ABSTRACT
The news media have been accused of oversimplifying multifaceted news topics, of covering political strategies and polling results while ignoring the intricacies of issues (Cappella & Jamieson, 1997; Fallows, 1997; Valentino, Buhr, & Beckmann, 2001), and of reporting social issues from within single, constraining perspectives (Domke, Shah, & Wackman, 1998; Fishman, 1980). The inability to translate the complexities of the social world to news audiences, and the probability that audiences are unlikely to read such coverage were it produced, threaten the notion of an informed public. It is proposed here that use of the Internet and adoption of theory from the field of education offer a partial solution to this problem.
