This study investigates how presenting the same factual content with varying narrators, as required by harder-versus softer-news formats, influences the way readers perceive the gay male subject of an actual news story. Because previous social-psychological findings have suggested that people typically respond to others first as members of distinct groups and then later as individuals if and only if they have sufficient motivation for doing so, the expectation was that presenting the same factual content with varying narrators—effected through the quantity of direct quotations included from the news subject—would provide such motivation. The findings of this study support this contention.
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