Media Effects on Voters’ Political Attention, Preference, and Judgment
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Media Effects on Voters’ Political Attention, Preference, and Judgment:
The Stair-Step Model
Introduction
For more than a century, the press has been a necessary condition for the operation
of the political systems in our democratic society. The important role of news media lies in
the fact that the press is a common carrier of the messages of political leaders. This is why
the press has been at the center of modern political communication interacting with
policymakers and the public (for overview, see Perloff, 1998).
News media’s role of informing the public about politics, however, has further
implications. Numerous studies in the field of political communication have shown that the
public relies on news media not only for the information about political agendas but for the
ways of thinking about political issues and actors as well (see McCombs, M. E., Shaw, D.
L., & Weaver, D., 1997; Scheufele, D. A., 2000). No matter what formats it takes, the
mediated news has become the biggest and substantially the only accessible window of
information about politics in modern democratic societies. News media provide the
materials with which the electorate draws the picture of the political world outside, and
frequently even the directions about how to draw it (see Lippmann, 1920). In short, without
news media, both the voters and political actors cannot even imagine how to participate in
and maintain the democratic process.
In general, it is true that the higher the level of an election campaign, the greater
amount of news media coverage and scrutiny on the candidates (Dunn, 1995). The role of
news media, however, might be more instructive in local elections than the presidential
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