ABSTRACT
Media play a fundamental role in modern democracies (Habermas, 1996; Thompson, 1995) by relaying information to individuals (Downs, 1957; Druckman, 2005; Graber, 2006), setting an agenda of common concerns for the citizenry (McCombs and Shaw, 1972), acting as watchdogs to powerful actors in the public and private sectors (Waisbord, 2000), and providing an arena for public deliberation (Page, 1996). The production and consumption of news are enmeshed in everyday life, and the importance of media as information providers, as well as the impact of news content on the audiences it reaches, has long attracted the attention of scholars and cultural commentators. One of the longstanding debates among both scholars and practitioners is whether there is a gap between the kinds of stories that the media present as the most important of the day and those that members of the public want to learn the most about (Dean, Pertilla and Belt, 2007; Gans, 2004; Mindich, 2005; Shoemaker and Cohen, 2006; Singer, 2011; Zaller, 1999).
