News Portals as Great Levelers

We know from recent research that television news, for all its faults, acts as a great leveler of what people know. In other words, TV news helps those who know the least. This study out of Japan suggests that news portals can act in much the same way.

As the authors say in their conclusions:

The results suggest that even people with a strong preference for entertainment can acquire political knowledge by being exposed to news headlines in the topics sections of portal sites. Or, more optimistically, it may be that “[t]he average citizens want to review headlines to make sure they are at least aware of the basic events and issues everyone else is likely to know about” (Neuman,1986, p. 156).  

Call it The Death of Inadvertent Exposure.