Prior research conducted within the Uses and Gratifications paradigm has considered the contribution of numerous background social and psychological characteristics to motives for media use and media consumption patterns. In this study, we explore the extent to which far more fundamental characteristics—genes—explain, in part, motives to use news media and frequency of news use. Using original data collected on identical and fraternal twins (n = 334), we find that latent genetic traits explain a nontrivial amount of variance in two unique news use motives, surveillance and entertainment, as well as frequency of consumption across multiple news sources. Genetic traits were particularly influential in explaining the frequency of using sources commonly characterized as ideological, such as Fox News and CNN.
