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This article examines the effect of television and newspaper news exposure on the holding and structure of political attitudes. Ideological utility is treated as an intervening variable. and is defined as the usefulness of the traditional dimensions of liberal/conservative and left/right to a person in describing political beliefs. The more ideologically sophisticated are presumed to be more familiar with these dimensions and better able to place themselves accordingly. Data are from the 1976 University of Michigan CPS national election study (N = 2402). Attitude consistency is treated as a variance of a person's responses to a series of nine bipolar political issue scales, indicating how consistently liberal. conservative. or neutral are that person's attitudes. As hypothesized. both television and newspaper news exposure are positively associated with attitude holding at low levels of ideological utility. Counter to expectations. television news exposure is positively associated with attitude consistency at low levels of ideological utility. The opposite is true of newspaper exposure. The results support treating ideology as a cognitive processing de vice for political information. as well as suggesting that television news helps viewers form opinions about political issues and structure them in a meaningful way.
Reese et al. (Wed,) studied this question.