| Summary: | Employing the design of a prior experiment by Peleg & Alimi (2005), the present study examines how differently framed texts about the Knesset's approval of the Israeli-Palestinian 'Road Map' influence German students' assessments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The results of the study confirmed our theoretical hypothesis that information presented in political news reports influences more than just recipients' assessments of the specifically mentioned issues. In addition, it also affects their assessments of issues related only via the structures of the mental models into which they integrate information. Moreover, the influence of political news is not uniform, but rather varies with differences in the mental models recipients have previously formed. These a priori mental models, therefore, can be more powerful predictors of media effects than variables such as recipients' political orientations, their personal views or the relevance they attribute to a conflict.
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