Audience members carry expectations and judgment of media prior to using them. On the assumption that perceptions have broad socio-political antecedents and audience cognitive consequences, this study specifies a model to examine the relationships among social demographics, perceived media functions and evaluation of media performance, attention to newspaper and television news, and information processing strategies. Telephone interviews of a probability sample of 1000 Guangzhou residents provided first-hand data for analyses. We found that media judgment and information processing are multi-dimensional concepts and their theoretical connections are non-trivial. Variances in media assessment made no difference in people's habit of reading between the lines, but predicted differentially to critical and non-reflective reading of media content.