Knowledge Gap Hypothesis - Competing Hypotheses

Competing Hypotheses

There are now three existing competing hypotheses: 1) Media Malaise hypothesis (that predicts a general negative effect), 2) the Virtuous Circle hypothesis (that predicts a general positive effect), and 3) the Differential Effect hypothesis (that predicts a positive effect from newspapers, and a null or negative effect from television)” (Fraile, 2011). Three types of media outlets have been used to examine the media effects on knowledge gap: 1) Television – knowledge gap between lower and higher education groups are greater among light television users compared to heavy television users (Eveland, 2000), 2) Newspaper - the exposure to newspaper can potentially reinforces the knowledge gap in politics for different SES groups since reading newspaper requires literacy ability to effectively understand the information (Jerit et al., 2006), while other studies suggest that exposure to newspaper actually slightly decreases the knowledge gap rather than increasing it (Eveland, 2000), and 3) Internet - internet exposure increases public’s general knowledge in health issues (Shim, 2008).