Effects of News Consumption on Political Understanding

I’m afraid I missed most of the ECREA 2018 sessions as I was in a team meeting of our Journalism beyond the Crisis ARC Discovery project, but I’m here again for the final session of the day, which starts with Mark Boukes. He starts by introducing the concept of political sophistication, and the difficulty in measuring it empirically. Often, this is done by administering knowledge tests, but knowledge does not necessarily imply understanding – so are there alternative indicators?

News consumption can improve knowledge, of course, but again this does not necessarily result in a genuinely enhanced understanding of the issues. The present project examined this in the context of the global financial crisis; this was covered using a number of different frames in the mainstream media, and the complexity of such coverage increased over time – did this increase audiences’ understanding of this topic?

News has to frame reality, and simplify it to fit within a story; complex stories may be overshadowed by simpler, ‘soft news’ stories as this happens. Further, only the quantity of relevant information received should have a positive effect on users’ understandings, and this plays out differently for users with different levels of prior knowledge.

The project assessed all this by combining content analysis of economic news articles in some nine outlets in the Netherlands, a panel survey of some 3,200 participants’ news consumption practices that allowed the project to infer how many financial crisis articles participants would have been exposed to, and a cognitive mapping assignment that required participants to identify concepts related to the financial crisis.

These cognitive maps highlighted especially the role of banks in the financial crisis, as well as its impact on employment and the housing market. Such understanding correlated with education but not political interest, and with internal efficacy and factual knowledge. Overall news consumption appeared to have a negative effect on the sophistication of these cognitive maps, however; exposure to crisis news had no strong effect here. However, especially less educated participants gained a more sophisticated understanding of the crisis the more crisis news they consumed, yet their understanding declined considerably if they consumed a substantial amount of news overall.