The fields of social and cognitive psychology and political science have offered several experimental designs for assessing the presence, type, and complexity of scripts (memory structures used to encode knowledge of an action) or event schemata. Script measurement is a potentially valuable tool for the study of information and news processing because the mass media typically present action-based sequences similar in nature to scripts. Most of the studies aimed at demonstrating the presence of a schema rely on hypothetical passages and indirect measurement strategies based on recall tests, clustering of related concepts, and inference based on prior knowledge. The study of information processing has focused on consensual or shared schemata--similar images for action-based or event stimuli shared by people in general. Media researchers are especially concerned with the assumption that people select specific schemata when processing various types of information supplied by the media--politics, sports, and weather, for example. The external validity of schema measurement has not been sufficiently assessed, though internal validity is rarely a problem in properly conducted experimental research characterized as a posttest only control group design. For the study of news and information processing, external validity should be sought using real news and information for stimulus material rather than hypothetical passages. References are included. (SRT)