"In chapter 2, the book lays down its foundations with a review of a large body of experimental psychology research on how and why individuals can preserve their beliefs, sometimes in the face of all evidence, logic, and argument to the contrary. The second part of the chapter shows that millions of people do the same in the real world outside the laboratories, whatever the media say ... Chapter 3 considers political partisanship and party identification - that is, strong attachments to political ideas, values, and organizations. Experiments show that people are likely to engage in belief preservation where partisan opinions are concerned, and the same seems to be true of partisans in the outside world ... Chapter 4 broadens the scope of inquiry to examine how non-partisanship and non-party political beliefs and values can influence the ways the majoritiy of individuals receive and process news reports and draw conclusions from them ... The first eight chapters deal mainly with the micro, demand side of the equation - but there is also the macro, supply side of news media systems. Supply and demand are often analyzed separately, although understanding media effects requires examining the interaction between them ... Chapter 9 compares commercial and public service broadcasting, showing that they have different effects on political knowledge, trust, participation, and democratic support. Chapter 10 turns to the classic theory of news media pluralism as a cornerstone of modern democracy ... The research strategy of this book involves comparing and contrasting a large number of studies of media effects on political attitudes and behavior in order to compare and contrast the conclusions they reach. The book does not merely traingulate in order to reach reliabe conclusions, but it polyangulates, using many different studies written by sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, and economists who employ a variety of methods to investigate many possible media effects on politics. American and British research is used in the main, but single-country research on Russia, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Belgium is included, as are comparative studies of European Union member states." (Chapter 1, p.2-5)