Revisiting the Civic Duty to Keep Informed in the New Media Environment

The present study revisits the relationship between the civic duty to keep informed and news media use in the new media environment, then discovers that the civic duty to keep informed functions as an intervening variable between education and news media use. Of particular theoretical interest is that the civic duty to keep informed was found to be a consequence of education and a determinant of use of new news media, specifically cable news and national news on the Internet, news media that did not exist when the civic duty to keep informed was first measured using a Guttman scale more than twenty years ago. The civic duty to keep informed was also found to have the same strong monotonic relationship to traditional sources of news, newspapers, and network television, as was found in numerous settings more than twenty years ago. Moreover, one new relationship emerged here that was not found in earlier years, a clear relationship between a civic duty to keep informed and use of local TV news. The demographic patterns found in the new media environment among citizens in this southwestern metropolitan area—strong monotonic, or near monotonic, links between the civic duty to keep informed and education, income, and age—replicate the patterns found in earlier years. For education and income, the patterns are very similar. For age, the pattern is even stronger than in previous years.