-23

posals. Changes on those issues which had been around longer--Nixon's handling of inflation and Vietnam, and McGovern's position on Vietnam withdrawal--were unaffected by advertising coverage.

We believe that these results probably underestimate the effects of televised political advertising. As a group, voters who watch considerable television programming are not particularly informed

about politics.

If change on the lightly covered issues can be taken

as "normal," voters with high ad exposure had less change (+11.8) than those with low exposure (+16.4). Televised political advertising, by reversing this relationship on the issues it covered in the 1972 cam13 paigning appears to have been a powerful communication channel.

Controlling for Exposure to Other Sources

14

Television news, newspapers, and televised ads have many of the same voters in their audiences. For example, many voters who closely read the newspapers are also regular television news viewers. Consequently, an examination of exposure to one source, without controlling for exposure to the other sources, may hide important effects. The data for these controlled relationships is presented in Tables 5, 6, and 7. In these tables changes in issue awareness among voters with low and high exposure to one source are presented within categories of voter exposure to each of the other sources.

The controlled relationships provide important qualifiers to the previous findings. All three information sources now have some impact when exposure to one or both of the alternative sources is low, but only newspapers have any effects (and these are limited) when exposure to either alternative source is high.

-24

Television News: High exposure to television news increased the issue awareness of voters with low newspaper exposure.

It does not, however, increase the awareness of voters with high newspaper exposure or add to the knowledge of voters with either low or high advertising

exposure.

Among voters with low newspaper exposure (see Table 5), those with high television news exposure show substantially more gain (+29.3) than those with low television news exposure (+16.2). These same effects do not appear among high newspaper readers. For these voters, those with high exposure to television news show less gain (+25.2) than those with low exposure (+46.8).

When television advertising exposure is controlled (see Table 6), exposure to television news shows no relation to increases in voters' issue awareness. Among voters with low ad exposure, those with high television exposure show a +32.0 gain, while those with low exposure show a +30.8 gain. And among high advertising exposure voters, the gain is +25.8 and +27.7 within the high and low television news exposure categories.

Newspapers: Increased newspaper exposure has a dramatic effect on the issue awareness of voters with low exposure to television news and televised advertising. Newspaper exposure also improves the isawareness of voters with high exposure to televised political adHowever, level of newspaper exposure shows no relationship to increased issue awareness among voters with high exposure to tele

sue

vertising.

vision news.

Among voters with low television news exposure (see Table 5), voters with high newspaper exposure show a gain of +46.8, three times greater than the +16.2 gain among those with low newspaper exposure.

Table 5.

-25

Changes in Voters' Issue Awareness for Level of Exposure to
Television News, Controlling for Newspaper Exposure

Table 6.

-26

Changes in Voters' Issue Awareness for Levels of Exposure to
Television News and Newspapers, Controlling for
Televised Advertising Exposure.

-27

The gain for those with high television news exposure, in contrast, is +25.2 among high newspaper exposure voters and +29.3 among low exposure voters. However, level of newspaper exposure is related to increased issue awareness among voters with both low and high advertising exposure (see Table 6). In the case of low advertising exposure, voters with high newspaper exposure showed a much greater gain (+43.0) than those with low newspaper exposure (+16.5). And among those with high advertising exposure, the gain among high newspaper readers (+29.8) was again higher than the gain among the low readers (+20.3).

Televised Advertising: Level of exposure to televised political advertising is related to gain in voters' awareness on those issues heavily covered in political ads (see Table 4). The average change was +31.5 among voters with high advertising exposure and +23.7 among those with low advertising exposure.

Among voters with low television news exposure (see Table 7), those with high advertising exposure show a greater average change (+31.0) than those with low advertising exposure (+22.3). The average change for voters with high television news exposure, however, was roughly the same in both the high (+32.2) and low ad (+33.9) exposure categories.

Examining ad exposure while controlling for newspaper exposure reveals a similar pattern (see Table 7). For voters with low newspaper exposure, the average change was nearly twice as great within the high (+22.0) as within the low (+11.9) category of advertising exposure. Among high newspaper exposure voters, however, the high ad exposure group showed about the same change (+39.4) as those voters with low ad exposure (+39.7).

Summary and Elaboration

All three information sources have some impact on voters' issue