Data from six nations are used to explore the failure of television news to predict political knowledge. The first hypothesis posits that how a person approaches a medium explains learning from that source. The second hypothesis posits that television news attracts an audience of lower cognitive ability, thus suppressing a relationship between news and knowledge. International news is considered a `low salience' topic most likely to lead to learning from television. Analysis shows that in general neither hypothesis is particularly good at explaining a lack of relationship between television news and political knowledge, although the hypotheses are supported in some nations.
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