Selling the news: TV news exposure and political attitudes in the Netherlands.

Does TV viewing affect political attitudes and activism? Most research that addresses this question has been conducted in the setting of a media system - the United States - in which commercial broadcasting has been dominant for a long time. Findings from this research have often pointed to negative relationships between TV viewing and political attitudes and activism. In media systems with a better balance between public and commercial broadcasting, these relationships are specified by the type of channel people tend to view. Exposure to commercial channels would be negatively associated with political attitudes, in contrast with exposure to public channels (Holtz-Bacha and Norris 2001; Hooghe 2002; Aarts and Semetko 2003).In this paper, we present an analysis of survey panel data of television exposure and political attitudes with a four-year interval (1998-2002) from the Netherlands. We show that exposure to television programs is structured according to a clear public-commercial divide. This structure of television exposure is quite stable over the time period studied. Focusing on the exposure to TV news programs in particular, we find that the percentage of intensive viewers of both public and commercial news almost doubled over the four year period. Respondents who used to focus more or less exclusively on public TV news programs, now tend to watch commercial TV news as well. Finally, we show that the type of news audience group people belong to (no intensive news viewer at all; intensive viewer of public news; intensive viewer of commercial news; intensive viewer of both public and commercial news) is related to indicators of political communication and political attitudes such as interest, internal efficacy, cynicism and trust. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]