Television Use and Confidence in Television By Blacks and Whites in Four Selected Years

Despite concern about the relatively incomplete nature of research on the relationship between Blacks and television reported by Poindexter and Stroman (1981: 105), certain find-ings comparing Blacks and whites and television seem to be well established. For example, studies cited by Comstock (1980: 31), Allen (1981: 48, 51), and Poindexter and Stroman (1981: 108-109) uniformly indicate that Blacks on the average watch more television than whites. Also, research by Comstock ( 1980: 31) and Bower ( 1973: 45-46) into Black attitudes toward the medium concludes that Blacks overall hold a more positive attitude toward the medium than whites-in the sense that Blacks deem television as a whole more credible than do whites. Less rigorously established is the related matter of the connec-tion between television use and perceived credibility of the medium by Blacks. For nonminority audiences, significant and positive relationships between viewing and credibility have been reported by Comstock ( 1980: 32) and Westley and Severin (1964: 332-335). In these studies, a consistent interplay was