The Push and Pull of Politics: How Media Literacy Students Sign Up For, Stumble Upon, and Seek Out News at Election Time

Introduction

Many Americans are awash in political news. During the scrum of a presidential election year, with millions of votes cast from January through November, information about polls, policies and politicians is easy to find on any media platform. Political content also finds audiences in a media environment where the news cycle is endless and a screen is often near.¹ News notifications come via e-mail and text message alerts. Campaign messages flood the airwaves and Internet. People see political news as they pass by television sets and laptops. They stumble upon headlines and user-generated content as they scroll through Twitter and check their e-mail and stock prices on Yahoo!

The ability to access messages² and media technologies³ is a central tenet of many definitions of digital and media literacy. Surveys have shown the increasing presence of personal computers,⁴ smartphones,⁵ and tablets⁶ in Americans’ lives—particularly among young people⁷—and the popularity of using multiple devices and platforms to get news.⁸ Scholars have studied how people filter and process political news and tame the information tide.⁹ Yet few contemporary studies have investigated how people use digital media technologies and traditional media platforms to track a major breaking news event, such as a national election, and the ways in which audiences come across and actively seek out news.

Following in the tradition of active audience research that investigates how people interact with media in their natural setting,¹⁰ this exploratory study examined how United States students in a media literacy course at a major mid-Atlantic university accessed political news during the height of the 2012 primary and general election season. Spring semester students tracked their media use over a three-day period before, on, and after Super Tuesday during the primary season, when the greatest number of states hold elections for delegates to the national conventions. Fall semester students repeated the study around Election Day. Media diaries provided first-person accounts of how students engaged with political news—nuanced data that could not have been retrieved via survey mechanisms. Diary entries were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively to examine the extent to which students (1) relied upon “push” notification systems, (2) found political news incidentally, and (3) actively sought out—or “pulled”—news.

Information Push and Pull

Information push and pull describe the manner by which people access content in the digital age. Information push refers to information sent by content providers based upon users’ indicated preferences or in anticipation of their needs; information pull refers to information sought out by users.¹¹ News can be pushed at users involuntarily via word-of-mouth—reports or recommendations from people in their personal networks—or due to user inactivity or passivity toward opt-out requirements. Users can voluntarily request news to be pushed at them via e-mail/text message alerts from news organizations and aggregation sites. News alerts rely upon users’ indicated preferences to push content deemed of interest of them.¹² The defining characteristic of information push is that a message designed to appeal to specific users finds them through a communication channel.

Information pull requires a more active effort to seek out information—whether a specific story, a general topic, or a broad news dive. As Eszter Hargittai wrote,

A diversity of sources and a cacophony of video, audio, and textual streams online require audience members to “pull” what they want, rather than simply sit back and allow the media professionals to decide what is important and “push” the headlines out to passive audience recipients. Pulling involves occasional errors, and takes effort and some evolved skill at manipulating the digital environment.¹³

Few studies have examined college students’ digital media literacy from the information push and pull perspective. A previous survey of news consumption habits found that undergraduates at a U.S. public university preferred receiving news from other people or through news alerts to actively searching for news.¹⁴ Our study goes beyond self-reported survey data and categorizes student diary entries as information push or pull.

Ambient News

The increasing availability of digital communication technologies and the constant flow of content have “made news more accessible to audiences to the point where it is omnipresent or ambient.”¹⁵ Scholars refer to this new phenomenon as ambient news. “Between push and pull is an intermediate form of interaction characterized by recommendation engines, collaborative filtering, short messages on current events, and e-mail attachments from the mainstream media.”¹⁶ In the “always-on media environment,”¹⁷ users may “receive information in the periphery of their awareness”¹⁸ or be passively aware¹⁹ as they happen upon news they did not set out to find.²⁰ Several studies have found that Americans more often come across news while they are doing other things than go online specifically to get news.²¹

Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have become awareness systems,²² a term often used in computer science literature in reference to technologies that allow people to maintain peripheral awareness of other users’ activities²³ and to “maintain a mental model of news and events around them”²⁴ with little effort. On these sites, news often “washes over” users.²⁵ Accessing news through social media “does not require focused effort or even contemporaneous engagement by actors who, in this way, can engage fully in other primary activities.”²⁶ Most Facebook users, for instance, get news when on the site for other reasons and view it as a supplemental news source.²⁷ Media literacy scholars have not investigated the new phenomenon of ambient news in depth.

