Political Knowledge Gaps Among News Consumers with Different News Media Repertoires Across Multiple Platforms

Abstract

This survey research (N = 2,098) identified news media repertoires based on users’ overall news consumption patterns and then investigated how political knowledge acquisition differs across distinct repertoire groups. A cluster analysis produced three repertoire groups: news avoiders (72.7%), emerging news seekers (9.6%) who prefer newer media (i.e., Internet, mobile, and SNSs), and traditional news seekers (17.7%) who heavily rely on older media. Moreover, traditional news seekers outperformed emerging seekers as well as avoiders in the acquisition of political knowledge, and the high education group possessed more political knowledge than the low education group. Finally, the magnitude of the knowledge gap between the high and low education groups was statistically significant for both the news avoiders and traditional seekers, but not for the emerging seekers.