A study sought answers for seven questions about the public's orientation toward television news. Television interviews were conducted with 823 adult residents of Dane County, Wisconsin, during October 1983 by trained graduate students and advanced undergraduates as part of a communications research methods course. Results showed that the public does not know very much about the structure and operation of television and newspaper news. Many people seem to have some information about how television works but few people have strong, well-organized patterns of knowledge of news operations. Answers to the question of what attitudes the public held about television and newspaper news revealed a mixture of strong supporters and strong detractors. Higher levels of knowledge were not associated with more favorable attitudes toward television news, and the varying levels of knowledge and attitude did not seem to be related to the time spent with the media and their news content. Finally, media knowledge and attitudes only slightly affected perceptions of helpfulness of television news and did not affect newspaper knowledge at all. Much more explication and research need to be done in developing the concepts of media news knowledge and attitudes. (DF)