This study examines how news frames in campaign coverage affect individuals' interpretation of campaigns. Framing effects are conceptualized in terms of the process by which textual features in news stories set limits on knowledge use in the construction of a discourse model-a mental model constructed through the interaction between news frames and the interpreter's social knowledge.Examining message structures in campaign news stories led to identifying two major frames in campaign coverage: strategy and issue. Narrative data collected from two field experiments were analyzed. The findings suggest that both strategy-framed and issue-framed print news stories are effective in influencing campaign interpretation.

Public service broadcasters (PSBs) are a central part of national news media landscapes, and are often regarded as specialists in the provision of hard news. But does exposure to public versus commercial news influence citizens’ knowledge of current affairs? This question is investigated in this article using cross-national surveys capturing knowledge of current affairs and media consumption. Propensity score analyses test for effects of PSBs on knowledge, and examine whether PSBs vary in this regard. Results indicate that compared to commercial news, PSBs have a positive influence on knowledge of hard news, though not all PSBs are equally effective in this way. Cross-national differences are related to factors such asde jureindependence, proportion of public financing and audience share.

This study tests the associations between news media use and perceived political polarization, conceptualized as citizens' beliefs about partisan divides among major political parties. Relying on representative surveys in Canada, Colombia, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we test whether perceived polarization is related to the use of television news, newspaper, radio news, and online news media. Data show that online news consumption is systematically and consistently related to perceived polarization, but not to attitude polarization, understood as individual attitude extremity. In contrast, the relationships between traditional media use and perceived and attitude polarization is mostly country dependent. An explanation of these findings based on exemplification is proposed and tested in an experimental design.