I seek, therefore I know? The impact of active news seeking and incidental news exposure on news knowledge

• Main Authors: Monteiro, Kenan Joseph, Loy, Guan Peng, Lua, Ker Hian
• Other Authors: Edson C. Tandoc Jr.
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Social sciences::Communication::Communication theories and models
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/165297
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the advent of the internet, the news media landscape has changed drastically. As learning from news is fundamental to a functional democracy, we need to consider how online media has changed news consumption and learning from it. Through an online survey in Singapore (n=734), this paper revisits the cognitive mediation model and proposes to advance it in two ways: accounting for two types of online news exposure, i.e., active news seeking (ANS) and incidental news exposure (INE), and measuring three knowledge outcomes: factual knowledge, perceived knowledge, and overestimation. Serial mediation analysis showed that ANS and news attention mediate the impact of surveillance gratification on factual knowledge. In terms of perceived knowledge and overestimation of knowledge, the impact of surveillance gratification is fully mediated in two pathways: by ANS, attention and elaboration, as well as by INE and elaboration surveillance gratification, ANS, attention and elaboration, as well as INE and elaboration This paper calls to attention the influence that news exposure types have on the acquisition of knowledge from news, and highlights how it contributes to individuals overestimating how much they actually know.