The impact of role‐congruency and photo presence on the processing of news stories about Hillary Clinton

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to examine the effects of news photo presence and role‐congruency in news stories of Hillary Clinton on reader interest and memory. In the photos and stories, Clinton was either portrayed as a wife, or as a professional person. Results indicate readers processed the photos at least sufficiently to rate them as fitting with the story or not. Further, this study showed that mere presence of a photo meant the story would be ranked as more interesting, but photo presence and role‐congruency with the story did not affect recall of story ideas. Results of this study therefore, suggest typical news photos of a political actor/public figure serve as attention‐getting devices, but are not used as an important informational aid.