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Television news stories tend to be structured to resemble drama or, more specifically, melodrama. What is the effect of such news presentation on the complexity with which viewers think about the political issues raised in the stories? Socialpsychological research on the effects of schema activation (Milburn, 1987; Milburn & Fay-Dumaine, 1988) indicates that such activation may reduce individuals' cognitive complexity. To test the effect of the dramatic presentation of television news, dramatic news stories were taped and edited to remove the highly dramatic scenes. The edited and nonedited stories were then presented to subjects, and subjects' recall and cognitive complexity were measured. We found that, controlling for various background differences, exposure to the dramatic news stories significantly decreased subjects' recall of the information in the stories and reduced the complexity with which individuals thought about the events reported. The results raise important concerns about the contribution of the news to the public's information level and political sophistication.
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