Both the news media and citizens have been blamed for citizens’ lack of political sophistication. Citizens’ information source choices can certainly contribute to suboptimal results of opinion formation when citizens’ media menus feature few, redundant, or poor-quality outlets. How strongly news consumers’ choices affect the quality of information they receive has rarely been investigated, however. The study uses a novel method investigating how content-as-sent translates into content-as-received that is applicable to high-choice information environments. It explores quality-as-sent and quality-as-received in a content analysis that is combined with survey data on news use. This study focuses on ‘selection quality’ measured in terms of scope and balance of subtopic units, information units, and protagonist statements sent/received. Regarding quality-as-sent , the scope of news proves to be lowest in TV news and substantially greater for online news and newspapers; imbalance of coverage varies only moderately between outlets. As for quality-as-received, the scope citizens received was only a small fraction of what the news outlets provided in combination or what the highest-quality news outlet provided, but was close to what one average news outlet provided. There was substantial stratification in the extent to which news coverage quality materializes at the recipient level. Scope-as-received grew mainly with using more news, relatively independent of which specific news outlets were used. Imbalance-as-received, however, was a function of the use of specific outlet types and specific outlets rather than the general extent of news use. Using additional news media improved the quality-as-received, invalidating the notion that different news outlets merely provide “more of the same.”

中文翻译：

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自我剥夺？德国新闻媒体的发送质量和接收质量

新闻媒体和公民都因公民缺乏政治技巧而受到指责。当公民的媒体菜单上的媒体菜单很少，多余或质量较差时，公民的信息来源选择无疑会导致舆论形成效果欠佳。但是，很少研究新闻消费者的选择对他们所接收信息质量的影响程度。该研究使用一种新颖的方法来研究适用于高选择信息环境的“已发送内容”如何转换为“已接收内容”。它在内容分析中结合了新闻使用的调查数据，探索了已发送质量和已接收质量。这项研究着重于“选择质量”，该质量是根据子主题单元，信息单元和主角陈述的范围和平衡来衡量的。关于已发送的质量，新闻的范围在电视新闻中最低，而在线新闻和报纸则更大。覆盖范围的不平衡仅在网点之间略有变化。至于所接受的质量，公民接受的范围只是新闻媒体提供的组合内容或最高质量的新闻媒体提供的内容的一小部分，但接近一个普通新闻媒体提供的内容。在新闻报道质量在接收者级别上实现的程度上，存在很大的分层。预期范围的扩大主要是因为使用了更多的新闻，而与使用哪个特定新闻媒体相对无关。然而，所收到的失衡是特定媒体类型和特定媒体使用的函数，而不是新闻使用的一般程度。