Page 240 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

9. POLITICAL COMMUNICATION EFFECTS 229

may be sufficient for the voter’s purposes, for example, to connect issues
to offices and to separate the candidates on the issues. Some of the revi-
sionist work in the area (Mondak, 1995) used local communities and a
natural experiment to examine the effect of newspapers on political
learning and activation.
Many reasons have been offered for the relatively weak increments of
political knowledge conveyed by the routine political news media. Most
prominent is the charge that the “horse race” coverage of political cam-
paigns, focusing on who is winning rather than on issues, deters learning
(Patterson, 1980). News content considered more generally may also limit
learning. Picking news for its entertainment value rather than for its polit-
ical importance may prevent more-complex issues from reaching the pub-
lic. Increasingly shorter sound bites on television news and presentation
of “nuggetized factoids” devoid of historical or political context in all
media may lead to processing information episodically rather than reflec-
tively. For the most part, these charges emanate from critical observation
of content alone without systematic tests as to their actual impact on the
audience. Systematic efforts to connect psychological theorizing on mem-
ory and comprehension with research on news forms and content and
their effects on the audience include Ferejohn and Kuklinski (1990),
Gunter (1987), and Robinson and Levy (1986). Price and Zaller (1993)
examined the role of media exposure in news story recall across a wide
range of topics and found that prior knowledge was the best predictor.
They also concluded that there is a general audience for political news,
but note that the audience is sharply stratified by prior knowledge.
Substantial research has examined questions about differential rates of
knowledge acquisition across different social strata and groups, as articu-
lated by Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien’s (1970) “Knowledge Gap Hypoth-
esis.” For instance, research has fairly consistently identified difference in
knowledge between high and low SES groups (Viswanath & Finnegan,
1996). Some studies have tried to evaluate, theoretically and/or empiri-
cally, whether these knowledge gaps result from such factors as differ-
ences in cognitive complexity or processing abilities, disparities in media
access and exposure, or differences in the perceived utility of being
informed (McLeod & Perse, 1994; Ettema & Kline, 1977). Each of these fac-
tors may contribute to knowledge gaps. For instance, higher levels of edu-
cation facilitate knowledge acquisition; income provides great access to
information; social situations socialize people into different patterns of
media use; and social circumstances reward different types of knowledge.
Recently, the emergence of new information technologies and evidence of
differences in the diffusion and use patterns across SES lines (Roberts,
2000; Shah et al., 2000) has furthered concern about knowledge gaps and
the “digital divide” (Jung et al., 2001; Loges & Jung, 2001).