This study contributes to the field of digital and media literacy by examining the ways in which students enact a specific type of civic engagement—using digital media technologies and traditional platforms to access and share political news. Specifically, this study addresses the following questions:

RQ1: To what extent do students rely upon information push and pull to track political news in a presidential election year?

RQ2: How do students come across political news in an ambient news environment?

Method

Selection of Participants and Political Events

Undergraduate students in a two-hundred-seat general education media literacy course participated in this study. At the time, the co-authors of this article were the professor and teaching assistants in the course. We selected this convenience sample of students because of its diversity—students represent a range of majors and years in school. Students had yet to encounter the course unit on media and politics at the time of their participation in this study.

We selected Super Tuesday and Election Day to track students’ engagement with political news because both political events attract major media attention for months and even years beforehand. Thus, we expected that if there were ever times when students would demonstrate interest in national electoral politics, then it would be at those moments in the US presidential cycle. Super Tuesday 2012 took place on March 6 with 419 delegates to the Republican convention in play in ten states. Given that Democratic primaries were uncontested, we did not expect spring semester students to demonstrate the same level of interest in political news that young voters showed four years earlier with highly contested primaries for candidates in both parties. We expected fall semester students to show greater interest in election news around Election Day than their cohorts had around Super Tuesday.²⁸ Despite the disparities in the spring and fall political events and in students’ interest in them,²⁹ we believe that this study sheds significant light on how students both actively and passively acquire political information over the course of a presidential election season.

Procedure

With institutional review board (IRB) approval, students completed this assignment for course credit but could opt out of having their responses used in the study. In online diary entries, students commented on how they received political news, what the general content of the news was, and with whom they shared the information. We defined news broadly in the study directions as “not just what happens in the election/campaign but also issues such as health care, the economy, tax policy, etc.” Students were informed that they should not alter their typical routine for the study.

Students wrote time-stamped diary entries on the online course site summarizing their engagement with political news over the previous three hours—or, in the case of the Tuesday and Wednesday morning posts, the past fifteen hours (including overnight). In all, students wrote ten entries: four on the Monday before Super Tuesday or Election Day; four on Super Tuesday or Election Day; and two on Wednesday, the day following the respective elections.

Data Analysis

Two researchers reviewed the diary entries and created a coding scheme (see Appendix 1) that allowed tracking of when students chose to have news sent to them via email/text notifications (labeled “elected information push”) or when news was pushed to them by people in their personal networks through word-of-mouth communication (labeled “involuntary information push”). When students noted in their media diaries that they checked a news website or app, watched or listed to a news network, or engaged someone in a conversation about political news, their diary comments were coded as “information pull.” In all cases when students engaged with political news, we noted the medium used—text-based (online or print), television, radio, word-of-mouth, or medium unclear.

Any instance in which students came across news while browsing online for other information, passed a screen showing political news, overheard a political conversation, etc., their encounters were coded as “ambient news.” These incidental news encounters are outside the boundaries of this study’s definition of information push because users happen upon information rather than having it pushed at them. Nor are they examples of information pull, which requires intent to seek out news. Included in this category were all social media interactions. On sites such as Facebook and Twitter, users both elect to follow others (a hallmark of information push) and seek out information (a hallmark of information pull), making these encounters somewhere “between information push and pull.”³⁰ We agree with Alfred Hermida’s classification of social media as ambient news³¹ because of the constant flow of content and the prevalence of incidental news encounters.

We coded media diary responses quantitatively in the form of a content analysis. Time slots were listed in sequential order, from Monday 9:00 a.m.–noon (the first required student diary entry, M1) to Wednesday noon–3:00 p.m. (the final required entry, W2) so that we could detect patterns about how students’ political news engagement fluctuated over the course of the three-day study. All forms of engagement were represented by a corresponding number on the code sheet. During each time slot, multiple forms of engagement with political news (watching television and checking a news app, for instance) were recorded when applicable, but multiple mentions of the same engagement (checking a news app several times in short order) were only coded once. Thus, results do not show the number of times students engaged with political news but rather the ways in which they engaged, when the interactions occurred, and the number of students who noted each type of interaction for each three-hour time block.

