We address the implications of the movement towards entertainment-centred, marketdriven media by comparing what is reported and what the public knows in four countries with different media systems. The different systems are public service (Denmark and Finland), a 'dual' model (United Kingdom) and the market model (United States). The comparison shows that public service television devotes more attention to public affairs and international news, and fosters greater knowledge in these areas, than the market model. Public service television also gives greater prominence to news, encourages higher levels of news consumption, and contributes to a smaller within-nation knowledge gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged. But wider processes in society take precedence over the organisation of the media in determining how much people know about public life.In press: European Journal of Communication 1In most parts of the world, the news media are becoming more market-oriented and entertainment-centred.* This is the consequence of three trends that have gathered pace since the 1980s: the multiplication of privately owned television channels, the weakening of programme requirements on commercial broadcasters ('de-regulation'), and a contraction in the audience size and influence of public broadcasters.Our interest lies in addressing the consequences of the movement towards marketbased media for informed citizenship. The democratic process assumes that individual citizens have the capacity to hold elected officials accountable. In practice, political accountability requires a variety of institutional arrangements including free and frequent elections, the presence of strong political parties, and, of particular importance to this inquiry, a media system that delivers a sufficient supply of meaningful public affairs information to catch the eye of relatively inattentive citizens. Thus, we are interested in tracing the connections between the architecture of media systems, the delivery of news, and citizens' awareness of public affairs. In particular, we test the hypothesis that market-based systems, by delivering more soft than hard news, impede the exercise of informed citizenship. Media Systems in Cross-National PerspectiveThere is considerable cross-national variation in the movement towards the American model. We take advantage of this variation by focusing on four economically advanced liberal democracies that represent three distinct media systems: an unreconstructed public service model in which the programming principles of public service still largely dominate (exemplified by Finland and Denmark), a dual system that combines increasingly deregulated commercial media with strong public service 2 broadcasting organisations (Britain), and the exemplar market model of the United States.This sample enables us to investigate whether variations in media organisation affect the quality of citizenship by giving rise to different kinds of reporting and patterns of public knowledge.

A BSTRACT We propose a context-dependent approach to the study of political information. Combining a content analysis of broadcast news with a national survey measuring public awareness of various events, issues, and individuals in the newsAs Walter Lippmann (1922) pointed out in his classic account of public opinion, politics is inherently a mediated experience. Indeed, issues and events not covered by the media fail to enter into the political consciousness. Yet, despite the indispensable role of the news media as "windows on the world", most scholarship on political information has focused on individual-level explanations (Bennett, 2006;Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996;Luskin, 1987).Conventional theories of political knowledge have relied on individual attributes (such as educational attainment) as the principal causal variable across a broad spectrum of awareness ranging from textbook knowledge of civics to familiarity with current events and issues (see Schudson, 1998). Thus, the standard predictors of political knowledge -no matter how the concept is defined -have been political interest, media attentiveness, education and other equivalent indicators of political motivation (Price & Zaller, 1993 We propose an alternative, more context-dependent approach to the study of political information. More specifically, we suggest that the importance of individual-level motivational factors varies across contexts; they are less important in information-rich environments, but critical in information-deprived situations.2

The Finnish media devote more attention to hard news than the British media, yet Finns are less interested in politics than the British. The principal reason for this difference in news values is that Finnish TV is more subject to public service influence than British TV, and the Finnish press is more strongly influenced by a professional journalistic culture than its British counterpart. While a number of national differences contribute to different levels of public knowledge, the Finns are better informed about hard news topics partly because they are better briefed in these areas by their media.

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