Results of the 1985 American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) survey--to determine public attitudes toward media credibility--are reported in this paper. Discussion is categorized according to the 12 issues explored: (1) the believability of media when news reports conflict; (2) geographic scope of topics; (3) reliability of reporting and…

Psychographic analysis--combining demographic and attitudinal characteristics into groups and looking at variations in those characteristics--is useful in newspaper research to expand theories of media publics. One effective segmentation strategy (used at Minnesota Opionion Research Incorporated--MORI) is to divide the population into four groups,…

Working from a knowledge gap hypothesis stating that as amounts of information in a community or society increase, segments of the population with more education and higher socioeconomic status acquire this information at a greater rate than do lower status groups, a study examined the contributions to neighborhood residents' knowledge of local…

Fifty-eight studies relating to the "knowledge gap" hypothesis (a theory that correlates public knowledge to educational level and mass media exposure) are examined in this report. In the opening sections, the theory is defined, and the early information diffusion studies and public opinion polls that led to its formulation in 1970 are…