Changing Minds or Changing Channels?: Partisan News in Age of Choice Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013.In era of partisan television news networks and ideologically-driven hosts, commentators, and analysts, it comes as no surprise that many blame the highly polarized nature of American politics on mainstream media. Yet, in Changing Minds or Changing Channels?: Partisan News in Age of Choice, Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson challenge this widely held perception. With so many viewing options today, Arceneaux and Johnson suggest that partisan news media actually have a very small effect on the general public because most people simply avoid the news and only a small self-selected group of individuals gravitates towards partisan news programs.This trend, which is described by Arceneaux and Johnson, is a relatively new phenomenon caused by the changing media landscape. In the years before widespread cable and Internet access, television news programs attracted large audiences simply because there were so few options. Today, however, ninety percent of American homes are connected to cable or satellite television, and the average person now has access to more than 130 channels. With so many non-news programs available, the audience for highly partisan news networks is relatively small, even among politically involved individuals. As Arceneaux and Johnson point out, while about 130 million Americans voted in both the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections, the four top-rated cable news shows draw just 7.5 million viewers on average day.To advance this premise, Arceneaux and Johnson present a new active audience theory. Based on the uses and gratifications approach of Elihu Katz, Jay G. Blunder, and Michael Gurevitch and the minimal media effects perspective of scholars including Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarsfeld, William McPhee, and Joseph Klapper, active audience theory suggests that the viewing public is not an inert mass, passively and unquestioningly soaking in the content to which they are exposed (3). Instead, Arceneaux and Johnson suggest that the viewing public is comprised of active participants, whose decisions, regarding what they view and how they interpret it, mitigate the potential effect of media content.To test their theory, the authors conducted a series of eleven experiments, which they present and explain throughout this book. After a general overview of the topic in the first chapter, a history of media effects research and the rise of partisan cable news in the second chapter, and a discussion about how television viewers actively engage with the programs they choose to watch in the third chapter, the authors dive into their findings. …