THE NEWS MEDIA| 147What Diff erence Does the Internet Make?
The Internet has made new kinds of political information available to the aver-
age citizen. Many sites off er the full text of government reports and analyses: for
example, the president’s annual budget request, new regulations published in the
Federal Register, or evaluations of government programs released by the Govern-
ment Accountability Offi ce.^69 Twenty years ago such documents were available
only at major libraries.KNOWLEDGE LEVELS BY NEWS SOURCE
TABLE »^ 5.1
One of the most important questions about media usage is whether people who know a lot about politics get
their information from diff erent sources than those used by people who don’t know as much. Does this table
show diff erences between high-information and low-information?
PERCENTAGE WHO COULD...HIGH-KNOWLEDGE
GROUPIDENTIFY
SUNNISIDENTIFY
LIBBYIDENTIFY
PUTINAPPROXIMATE
U.S. DEATHS
IN IRAQ
Nationwide 35% 32% 29% 36% 55%
THE AUDIENCE OF...
The Daily Show/The Colbert Report 54% 50% 44% 52% 59%
Major newspaper websites 54 52 42 58 64
NewsHour 53 46 45 54 67
The O’Reilly Factor 51 43 44 53 64
National Public Radio 51 49 43 51 66
The Rush Limbaugh Show 50 40 42 52 70
Local daily newspaper 43 36 35 43 60
News from Google, Yahoo, etc. 41 44 33 44 60
CNN 41 38 36 41 60
Network evening news 38 31 33 37 61
Online news discussion blogs 37 35 32 36 57
Fox News Channel 35 32 29 38 58
Local TV news 35 30 30 35 57
Network morning shows 34 30 30 35 57Entries show the percentage of regular viewers, readers, or listeners of each outlet who fall in the high-knowledge group (cor-
rectly answered at least 15 of 23 questions about politics and world affairs) and the percentage who correctly answered some
of the individual questions on the test.
Source: Pew Research Center, “What Americans Know: 1989–2007,” April 15, 2007, http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/319.pdf
(accessed 8/30/12).