Book Description

I examine the political implications of the three most important changes in the media environment that occurred in the last half-century: broadcast television, cable television, and the Internet. The thesis starts by outlining a unifying theoretical framework to examine changes in the media environment and then follows the major changes in chronological order, focusing on implications for knowledge and turnout in the first part and on the impact on vote decisions in the second part. The theory extends existing explanations of political learning by focusing explicitly on the way in which different prerequisites for learning jointly affect the acquisition of political knowledge. Some media environments leave a lot of room for people's interests and skills to guide their media use and political learning, while others impose strong constraints on everyone. Before cable, the homogeneity of content on broadcast stations during the dinner hour meant that individual-level factors played a relatively minor role in guiding political learning. As a result, many Americans, even the less educated, less interested, and less partisan, watched national and local news and absorbed at least some of what they saw. As cable and Internet offer greater content choice, some people who were sufficiently interested to watch news in the absence of alternatives, abandon the news for entertainment programming. Others, in contrast, take advantage of the new opportunities to acquire even more information than before. As a consequence, the gap between the most and the least knowledgeable segments in the electorate widens. Furthermore, to the extent that knowledge motivates people to vote, the knowledge gap translates into a turnout gap. The second part of the thesis examines consequences of changing media environments for aggregate voting behavior. Less educated citizens who started to learn about politics from broadcast news had a moderating influence on election outcomes. Greater choice removes this moderating influence again. Politically interested people who continue to follow the news despite the increasing allure of around-the-clock entertainment are also more partisan. Cable television and the Internet, by increasing people's media choices, thus weaken the moderate elements and produce a higher concentration of partisans in the voting public, leading to greater political polarization among voters.