Students surveyed by I-ELECT also gave a lot of weight to the news. The influence of media was the third strongest factor in forming their political opinions, after family and where they grew up.

“What people know about politics, to a great extent, is what they get from the news media,” said former Gov. Jim Edgar, now an analyst at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois. “Not many of them go to Springfield, not many go to Washington, not many have dealt with an elected official.”

Television was the highest rated media according to students surveyed. More than 17 percent of students said they used it “very often.”

Edgar said that’s not surprising.

“A lot of folks who don’t give a lot of time thinking about politics, they’ll get their news just from television; they aren’t going to study The New York Times,” he said.

Students ranked newspapers second. Internet news sites came in third. Talk radio and Internet blogs both were least used, according to the survey. More than 35 percent of students said the two media were “not at all” used.

But that means students are getting their new from the same place -- television-- where they also see a lot of advertising. And, in this election, it’s a lot of negative advertising.

Some experts say this election cycle has seen an increase in “attack ads” from both presidential candidates, as well as tax-exempt groups, commonly called 527s, which can raise money to influence federal campaigns.

As of Oct. 1, President George W. Bush’s campaign had spent about $222 million during his campaign. Roughly 56 percent of that went to television advertising, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Sen. John Kerry’s campaign had spent $198 million, 43 percent of it on TV ads.

Additionally, 527 groups – such as Texans for Truth or Swift Boat Veterans for Truth – had spent more than $200 million as of Sept. 20, according to the Federal Elections Commission.

“Since they’re not directly tied to the candidates, they feel freer to make charges against a candidate and, therefore, they get less scrutiny as well because they’re not official, they’re not the candidates’ ads, they’re not the candidate saying at the beginning or end, ‘I approve this message,’” said Mitchell McKinney, a professor at the University of Missouri and staff member of Uvote2004, a nonprofit group of students and professors trying to engage youth in politics.

Though experts historically believed negative ads turned off voters, some experts today are saying that they actually pique interest enough to pull more people in.

“The most recent studies are in agreement with one another that negative ads do not have a demobilizing effect but actually have a stimulus effect,” said Scott Althaus, an associate professor of speech communication and political science at the University of Illinois. “More negative advertising and negative campaigning increases turnout rather than decreases it.”

That’s because television advertising works on “inattentive voters,” said Bruce Williams, director of the Institute of Communications Research at the university. “You’re not paying much attention and, suddenly, you’re watching a football game or a soap opera and you see a campaign ad.”

Still, the message can matter, said Jim Nowlan, an analyst at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs. If a negative ad focuses on issues, it usually has a positive effect, he said. But very personal, mudslinging ads tend to push voters away.

The attacks in an ad also can confuse the issues or take the focus away from more practical debates about policy, said John Tedesco, director of graduate studies at Virginia Tech’s Department of Communications.

An I-ELECT reporter showed attack ads that have been airing in battleground states such as Missouri and Pennsylvania to four University of Illinois students to gauge the spots’ effect. Deyana Lewis, graduate student in physics, said upon seeing the ads for the first time that she was prompted to think more about the candidates.

“It would just make me look deeper for the candidate I’m voting for than the one I’m not voting for,” she said. “It would make me do a little bit of research into that.”

But another student who saw the ads, which focused on the Bush’s National Guard duty and Kerry’s Vietnam record, was just turned off.

“It’s not like we’re electing someone to go to Vietnam right now or someone to go to the National Guard right now,” said Chris Ludwig, a freshman. “I don’t really see how it’s relevant to how competent they are to be president.”