Markus Prior

Who they are

Prior is a political scientist whose work is about how the media environment sorts people. At the time of his 2005 paper in the American Journal of Political Science he was an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. A Princeton news item of November 2007 says he joined the university in 2002 and describes his book as an expanded version of a dissertation that won the American Political Science Association's E. E. Schattschneider Award for the best dissertation in American government. His own Princeton page hosts the paper. This page does not state his current post.

The paper begins from a puzzle. Cable television and the internet had put far more political information in front of Americans, yet political knowledge and turnout had not changed noticeably. His explanation is selection. Greater media choice lets people find the content they prefer. People who like news use it to become more knowledgeable and more likely to vote, and people who prefer entertainment drift away from news and become less informed and less likely to vote. He built a measure of media content preference, included it in a representative survey of 2,358 U.S. residents, and found that preference predicts knowledge and turnout more strongly as choice increases.

The book that followed, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections (Cambridge University Press), extends the account. According to the Princeton news item, almost half of Americans watched a network newscast on a typical weeknight in the broadcast era, against under 10 per cent at the time of writing, and about 20 per cent of the survey sample preferred news to other genres. The item also reports that news junkies and entertainment fans were similar in education, age, gender and income, with news junkies much more partisan, and that Prior argues polarisation comes mainly from changes in who votes, as moderate, indifferent entertainment fans stop voting.

His result matters for Postman's claim because it moves the explanation. Postman blamed what television does to the news. Prior's survey finds that the people most likely to be less informed are those who prefer entertainment and, given alternatives, leave the news. The finding is consistent with the news having softened, and it does not need the form of television to explain who ends up uninformed.

Key papers

Prior, M. (2005). "News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout." American Journal of Political Science, 49(3), 577-592. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00143.x. The survey study of 2,358 U.S. residents.

Prior, M. (2007). Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge University Press. An expanded version of his award-winning dissertation, known here through a Princeton news item.

No other work of his is used on this site.

Key ideas

Media choice sorts audiences. More choice lets people find what they prefer, so gaps open between the news-minded and the entertainment-minded. See Media Choice and Knowledge Gaps.

The average hides two movements. Flat knowledge and turnout can hide news-oriented people gaining and entertainment-oriented people falling away.

Incidental exposure fell. Remote controls and multichannel options made it easy to avoid news that earlier audiences met by default.

Selection can drive polarisation. In the book's account, polarisation arises mainly from changes in who votes.

How the article uses him

The article Was Amusing Ourselves to Death Right uses the 2005 paper for one point: the mechanism is departure rather than format. It does not use the book's polarisation argument. The paper was read at abstract level, and the book through a university news item, so the claims here are the ones those sources state.

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