This book empirically tests compares and explains the effects of British and American legacy conservative press and far-right websites on accordant political views and behavioural intentions. Correspondingly the 2016 Brexit Referendum and American Presidential election results are often attributed to the spread of fake news through social media Russian Bots and alt-right news websites. This has raised concerns about the impact of digital disinformation on democracy as well as the rise of nativist parties and movements worldwide. However this book argues that these causal attributions are largely based on unproven assumptions and deflect attention from the more influential and harmful role of traditional conservative media. To support this argument Leyva incorporates insights from various fields such as neurocognitive science media-communication research cross-cultural psychology and sociology. Additionally the book presents primary evidence from a series of experiments that examined the effects of candidate-related fake news and immigration coverage from both old and new media right-wing sources. These experiments focused on how such content influences anti-immigrant attitudes and voter preferences. By doing so the book provides a nuanced and robustly tested theoretical account of how right-wing media affects political beliefs sentiments and practices at the neuronal level and of how this can in turn negatively impact democratic multicultural societies. Given its interdisciplinary approach this book will be of interest to scholars in the social behavioural and cognitive sciences who are studying media psychology online misinformation authoritarian populism political sociology new media and journalism. |Right-Wing Media’s Neurocognitive and Societal Effects | Communication Studies
