ITHACA, N.Y. -- You are what you read.
In our culture of mass media and information bombardment, it is the daily newspapers -- and not the nightly television news programs -- that motivate highly educated people into civic participation, according to researchers at Cornell University and Ohio State University. And this is creating a civic-participation gap between people with high and low education levels.
"People with a higher education not only tend to read newspapers but they can process the information more carefully," says Dietram Scheufele, Cornell assistant professor of communication. "The highly educated know where to look to find information, and they have the skills to read a newspaper more effectively. As a result, mass media has a stronger influence on their civic participation. Less educated people participate less in the first place, but they also benefit less from information presented in newspapers and a participation gap is being created."
When it comes to involvement in an election campaign, Scheufele explains, highly educated people generally find it easier to extract mobilizing information from newspapers. For example, he says, they find out how to register to vote, where to vote, how to work for a candidate and how to organize a demonstration because they have the ability to track down that detailed information efficiently from the newspapers. Those with a low level of education often do not know where to look or how to find that information.
Those with a low level of education, according to the researchers, were defined as having a high school diploma or less, those with a moderate education were defined as having some college experience or an associates degree, and those with high education had a bachelor's or a more-advanced degree. The study, "Connecting News Media Use With Gaps in Knowledge and Participation," which appeared in the most recent issue of the journal Political Communication (July-September 2000), was authored by Scheufele and William P. Eveland Jr., an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Ohio State. The researchers used data from the 1996 American National Election Study, which surveyed more than 1,700 Americans between September and December of 1996. The 1996 study was conducted by the University of Michigan and funded by the National Science Foundation.
While newspapers had a great influence on participation among the highly educated, television's influence on participation was negligible, the researchers say. "Television doesn't make a difference," says Scheufele. "Television's impact is weaker than newspapers because there isn't much mobilizing information or content. Television news cannot provide in-depth information, and in that medium it is almost impossible to provide that depth."
However, in the area of political knowledge, it appears that television helps even the field, the researchers say. "We found that television serves as a leveler of the knowledge gap -- the highly educated don't learn much from television but the less-educated people learn quite a bit. For the educated, television repeats what these people already know. But because television explains stories in a somewhat linear, simple fashion, television makes it easier to understand information for the less educated, and that's why the gap narrows."
Scheufele observes that in this presidential election season, the candidates would like to see more participation from young people. "Newspapers are doing a good job in getting highly educated people involved in the civics process," he says. "Newspapers are not doing a good job getting the less educated to participate."
Journal
Political Communication