The 2004 presidential campaign is continuing the long-term shift in how the public gets its election news. Television news remains dominant, but there has been further erosion in the audience for broadcast TV news. The Internet, a relatively minor source for campaign news in 2000, is now on par with such traditional outlets as public television broadcasts, Sunday morning news programs and the weekly news magazines. And young people, by far the hardest to reach segment of the political news audience, are abandoning mainstream sources of election news and increasingly citing alternative outlets, including comedy shows such as the Daily Show and Saturday Night Live, as their source for election news.
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The survey shows that young people, in particular, are turning away from traditional media sources for information about the campaign. Just 23% of Americans age 18-29 say they regularly learn something about the election from the nightly network news, down from 39% in 2000. There also have been somewhat smaller declines in the number of young people who learn about the campaign from local TV news (down 13%) and newspapers (down 9%).
Cable news networks are the most frequently cited source of campaign news for young people, but the Internet and comedy programs also are important conduits of election news for Americans under 30. One-in-five young people say they regularly get campaign news from the Internet, and about as many (21%) say the same about comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show. For Americans under 30, these comedy shows are now mentioned almost as frequently as newspapers and evening network news programs as regular sources for election news.
But people who regularly learn about the election from entertainment programs - whether young or not - are poorly informed about campaign developments. In general, Americans show little awareness of campaign events and key aspects of the candidates' backgrounds: About three-in-ten (31%) can correctly identify Wesley Clark as the Democratic candidate who had served as an Army general and 26% know Richard Gephardt is the candidate who had served as House majority leader. People who say they regularly learn about the campaign from entertainment programs are among the least likely to correctly answer these questions. In contrast, those who learn about the campaign on the Internet are considerably more knowledgeable than the average, even when their higher level of education is taken into account.
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