Media multitasking during political news consumption: A relationship with factual and subjective political knowledge

Growth of digital, social, and mobile media has enabled engagement with multiple media activities during news consumption in a more efficient and synchronous fashion than before. This study investigates whether media multitasking activities while consuming political news affects individuals' levels of subjective and factual political knowledge. Results from a Web survey of online panel members show that on the whole, pairwise and bundled forms of media multitasking are negatively related to factual political knowledge. Also, those who engage in media multitasking are more likely to report that they are politically knowledgeable but they do not know about politics as much as they think they do. Implications are discussed for media multitasking and an informed citizenry. We examine the relationship between media multitasking and political knowledge.Multitasking while consuming news is related to lower factual political knowledge.Multitasking while consuming news is related to greater knowledge miscalibration.Bundled multitasking has stronger effects on knowledge than pairwise multitasking.

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