254254 Chapter 7 | The Mediathe time and effort to become well informed. Everyone else learns about politics as a
by-product of other things he or she does throughout the day.
The lack of citizen interest is one reason why the increased amount of information
available on the Internet has not produced a better-informed citizenry: while
information is available, average Americans make little attempt to find and understand
it. Even if they try, finding information, sifting through conflicting sources, and
assessing the credibility of different accounts is a difficult task, even for experts. For
example, suppose you want to learn more about the conflict in Syria. A Google search
in late 2018 of the terms “America,” “Syria,” and “war” returned over 100 million
Web pages, ranging from reports on America’s military strategy to pictures of Syrian
refugees. Thus, the problem is not in finding information but in deciding which of the
millions of pages available will help you learn about the conflict.
In short, despite the Internet’s wealth of information, there is no guarantee that
people will sit down, search for what they want or need to know, distinguish truth
from falsehood, and assemble their findings into coherent conclusions. In fact, rather
than creating a uniformly well-informed citizenry, the availability of information
on the Internet may exacerbate the pattern we saw in Chapter 6, where a small
percentage of Americans are extremely well informed about politics, whereas the
vast majority of the public may simply throw up their hands and make no attempt to
become better informed.^34Market Forces
Another influence on media coverage is competition for an audience. Mass media
sources have always tried to get as large an audience as possible in order to generate
profits and stay in business, but the expansion of the Internet and the increased
availability of free information have increased competitive pressures.^35 In part,
these pressures have had positive effects for consumers: newspapers, for example,
have put their content online and moved from publishing once per day to continually
producing new stories and updates. Television stations have placed their videoMany Americans, attracted by clickbait
headlines and dramatic storylines,
now get the bulk of their political news
from nontraditional online sources
like BuzzFeed.Full_08_APT_64431_ch07_232-261.indd 254 16/11/18 1:40 PM