AUTHOR Neuman, W. Russell; And Others TITLE Knowledge, Opinion, and the News: The Calculus of Political Learning.

To determine where U.S. cicizens receive their political and current events knowledge, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) interviewed people at a Boston shopping mall. This preliminary report, the first in a series to examine the political knowledge gap between the affluent and the economically disadvantaged, examined information dissemination through television, newspapers, and news magazines. The researchers found television to be more successful at presenting abstract and distant political issues, while print media, especially newspapers, were more successful with immediate and concrete presentation. This finding contradicts the perceptions of journalists interviewed prior to the study. It was hypothesized that television attracted people with low initial interest and low cognitive skills while the print media is ur.c1 more for information retrieval by informed citizens. T