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When Uses and Gratifications Meet the Knowledge Gap:
The Impact of Media Motives and Demographics on Political Activity
This study emerges from two theoretical traditions in the political communication
literature. The first is the uses and gratifications tradition (e.g., Blumler, 1979; Lasswell, 1948;
Wright, 1960), which suggests that why people use the news media is as important as how much
they use them and which ones they use. In the uses and gratifications approach, various
motivations, such as surveillance and diversion, are of primary concern. The present paper limits
its examination of such motivations to a political campaign context, specifically, the 2000
national election.
The second theoretical tradition is the knowledge gap theory (Tichenor, Donohue, &
Olien, 1970), as well as, more broadly speaking, the theory that demographics can influence
media use and media effects. Basically, the knowledge gap theory posited that when people are
exposed to media information, those higher in socioeconomic classes benefit more from that
exposure that those in lower socioeconomic classes (Tichenor, et al, 1970).
Common to current research in political communication is the treatment of demographics
as no more than control variables. Their effects are removed in either regression or SEM
statistics, and then the effects of media and other variables are evaluated. A classic example
would be McLeod, Scheufele, & Moy (1999), who tested their community participation model
after removing the effects of age, gender, education, income, and structural anchoring (a variation
on home ownership). Although this approach is useful in articulating and testing various models
and theories, it can be limiting in other ways, for example, ignoring the possibility that
demographics have not only direct effects on the dependent variables, but also interactive effects.
In other words, the common approach of using demographics simply as control variables does not
take into account possible “gap-creation” that the interaction of demographics and media
variables might expose. Some recent research has acknowledged the importance of various types
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Convention