In the days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden quickly became America's leading enemy. But as the Bush administration prepared its case for war against Iraq in the first half of 2002, officials began to avoid mentioning Osama bin Laden's name in public. At the same time, administration officials increasingly linked Saddam Hussein with the threat of terrorism in an effort to build public support for war.

Since so few people appear knowledgeable about public affairs, one might question whether collective policy preferences revealed in opinion surveys accurately convey the distribution of voices and interests in a society. Scott Althaus' comprehensive analysis of the relationship between knowledge, representation, and political equality (in opinion surveys) leads to surprising answers. Knowledge does matter, and the way it is dispensed in society can cause collective preferences to reflect opinions disproportionately.

This article looks at changes in the size of American news audiences during the 1990–91 Persian Gulf Crisis and the more recent period surrounding the 9/11 attacks. Like the current situation, the Persian Gulf crisis started suddenly, when Iraq launched a surprise invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Since there are clear starting points for both national crises, comparing the percentage of adults watching television news broadcasts before and after each precipitating event should show whether the respective crises prompted changes in levels of popular attention to the news.

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive supplies written abstracts for its video collection of news programs. Researchers from many disciplines use the abstracts to locate stories, track specific topics, and measure the evaluative tone of news. This study examines the validity of using abstracts as substitutes for full-text transcripts. Drawing on an analysis of the abstract writing process, we highlight potential sources of error and analyze the correspondence between transcripts and abstracts.

This study examines whether readers of the paper and online versions of a national newspaper acquire different perceptions of the importance of political issues. Using data from a week long experiment in which subjects either read the print version of the New York Times, the online version of that paper, or received no special exposure, this study finds evidence that people exposed to the Times for 5 days adjusted their agendas in response to that exposure and that print readers modified their agendas differently than did online readers.

Although many recent studies have examined presidential campaigns, most have concentrated on television advertising or news media coverage as the key variables of interest. Few empirical analyses have focused on the pattern of candidate appearances, and almost none have considered changes in these patterns over time. This gap is intriguing because some places should tend to receive more attention than others, and yet we know very little about the electoral strategies that determine where and why candidates make appearances.

This study examines the validity of newspaper indexes, lead paragraphs, and headlines as representations of full-text media content. We analyze the effects of production decisions on content and categorization in the New York Times Index, based on interviews with its senior editor. We then compare the content of three proxies with that of full-text articles by conducting a parallel content analysis of New York Times stories covering the 1986 Libya crisis and their corresponding Index entries.

This chapter examines the impact of political ignorance on the basic units of democratic input: individual votes cast in free elections. Do ill-informed people, regardless of their personal political views, tend as a group to favor certain kinds of candidates? If so, we might rightly question not only the ability of citizens to accurately communicate their needs, wants, and values through the ballot box, but also the quality of representation provided by this most basic of democratic institutions.

Relative to traditional newspapers, Internet-based papers provide fewer cues about news story importance and give readers more control over story selection. As a result, readers of an online paper may acquire less information about national, international, and political events than would print paper readers. This article reports the results of a multi-day experiment which compared the differential effects of exposure to print and online versions of the New York Times.

Using data collected from students at a fully networked university community, this study examines patterns of World Wide Web use and how they may relate to gratifications people seek from traditional media. Path analyses show that beliefs about the Web predict gratifications sought, and that the latter predict gratifications obtained, with considerable reliability. More importantly, entertainment, surveillance, and passing time—gratifications typically associated with television and newspaper use—prove to be significant predictors of World Wide Web site visitation.