Do you keep up with the news and current events? If so, where do you get most of your information? Do you keep up with political news? How well do most Americans keep up with events in the news? With political news, in particular? What are their sources for news about current events and politics? How informed about politics are young Americans? The following selection examines these questions.

1 Campaign work and community participation are active forms of political involvement. There is also a passive form of participation: following politics by reading newspapers and newsmagazines and by listening to news reports on television and radio. It can safely be said that no act of political participation takes up more of people's time than does news consumption. The news is important to citizen participation: if people are to participate effectively and intelligently in politics, they must be aware of what is taking place in their communities, in their nation, and in the world.

2News about politics is within easy reach of nearly all Americans. More than 95 percent of U.S. homes have a television set, and about 50 percent of Americans receive a daily newspaper. However, the regular audience for news is much smaller than these figures suggest. The mere fact of having a television or getting a daily paper does not mean that a person pays close attention to the news these media provide. If the regular audience for politics is defined as those who read a newspaper's political sections or watch television newscasts on a regular basis, then about a third of Americans can be classified as closely attentive to the news. Another third follows the news intermittently, catching an occasional newscast or scanning a paper's news sections somewhat often. The final third pays no appreciable attention to the news either on television or in a newspaper.

3 Television is the medium through which most Americans get most of their news. In recent decades, citizens who say television is their main source of news have substantially outnumbered those who rely mainly on a newspaper. Radio and magazines account for even smaller proportions. The figures are somewhat misleading in that people are asked where they get "most" of their news, not how much news they actually get. Some of the people who say they get "most" of their news from television do not watch the news a lot. They do not read a newspaper at all, so that even a little exposure to television news makes it their leading news source.

4 The news audience has shrunk considerably in size in recent years. Newspapers have lost audience to television newscasts, which in turn have lost audience to television entertainment programs. Before cable television was widely available, many television viewers had no alternative to a newscast during the dinner hour. With cable, viewers always have a wide variety of choices, and many viewers, as many as 40 percent by some estimates, choose to ignore the news unless a sensational event occurs, such as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

5 The audience for major televised political events has also fallen off. Although they are still a major attraction, even the October presidential debates get less attention than before. The four Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960 each attracted roughly 60 percent of all households with television sets. When debates resumed with Carter and Ford in 1976, viewers again flocked to their TVs, as they also did for the single Reagan-Carter face-off in 1980. Since then, however, except for the Clinton-Bush-Perot encounters in 1992, debate audiences have been declining. Only 46 percent of the country's television households watched the two Reagan-Mondale debates in 1984. Barely more than 36 percent saw the Bush-Dukakis debates in 1988. The Clinton-Dole debates in 1996 averaged a mere 29 percent. The debate audiences in 2000 were widely expected to exceed that level. The Bush-Gore contest was much tighter than the Clinton-Dole race, and large numbers of voters had not yet settled on a candidate. Yet the audience rating for the first Bush-Gore debate was no higher than for the first Clinton-Dole debate. The third debate had a 26 percent rating--the lowest ever. The 2000 debates drew on average about 45 million viewers 25 percent fewer viewers than in 1960, a time when the United States had one hundred million fewer people.

6 Young Americans in particular are ignoring politics. Americans under thirty years of age know less and care less about politics and pay less attention to newspapers than did each previous generation of the last half-century. Young people today are inclined toward television use generally but do not pay much attention to television news. Many of them apparently cannot be bothered with news in any form.

Source: Thomas E. Patterson, The American Democracy, Alternate Ed., 6th ed., New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2003, pp. 214-16.

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