The Unequal Challenge of Learning from Under-Informative News

• In Event: Traditional News Industry Changes and Their Political Consequences

Abstract

Contemporary news organizations compete for the attention of a shrinking pool of news consumers. Today’s core news consumers are not broadly representative of the public. Instead, they are highly engaged in politics, and are characterized by high levels of both political knowledge and interest in politics. Several common styles of covering political news---conflict framing, prediction-as-news, insider's politico jargon, and attention-grabbing clickbait headlines---are potentially attractive to these highly-invested core consumers, but may make news about politics less accessible for incidental or less-engaged readers. In a pre-registered survey experiment (n = 2,233), I show that, relative to placing a story’s democracy- and policy-relevant information front and center, these styles of political news coverage weaken information recall after exposure. Further, the reduction in information recall is especially pronounced among those who are less politically engaged at baseline. This study shows that several common forms of news coverage are under-informative and contribute to disparities in political knowledge among the mass public.

Author

• Andrew Trexler, Duke University