Participation in Conversations about the News

Abstract

The active participation of the public in conversations about the news is important. Through discussion people develop and validate their own thoughts and opinions on issues about which they obtain information by following the news. People differ in the extent to which they use mass media to learn about the news and in the goals they set out to achieve by following the news. According to media system dependency theory, people develop individual dependency relations with the media or media genres, such as the news. These dependency relations are based on the interplay between the information offered by the media and the goals of individuals. We used survey data (n = 176) to examine the relations between dependency relations with the news, participation in conversations, news exposure, cognitive responses and knowledge. Results show that dependency relations with the news, news exposure, and participation in conversations are clearly and positively related. The cognitive responses people have about an issue play a central role in the dependency–exposure–conversation model, which is presented to describe our theoretical point of view.

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