“News vs. Entertainment” 317
media choice so much in recent decades that many Americans now live in a high-choice media environment. As media choice increases, the likeli hood of “chance encounters” with any political content declines signifi cantly for many people. Greater choice allows politically interested people to access more information and increase their political knowledge. Yet those who prefer nonpolitical content can more easily escape the news and therefore pick up less political information than they used to. In a high-choice environment, lack of motivation, not lack of skills or resources, poses the main obstacle to a widely informed electorate.
As media choice increases, content preferences thus become the key to understanding political learning and participation. In a high-choice envi ronment, politics constantly competes with entertainment. Until recently, the impact of content preferences was limited because media users did not enjoy much choice between different content. Television quickly became the most popular mass medium in history, but for decades the networks’ scheduling ruled out situations in which viewers had to choose between entertainment and news. Largely unexposed to entertainment competi tion, news had its place in the early evening and again before the late-night shows. Today, as both entertainment and news are available around the clock on numerous cable channels and web sites, people’s content prefer ences determine more of what those with cable or Internet access watch, read, and hear.
Distinguishing between people who l
ike news and take advantage of additional information and people who prefer other media content explains a puzzling empirical finding: despite the spectacular rise in available political information, mean levels, of political knowledge in the popula tion have essentially remained constant. Yet the fact that average knowl edge levels did not change hides important trends: political knowledge has risen in some segments of the electorate, but declined in others. Greater media choice thus widens the “knowledge gap.” [Njumerous studies have examined the diffusion of information in the population and the differences that emerge between more and less informed individuals. According to some of these studies, television works as a “knowledge lev- eler because it presents information in less cognitively demanding ways. To reconcile this effect with the hypothesis that more television widens the knowledge gap, it is necessary to distinguish the effect of news expo sure from the effect of the medium itself. In the low-choice broadcast envi ronment, access to the medium and exposure to news were practically one and the same, as less politically interested television viewers had no choice but to watch the news from time to time. As media choice increases, expo sure to the news may continue to work as a “knowledge leveler,” but the distribution of news exposure itself has become more unequal. Access to the medium no longer implies exposure to the news. Television news nar rows the knowledge gap among its viewers. For the population as a whole, more channels widen the gap.