Looking at media audiences and their preferences gives us one part of a larger puzzle about why politicians expend such effort in reaching media audiences: why do they believe these efforts can make a difference to election results? To get to the heart of this, in this chapter I address four themes around political learning, attitude formation, voting behaviour and media effects. I focus on four main questions: (1) How much do Australians know about politics? (2) Are some media better than others at informing people? (3) Do audiences choose media outlets that accord with their partisan views? – and, finally, putting all of this evidence together – (4) What impact can media content really have during an election?

All of these individual questions about political learning, political attitude formation and media effects have spawned a vast literature and many different theories both in Australia and beyond. This is because, in the study of audiences, untangling causes, effects, correlations and associations is notoriously difficult. To take an example, if someone who reads the Age newspaper is more likely to vote Labor, is this because they have been influenced by its ‘left-wing’ content (see Chapter 11 for allegations of this nature), or is it because they were already a Labor supporter and selected the Age in the first place because its content seemed to fit well with their pre-existing views?