News Information Processing as Mediator of the Relationship between Motivations and Political Knowledge

The cognitive mediation model of learning from the news proposes that motivations for news use influence the processing to which the news information is put, and that this processing is the proximal determinant of learning. The role of motivations in learning from the news, then, is indirect through information processing. Secondary analysis of data indicate substantial support for the model. The relationship between motivations and knowledge was reduced by the introduction of the mediating cognitive variables, news attention, and news elaboration. Both attention and elaboration were significantly related to knowledge, even after controlling all other variables in the model.