The partisan political environment adds another dimension to the way that media influence the public. To evaluate whether partisans exposed to the same information reacted similarly to it, I ran the militarism analyses separately for Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. The quite different effects that the media treatments had on the partisan groups suggest that, in the area of foreign affairs, the adage that “politics stops at the water’s edge” no longer applies. Not only does politics influence the type of foreign policy that citizens desire from government; it also shapes how citizens interpret media messages and apply that information to their preferences.

Figure 1 shows the effects for all respondents. It indicates that respondents more concerned about terrorism preferred more hawkish policies than those less concerned. In addition, among those respondents highly concerned about terrorism (the blue line), watching one of the two terrorism stories increased their hawkishness.

As Figure 2 shows, Democrats threatened by terrorism became the most hawkish after viewing the threatening story paired with threatening visuals.

In comparison, Republicans preferred militaristic foreign policy, no matter which video they viewed (Figure 3).

The shape of the graph in Figure 4 indicates that for Independents, the neutral visuals condition moved opinions the most, meaning that the threatening information contained in that story, but not the threatening visuals, mattered for this group.

Being in the scary visuals condition had more than twice the impact on Democrats than it had on Republicans or Independents in pushing them toward militarism. This finding is particularly striking given that, when asked about their emotional reactions after watching the news stories, politically engaged Democrats tended to dismiss the scary visuals condition as manipulative, and to show evidence of “negative persuasion”—that is, reacting in the opposite way to that intended by the communication.

Using the foreign policy index instead of the diplomacy measure in the analysis produced the same results: Democrats were more affected by the news stories than Republicans or Independents, and were most affected by the scary visuals condition. For respondents most concerned about terrorism, the influence of the scary visuals condition was more than twice as large among Democrats as among Republicans or Independents. While threatening information paired with neutral visuals mattered little for Democrats’ attitudes, the neutral visuals condition influenced Independents more than the scary visuals condition did. As with the diplomacy measure, these findings also suggest that exposure to the most threatening types of news stories influences the attitudes of Democrats by moving them toward supporting policies they otherwise would not.