ABSTRACT
Walter Lippman Autobiographically speaking, the above quote certainly informs my own media consumption patterns. I watch very little television news, except when reports in another medium have alerted me to some possibly interesting visual dimension to a news event, in which case I may decide to watch it on television, specifically to see what the event looks like. The advantages of print seem obvious to me, so far as news goes. I can choose a newspaper designed to address my interests, in a way that I cannot on television. I can then use the printed medium more efficiently, imposing my own schedule and sequence of selections on it, starting with the back or middle pages, if I choose, scanning or skipping through the bits I am bored by, or going directly to what interests me (cf. Hagen 1992 for similar findings among middle-class viewers in Norway). With a newspaper I do not have to sit through the imposed chronology of television time (or, the postmodern equivalent, have to scroll through the interminable pages of junk on my computer screen before I finally get what I am after).
