The Unequal Challenge of Learning from Under-informative News

The consumption of political news today is highly uneven: a small subset of the population consumes directly from news outlets, while the rest of the public typically encounters such news incidentally through social media and similar channels. Because of their dependence on direct consumers for revenue, news organizations cater their products to appeal to their core audience’s specific tastes. Several common styles of covering political news—which focus on partisan conflict, employ specialized political jargon, engage in prediction/forecasting analysis, and use attention-grabbing clickbait language—may be attractive to habitual consumers, yet may also make the news less accessible for others. Further, by favoring entertaining aspects of politics over substance, these styles may also undermine the press’s normative role for informing the public. In a preregistered survey experiment (n = 2,233) I show that, relative to a style of news that prioritizes information about public policy and democratic norms, these styles of coverage weaken post-exposure recall of key information. Further, this decline in 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.