Table of Contents

1. Introduction; 2. Conditional political learning; Part I. The Participatory Effects of Media Choice: 3. Broadcast television, political knowledge, and turnout; 4. From low choice to high choice: the impact of cable tv and internet on news exposure, political knowledge, and turnout; 5. From low choice to high choice: does greater media choice affect total news consumption and average turnout?; Part II. The Political Effects of Media Choice: 6. Broadcast television, partisanship, and the incumbency advantage; 7. Partisan polarization in the high-choice media environment; 8. Divided by choice: audience fragmentation and political inequality in the post-broadcast media environment.

Promotional Information

This 2007 book studies the impact of the media on politics in the United States during the last half-century.

About the Author

Markus Prior is Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford's Department of Communication in 2004. He is the author of Post-Broadcast Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), an early version of which won the E. E. Schattschneider Award for the best dissertation in American politics, awarded by the American Political Science Association. The book examines how broadcast television, cable television and the internet have changed politics in the United States over the last half-century. His work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Political Communication.

Reviews

"[Markus Prior] presents a highly compelling story by building his case carefully and thoroughly using a wide array of data, aggregate and individual, covering many decades and areas ranging from the history of broadcasting to activities of Congressional incumbents...the prose is lucid and easy to follow." -Keiko Ono, Millikin University, The Journal of Politics