The growing popularity of the World Wide Web as a source of news raises questions about the future of traditional news media. Is the Web likely to become a supplement to newspapers and television news, or a substitute for these media? Among people who have access to newspapers, television, and the World Wide Web, why do some prefer to use the Web as a source of news, while others prefer traditional news media?

Contrary to much of the literature on collective opinion, I find that the low levels and uneven social distribution of political knowledge in the mass public often cause opinion surveys to misrepresent the mix of voices in a society. To assess the bias introduced by information effects, I compare '{fully informed" collective preferences simulated from actual survey data to collective preferences revealed in the original data.

This study examines whether supplementing face‐to‐face discussion with computer‐mediated discussion (CMD) enhances the academic performance of undergraduate students in large lecture courses. It also examines the characteristics of students who volunteer to take part in CMD groups when such participation is optional and worth a small amount of credit.

This study revises the indexing hypothesis by specifying its predictions and testing them on a single event, the U.S.‐Libya crisis of 1985–1986. We consider not only whether journalists use “official debate” to guide their coverage of important policy issues, but also how they might construct and interpret this debate. Detailed content analysis of the New York Times demonstrates that, while indexing is a valuable theory in assessing media treatment of foreign policy, it needs further refinement.

Much of the recent literature about political knowledge and public opinion concludes that the low information levels of the American public are benign to the workings of democracy. However, this study finds that the information resources possessed by rival publics are critical determinants of how loudly their preferences are voiced in policy‐oriented survey questions. Ill‐informed respondents tend to select “no opinion” more frequently and, when they provide responses, answer more randomly than the well informed.

Although many important governmental databases are still maintained by commercial vendors, there has been exponential growth over the past two years in the number of online resources made available to the general public. The rich availability of online resources for American politics is due largely to the lobbying efforts of public-interest organizations coupled with the Clinton Administration’s willingness to increase citizen access to government information. There were relatively few publicly-available political resources on the Internet until the end of 1992.

One of the characteristics of modern democracy is the participation of the public in the control over government representatives. Electoral processes have been the classic procedure for this exercise, and in the last few years, the election of surveys has reinforced that intention.

“Big data” in the form of unstructured text pose challenges and opportunities to social scientists committed to advancing research frontiers. Because machine-based and human-centric approaches to content analysis have different strengths for extracting information from unstructured text, the authors argue for a collaborative, hybrid approach that combines their comparative advantages.

This volume addresses the underscrutinised topic of cinema newsreels. These short, multi-themed newsfilms, usually accompanied by explanatory intertitles or voiceovers, were a central part of the filmgoing experience around the world from 1910 through the late 1960s, and in many cases even later. As the only source of moving image news available before the widespread advent of television, newsreels are important social documents, recording what the general public was told and shown about the events and personalities of the day.