Two researchers coded ten percent of all online diary entries, discussed results, and resolved most discrepancies—emerging with a Krippendorff’s Alpha coefficient of 0.919 (α≥0.8), indicating high intercoder reliability).³² The researchers then coded the remainder of the diary entries.

Results

A total of 277 students (n = 127 spring; n = 150 fall) agreed to have their media diaries reported in the study. More participants self-identified as Democrats than Republicans (32% to 19% spring; 50% to 14% fall), with the remainder indicating another political party or no affiliation. The vast majority did not major in journalism or communication (85% spring; 76% fall).

As expected, spring students around Super Tuesday had far fewer interactions with political news than did fall students around the general election. In the spring, 42.3% of all coded entries indicated no interaction with political news, compared with 15.2% in the fall. We removed these “0” cases from our data analysis so that we could calculate the percentage of all news interactions that represented information push, pull, and ambient news.

Table 1: Super Tuesday: Spring Data
Number of students (top) and percentage of coded comments (bottom)

Table 2: General Election: Fall Data
Number of students (top) and percentage of coded comments (bottom)

RQ1 asked, To what extent do students rely upon information push and pull to track political news during a presidential election year?

Students far more commonly relied on information pull (57.4% spring; 46.1% fall) than push (10.1% spring; 12.3% fall) to find political news. The vast majority of students (86.7% spring; 98% fall) pulled information at least once during the study, with text-based news (on computers, cell phones, and rarely in print) the most commonly sought out (representing 36.1% of fall information pull interactions). In the spring, the majority of information pull interactions (56.4%) were text-based news searches. There was no spike in students seeking out political discussions, watching television, or searching for text-based news during primetime on Super Tuesday. Strikingly, just 7.1% of spring students watched election returns from 6:00–9:00 p.m. More than one-third (37%) paid no attention to politics during that time slot, compared with just 8% of fall students.

Chart 1: Super Tuesday: Spring Data

Number of Students Who Interacted with Politics By Time Block

Fall students consistently reported searching their devices for the latest political news across all time blocks, with a predictable spike on Tuesday night (when 27.3% of all students pulled text-based news) as election results began to be announced. Even before Election Day voting began, students were drawn by the rush of tracking election live blogs and interacting with electoral maps. A number of fall students prepared for Election Night with deep dives into political news: “I decided to read some news sites before I began to study for my Tuesday exam. Mostly, I took note [of] the referendums that were being voted on in Maryland and researched what all of those were about.”³³ Students described seeking out political news in ways that were atypical for them. “I watched the five o’clock news, which heavily covered the final campaign push. This is not something I normally do, but I wanted to see what the candidates were doing during their last day of campaigning.”

Chart 2: General Election: Fall Data

Number of Students Who Interacted with Politics By Time Block

One-quarter of all information pull news interactions in the fall were through television. While students sought out text-based news at all hours, their use of television was minimal until Tuesday prime time (6:00–9:00 p.m.), when nearly half (46%) of all students sought out televised election coverage. One-fifth of all fall students and nearly half (43.5%) of those who watched television during this time slot tracked political news only by watching television: “I was at a restaurant watching the election unfold. I had my eyes glued on the television, and I watched every election update as it occurred.”

One-third of all information pull news interactions in the fall were through word-of-mouth. Students who were not with friends or family discussing election results at formal or makeshift campus watch parties were texting or chatting online with people in their personal networks about political news while concurrently watching television or searching for news online. Word-of-mouth conversations, like television viewership and text-based news searches, were most prevalent from 6:00–9:00 p.m. Tuesday and then dropped off substantially in the late evening and overnight, even though the news media did not call the election for President Obama until after 11:00 p.m.

