-documented tendency by males to guess rather than omit an answer (e.g., Delli
Carpini and Keeter 2000) and then risk being wrong for the chance of ending up being
right. Females, on the other hand, are more conservative and tend to answer only when
they are confident. Similarly, comprehension for the hard-news story was also lower,
suggesting that indeed soft-news stories—regardless of treatment—are easier to grasp.
In the case of lower SES, the results are consistent with Fuenzalida (2011), who found
that in Chile this group tends to appropriate dramatic content as educational, whereas

TABLE 5
Gender, age group, and SES differences in soft-news comprehension, by news treatment

Gender Age group SES

Male Female Young Adult Older Low Medium High
Melodramatic 1.49 0.97 1.86 0.26 1.80 1.04 0.96 1.73
(2.80) (2.15) (2.85) (1.84) (2.57) (2.84) (2.18) (2.49)
Non-melodramatic 1.85 1.63 2.62 1.12 1.39 1.14 1.61 2.50
(2.85) (2.91) (3.00) (2.89) (2.54) (2.84) (3.22) (2.47)

Values are means with standard deviations in parentheses.

 IMPACT OF MELODRAMATIC NEWS COVERAGE 347

high-SES individuals dismiss it as sensationalist. This suggests that low-SES individuals

might be more inclined to accept dramatic presentation of news, which in turn could facili-
tate information access, recall, and comprehension.
For younger people, health insurance topics are arguably less personally salient, so it
can be suggested that the empathy to news characters’ experience and emotions that
melodrama promotes can favor information processing. Actually witnessing someone
else’s experience appears to affect both recall and comprehension positively for this group.
In the case of the soft-news story, in conversations held after the experiment, female
participants criticized what they qualified as excessive sports coverage. Arguably, in the
same sense that young audiences seemed to benefit from watching the melodramatic
version of a story distant from their current experience, female participants might have
felt closer to a sports issue they did not care for when it was treated melodramatically.
In contrast, in the case of high SES, high prior interest might be enhancing the effects or
melodramatic treatment of the story.
Even though these results suggest a generally positive effect for melodrama over
recall, it is important to nuance that conclusion considering socio-demographic variables.
High levels of melodrama do not necessarily guarantee a better, more accurate recall
across the board, nor do they improve comprehension. Different audiences seem to
retain melodramatically presented contents differently. Editors should be aware of these
nuances when producing news content for mass audiences and consider them when creat-
ing niche information shows. Along these lines, the results have implications for how
people understand the role in the news of such a culturally relevant genre in Latin
America as melodrama. The evidence presented here suggests that a melodramatic treat-
ment of news is not necessarily detrimental.
While an experimental design offers internal validity for the findings reported here,
the fact that the stimuli used in the different treatments were constructed as actual
news clips—with real cases and true facts—makes a case for external validity as well.
Although the news stories were manipulated to fit the conditions, they were very realistic
and only included content deemed newsworthy.
A possible caveat for these results is the fact that the difference in the effects among
groups might be affected by interest in the stories’ topics, and difference in prior knowl-
edge about them. For example, a minority of Chileans buys health insurance plans from
private providers, most of them from high and medium SES. Hence, previous experience
with the issue might confound the results. Something similar might have happened with
the sports story, a topic usually associated with male interest.
Another limitation is that the sample of participants relied on a stratified model and
thus the subjects are not necessarily representative of the general public of the country. In
that sense, young people and higher-SES individuals were overrepresented in comparison
to the population at large. Still, it is important to notice that the effects of the conditions
varied significantly across different categories, and were consistent.
Moving forward, the implications of these results offer an interesting path for future
explorations about melodrama in news reports. The inclusion of other story topics, as well
as other formats (e.g., longer reports, live coverage) would add a new layer to these find-
ings. Complementation with other methods as well as future replications, including new
measures and conditions, could also open other avenues of research. For instance, consid-
ering other dependent variables such as attention, credibility, and interest in each story.
348 CONSTANZA MUJICA AND INGRID BACHMANN

Additionally, researchers should also consider the differences at the cross-national or

international level and attempt comparative studies. It would be especially relevant to
compare Chilean results with other countries in Latin America that share the melodramatic
tradition described in the literature review, and with countries elsewhere, to see if effects
change according to the incidence of these contents in newscasts in each country.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank Sebastián Valenzuela for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper,
and Martina Piña for her assistance in conducting the experiment.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

FUNDING
This work was supported by the Chile’s National Fund for Science and Technology
(Fondecyt), Project No. 1110311.

NOTE
1. This approach mimics a factorial design with a subset of reduced designs that maintain the
balance property. This allowed for small groups while maintaining per-factor power and
relying on tests that could forgo covariance, since setting of the subsets already factored
in those elements (see Collins, Dziak, and Li 2009).

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Constanza Mujica, School of Communications, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,

Chile. E-mail: mcmujica@uc.cl
Ingrid Bachmann (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), School of
Communications, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile. E-mail: ibachman@
uc.cl
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