A Cross-Cultural Experiment on How Well Audiences Remember News Stories from Newspaper, Computer, Television, and Radio Sources

Abstract

This paper reports on the methods, findings, and implications of a large-scale cross-cultural experiment on audience recall of brief news stories. Subjects from Spain and from the United States were exposed, one-at-a-time and under highly controlled conditions, to one of three local spot news stories presented via either newspaper, computer screen, television, or radio. Each of the 720 subjects was a student in a beginning course in media studies, in either a Spanish or an American university. The stories were the same for each group, with each carefully prepared in the two languages so as to be “matched.” Careful attention was given to making the stories as close as possible in length, topic, organization, and coverage of specific details so as to permit direct comparisons between similar subjects in the two cultural settings. Distinct patterns of results with statistically significant differences between the two cultural groups were found.