Across all time blocks, elected information push was rare. Only 5% of coded interactions with political news in the spring and 2% in the fall involved students receiving an e-mail or text news alert from a news outlet or other organization. Only 15.7% of spring students and 14.7% of fall students ever reported receiving a push notification about politics. Those who did commonly mentioned checking news notifications first thing in the morning as a way of quickly catching up on what they missed overnight. News notifications served as first-alert systems on election nights for the few students who referenced relying on them.

Involuntary information push represented 5.1% of all spring political news interactions in and 10.3% of fall interactions. The spike in one-way word-of-mouth communication during the morning and early afternoon of Election Day was largely a product of parents, friends, coaches, and professors e-mailing, calling, and making class announcements reminding study participants to vote.

RQ2 asked, How do students come across political news in an ambient news environment?

Ambient news represented 32.5% of spring interactions and 41.6% of fall interactions, making them far more commonplace than cases of information push but not as commonplace as information pull. Around Super Tuesday, students not only reported having few conversations about politics but also hearing few as they moved through campus. Ambient text-based and televised interactions were less commonplace than cases of text-based and televised information pull in the spring.

Chart 3: Percentage of Spring and Fall Students Who Engaged With Politics Through
Information Pull, Information Push and Ambient News

Around Election Day, text-based information pull interactions with politics (n = 294) were roughly five times more common than ambient text-based interactions (n = 57), and television pull interactions (n = 209) were more than twice as common as ambient television interactions (n = 98). This trend was even more pronounced during Tuesday primetime, when far more students (n = 41) sought out text-based news than happened upon it (n = 3) and sought out televised news (n = 69) than happened upon it (n = 9). The only type of ambient news that fall students commonly reported was overhearing political discussions on campus: “Everywhere I’d go I would hear people discussing different propositions and whether or not they voted.”

Consuming political news through social media was more popular in fall than spring. Around Super Tuesday, students commonly referenced the lack of buzz about the election and other political issues: “I had only been able to check my Facebook and Twitter on my phone, and there was absolutely no mention of the primaries.” There was never a springtime slot when more than 15% of students reported accessing political news on social media. In the fall, however, social media was, in students’ own words, “blowing up” with political posts about the general election. “Facebook had exploded; many people had statuses telling everyone to vote, some people put up videos (serious and satirical), and Twitter was filled with news.” There was never a fall time slot when fewer than 18% of students reported accessing political news on social media. In all but three time slots (one being Tuesday 6:00–9:00 p.m., when television viewership and text-based searches crested and social media use actually decreased), social media was the most common way for fall students track political news.

Fall students closely monitored links to news articles and commentary posted by their friends, in some cases in lieu of following other sources of news: “Looking at my news feed on Facebook and Twitter, it was interesting to see how much information and detail I could receive by the work of my friends alone. If I did not watch the counting of votes on television, I still would have been able to know exactly everything that happened based on the posts of my friends on Facebook and Twitter.”

While using social media as the lone source of political news was commonplace before and immediately after the fall election, only three students during Tuesday primetime relied only on social media. Spikes in social media use for election news came on Tuesday and to a greater extent on Wednesday morning after the election (when 36% of students found news on social media), as students caught up on what they had missed overnight. While seeing political news on social media sites prompted some students to take deep dives on news stories, it prompted a backlash among others: “I woke up and immediately went on Facebook. It seemed as though every single person has become a political expert overnight and feels the need to post about their feelings.”

Discussion

This study shows that at a time of information abundance, when technology and social connectedness make it easier than ever to adopt a news-will-find-me mindset, students tracking a major political news event still seek out news as it is breaking. The increasing popularity of news apps and the ubiquity of cell phones is one explanation for the prevalence of students “pulling” news. Around Election Day, however, a significant number of students went beyond quick news searches on their smartphones in between classes. Across all time blocks, they investigated claims made on social media, researched political issues or candidates that came up in conversation, and played with electoral college maps.

The main storyline emerging from Super Tuesday was that students took little interest in an election in which few had a voting or a partisan interest. The vast majority of participants did not self-identify as Republicans. They commonly referenced feeling disinterested in news about the primaries because they did not see any personal relevance. The predominance of information pull was more a product of the lack of word-of-mouth conversations or buzz on students’ social media feeds than a sign of widespread active engagement. Put another way, Super Tuesday news did not come to—or find—students because people in their personal networks generally did not push news toward them or create an ambient news environment filled with election chatter. The few students who were motivated enough to follow Super Tuesday news found it on their own.

