The Real Media Divide

THE REAL MEDIA DIVIDE
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Markus Prior, Princeton University]
[Commentary] Today's news world is a political junkie's oyster. Cable TV offers CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and C-SPAN. The Washington Post, BBC online, The Note and many, many more news Web sites are only a click away. But that's where they remain for many Americans. Decades into the "information age," the public is as uninformed as before the rise of cable television and the Internet. Greater access to media, ironically, has reduced the share of Americans who are politically informed. The most significant effect of more media choice is not the wider dissemination of political news but mounting inequality in political involvement. Some people follow news more closely than in the past, but many others avoid it altogether. More troubling is that entertainment fans reduce the political representation of their interests when they avoid news and cut down on their political participation. Politicians pay more attention to voters than to nonvoters, so the views of these less-involved entertainment fans may not be reflected in political outcomes as much as they were in the past.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/15/AR200707...
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