The Knowledge Leveling Effect of Portal Sites

The new high-choice media environment has allowed entertainment-oriented people to avoid political news, resulting in a wider gap in political knowledge between entertainment- and news-oriented citizens. On the Internet, however, users tend to be concentrated into a handful of portal sites that offer a mixed information environment in which both news and entertainment are readily available. The simultaneous presentation of news and entertainment headlines on portal sites exposes entertainment-oriented people to the news, which may in turn narrow the knowledge gap between them and news-oriented people. To test this hypothesis, we examined the effects of exposure to major portal sites in Japan, where Yahoo! JAPAN attracts a large majority of Internet users. Two studies using self-reported exposure to portal sites (n = 838) and web browsing histories (n = 1,000) demonstrated that even entertainment-oriented people can acquire political knowledge, and thus portal sites can serve as knowledge levelers.