To determine people's use of media during the 1984 presidential campaign, telephone interviews were conducted with 630 heads of households in Dane County, Wisconsin. It was hypothesized that persons with different political orientations would have significantly different media use and attention patterns. The data analysis proceeded in two stages. The first phase involved factor analyzing the various political media attention and interest questions into a set of summary variables that could be used subsequently in an interactive multiple regression model. The second phase involved designing a hierarchical multiple regression equation to help understand the relative contribution of each independent variable to the prediction of the dependent variable, political knowledge. The results show that a person cognitively engaged with the political system, as expressed in a definite political orientation, is likely to know more about politics and be better equipped to learn more readily from political media. The data also added evidence that attention is an important variable in the process of learning from the mass media, and that political identity in terms of partisan support helps in predicting political knowledge. (HOD)