The ways in which fall students tracked political news in the thirty-plus hours before polls closed and the day after the election—tracking live blogs, scrolling through news feeds, texting with friends—is indicative of the modern media landscape. Students used social media and, to a much lesser extent, push notifications from news outlets to monitor trending stories and track commentary, particularly first thing in the morning as a daily tip sheet. When news found students, it was more commonly through social channels (Facebook, Twitter, word-of-mouth communication) than through official channels (news blasts from media outlets). Fall students sought out news of interest and relied on their social networks to remain peripherally aware of most political news. With news already surrounding them and with some complaining of information overload during the peak hours of general election coverage, students showed little interest in yet another way of receiving news: signing up for push notifications (i.e., opting in).

The ways in which fall students followed political news in the hours immediately after polls closed was strikingly traditional—gathering in front of a television to track election results. In the fall, 46% of students watched television in Tuesday primetime and 43.5% of these viewers only watched television to get news during this time slot. These findings show that Election Night is one of few national events in which appointment viewing is widespread and viewers give their full attention to one screen. Even with the explosion of digital media technologies, television still plays a central role in connecting audiences during a major political event. Results speak not only to the primacy of television but also to the limitations of social media, the use of which slightly decreased as television viewership rose. While users can monitor a flood of political news and commentary with little effort on social media, they cannot easily witness a live event of significant importance. Social media regained its primacy in the wee hours of Tuesday and early Wednesday, as students turned to (and often were turned off by) analysis from those in their social networks.

Limitations and Future Research

Given this study’s use of convenience samples, there are limits to the generalizability of results. For instance, students electing to take a media literacy course that examines media coverage may be more voracious news consumers than their peers. This sample also represents a relatively liberal campus population. It would be worthwhile to replicate this study in a more neutral or conservative population in the future and compare the findings.

Replication of this study in 2016 would allow researchers to measure the consistency of students’ interaction with political news when both parties hold Super Tuesday primaries. Given the nature of the semester-long media literacy course, researchers could not use the same sample of students in both spring and fall semesters. However, there is minimum sequence effect, since students from both samples should have a similar generalized media literacy level when they entered the class and interacted with each political event. To best avoid sequence effect, future studies should draw samples from multiple student populations in different election states, collect data simultaneously, and compare the results.

Conclusion

This study has clear implications for media educators and practitioners seeking to understand how and when students demonstrate political engagement by consuming and sharing news in a presidential election year. The disparity between spring and fall students’ interactions with political news suggests a strong connection between a news event’s personal relevance and engagement. Educators can use this as a teachable moment to discuss growing partisanship and the importance of following news about politicians and political parties with which students are not affiliated. Media practitioners may benefit from the findings that students pull content from a variety of streams and will seek out news that provides fodder for social interactions or encourages interactivity. While news organizations have heavily promoted text and e-mail news alerts, this study shows that their reach is limited and that efforts to reach young people through social media may prove more effective.

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Appendix 1: Coding Sheet

0=No political interaction
1=E-mail or text news alert (elected information push)
2=Ambient text-based news interaction
3=One-way word-of-mouth communication (involuntary information push or ambient news)
4=Ambient television news
5=Ambient radio news
6=Ambient source unknown
7=Social media information retrieval (ambient news)
8=Social media public commenting
9=Social media sharing through e-mail
10=Text-based information pull
11=Word-of-mouth information pull
12=Television information pull
13=Radio informaiton pull
14=Information pull source unclear

M1=Monday 9 a.m.-noon
M2=Monday noon-3 p.m.
M3=Monday 3-6 p.m.
M4=Monday 6-9 p.m.
T1=Monday 9 p.m.-Tuesday noon
T2=Tuesday noon-3 p.m.
T3=Tuesday 3-6 p.m.
T4=Tuesday 6-9 p.m.
W1=Tuesday 9 p.m.-Wednesday noon
W2=Wednesday noon-3 p.m.