Media usage and content influence political issue positions, citizens' views of the political agenda, and even political cynicism, and most time-series studies of election-economic cycles have assumed that the media are essential transmitters of the information on which economic voting is based. This study of the way in which voters form judgments of the incumbent administration's economic policy performance argues that the ability to employ the mass media to evaluate policy is not uniform across the electorate. Those who can derive a coherent image of collective conditions from the media will weigh this information heavily in their judgments; others will emphasize personal financial conditions, as will those who suffer severe personal economic reversals. Stratifying a national sample by media usage and then analyzing the sources of economic policy ratings shows the effect of media usage on the opinion formation process which precedes economic voting.
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