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Learning Versus Knowing

Effects of Misinformation in Televised Debates

Institut fuer Publizistik, University of Mainz, Germany

Carsten Reinemann

Institut fuer Publizistik, University of Mainz, Germany

Many studies have shown that voters do learn about political issues from televised debates. Because debaters may not be interested in educating voters but in gaining votes, this does not necessarily mean that debate viewers improve their knowledge (i.e., learning something that is correct). Instead, they may become misinformed by watching a debate. Taking the second debate in the 2002 German general election as an example, we first compare people’s knowledge about economic facts before and after the debate with the actual situation as represented by official statistics. In a second step, we trace back the change or stability of their assessments of the state of the economy to candidates’ statements on that issue during the debate by using continuous-response measurement (CRM) measurement. Our analysis shows substantial learning effects among debate viewers. However, most of them did not improve their knowledge. They were rather misled by candidates’ selective presentation of facts.

Key Words: televised debates • learning • misinformation • state of the economy

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