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Doris A. Graber, Young Yun Kim, Why John Q. Voter Did Not Learn Much from the 1976 Presidential Debates, Communication Yearbook, Volume 2, Issue 1, December 1978, Pages 407–421, https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.1978.11923739
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Abstract
The results reported in this paper about political learning from the 1976 presidential debates are based on a year-long study of all aspects of political learning of a small panel of voters. Debate learning is put into general learning perspectives and distinguishes various levels of learning. Judged in the context of learning throughout the campaign year, new learning from the debates was quite modest, even when the standards for scoring learning are low and inadequate to support the goal of intelligent voting. The knowledge-deficient learned at lower rates, quantitatively and qualitatively, than the better informed. Several factors which are known to inhibit learning were present in the debate scenarios. These include redundancy of information with predebate news supply, excessive complexity of issues with inadequate time for analysis, sketchy postdebate commentary, and general dullness. The audience watched the spectacle only partially and with mixed attention and discounted much of it as mere “campaign rhetoric.”
