A Media Repertoires Approach to Selective Exposure: News Consumption and Political Polarization in Eastern Europe

In recent years, links between selective news exposure and political polarisation have attracted considerable attention among communication scholars. However, while the existence of selective exposure has been documented in both offline and online environments, the evidence of its extent and its impact on political polarisation is far from unanimous. To address these questions, and also to bridge methodological and geographical gaps in existing research, this paper adopts a media repertoires approach to investigate selective news exposure and polarisation in four Eastern European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Serbia. Using a combination of population surveys, expert surveys and qualitative interviews, the data for the study were collected between November 2019 and May 2020. We identify five types of news repertoires based on their relative openness to counter-attitudinal sources, and show that selective news repertoires are present in 29% of the entire sample. Our findings also reveal significant cross-country differences, with the more selective news repertoires more prominent in countries characterised by higher levels of polarisation. Furthermore, while the selection of news sources is in line with people's electoral (and to a lesser extent ideological) preferences, our findings show that exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can also be strongly correlated with political and ideological leanings. Our qualitative data suggest that this is because exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can reinforce attitudes, and potentially contribute to polarisation. Qualitative data also highlight the influence of environmental factors (e.g., family), and suggest that selective news consumption is associated with normatively different conceptions of media trust.

Youth media repertoires: Age ranges, context factors and privacy management

The overall aim of the study is to trace the interaction between the composition of the media repertoire and the everyday world of adolescents, also looking at privacy management in the course of acquiring digital communication media as part of the media repertoire. In order to do justice to this complexity, young people were not considered as a uniform demographic group, but were divided into three stages. Through this differentiation, a recursive process is to be worked out that makes it possible to also include contextual influencing factors such as peer group, family environment etc. and to expand previous findings on the media repertoire of young people. As a result of this approach, a multi-stage development process was elaborated as well as the privacy management of digital communication media of young people.

Birds of a Feather Flock Together Online: Digital Inequality in Social Media Repertoires

Communication has long been concerned with people’s media repertoires, yet little of this approach has extended to the combination of social media platforms that people use. Despite their considerable popularity, research has found that people do not select into the use of social network sites (SNSs) randomly, which has implications for both whose voices are represented on them and where messaging can reach diverse people. While prior work has considered self-selection into one SNS, in this article we ask: how are different SNSs linked by user base? Using national survey data about 1,512 US adults’ social media uses, we build networks between SNSs that connect SNS pairs by user base. We examine patterns by subgroups of users along the lines of age, gender, education, and Internet skills finding considerable variation in SNS associations by these variables. This has implications for big data analyses that depend on data from particular social media platforms. It also offers helpful lessons for how to reach different population segments when trying to communicate to diverse audiences.

Older People’s Media Repertoires, Digital Competences and Media Literacies: A Case Study from Italy

Digital media are part of everyday life and have an intergenerational appeal, entering older people’s agendas, practices, and habits. Many people aged over 60 years lack adequate digital competences and media literacies to support learning, well-being, and participation in society, thus imposing a need to discuss older people’s willingness, opportunities, and abilities to use digital media. This study explored older people’s media use and repertoires, digital competences, and media literacies to promote media literacy education across all ages. The article discusses the data from 24 interviews with older people aged 65 to 98 years in Italy to answer the following research questions: What kinds of media repertoires emerge? What kinds of competences and media literacies can be described? What kinds of support and training do older people get and wish to receive? The analysis of the data produced four specific profiles concerning media repertoires: analogic, accidental, digital-instrumental, and hybridised users. Media literacy is still a critical framework, but the interviewees were open to opportunities to improve their competences. The use of digital media has received a strong boost due to the pandemic, as digital media have been the only way to get in touch with others and carry out their daily routine.

News reception and authoritarian control in a hybrid media system: Russian TV viewers and the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Authoritarian regimes attempt to control the circulation of political information. Scholars have identified many mechanisms through which actors can use broadcast and digital media to challenge or sustain authoritarian rule. However, while contemporary media environments are characterised by the integration of older and newer forms of communication, little is known about how authoritarian regimes use different media simultaneously to shape citizens’ perceptions. In order to address this issue, this study relies on focus groups and investigates Russian TV viewers’ cross-media repertoires and their reception of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It argues that some citizens evaluate state-aligned television narratives as more credible when they are reinforced by similar narratives in digital media. Citizens’ reactions to this synchronisation are predicated on their type of media use. For not very active news consumers, the reliance on digital media can verify the regime’s narratives in television news. Others can escape the synchronisation effect by actively searching online for additional information or not using digital media for news. These findings show how authoritarian regimes can utilise the advantages of hybrid media systems to shape citizens’ perceptions and specify the conditions under which citizens can escape the effects of the regime’s simultaneous use of different media.

Media as the great emancipators? Exploring relations between media repertoires and cultural participation in Flanders

Media convergence has afforded users an increasing amount of options regarding the media they consume, available at the click of a button. This has led some to clamor about the potential for media to bridge previously existing inequalities and decrease social stratification not just in media use, but in other realms of society as well. Skeptics have argued that while the convergence of media has given users more options in their own media repertoire, social stratification persists. Moreover, if media do increase a user’s possibilities to participate in other realms of society, the persisting stratification of media use risks enacting a Matthew effect whereby the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Using data from the Flemish participation survey, this article seeks to contribute to this discussion by exploring Flemish media use by constructing media repertoires using latent class analysis and exploring their sociodemographic profiles. Following this analysis, we compare the cultural participation patterns of the six Flemish media repertoires using negative binomial regression analysis. We find that social stratification of media use persists in Flanders, with broad and ‘highbrow’ repertoires predominantly restricted to higher status groups. Moreover, we find a structural homology between the structure of media repertoires and cultural participation, whereby broad repertoires exhibit a similar openness to cultural practices, and repertoires tailored to highbrow media exhibit a similar preference for highbrow cultural activities. As a result, we find that social stratification persists in media use and cultural participation but argues that media repertoires offer a potential entrypoint.

Navigating Conflicts through the Media: The Sceptical and Self-Responsible Repertoires of Baltic Russian-Speakers

This article contributes to the scholarly discussions about the self-responsibilization, defined as a configuration of understandings and action strategies oriented to compensate the (perceived) dysfunctionality of the media system, of audience members in East European societies. The authors argue that audience members’ sceptical and self-reliant stance towards political news, which were planted in Soviet times, continue today in the context of mediated geopolitical conflicts. Based on a mixed methods study of Baltic Russian-speaking audiences’ behaviour in the context of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, the authors explore audience members’ media repertoires aimed to “fish out” reliable information from the political news by searching for unspoken clues or identifying ideologically biased messages. The authors introduce six political news repertoires based on the varied degrees of plurality of information channels and conditional trust. Then, they characterize audience groups exercising these repertoires and explain how audience members rationalize the chosen repertoires as a part of their agency in the context of geopolitical turbulence. They suggest that media audiences’ self-responsibilization is a worthwhile object for further study and call for a shift in East European media research away from a structuralist approach and towards an agency-centred one.

News repertoires and information behavior in Austria—What is the role of social inequality?

The changes in the global mediascape have had a tremendous impact on societal news flows. Using data from the Social Survey Austria 2018 and a quantitative application of the media repertoire approach, the article illustrates how information behavior and news seeking relate to social status, political orientation and sociodemographics. The results confirm that the developments in Austria—often referred to as a representative of a traditional media landscape—are mostly in line with international trends, as new media have been added to the media repertoires of approximately two-thirds of the sample. Effects tied to social inequality generally match previous assumptions: Higher educational achievements and income lead to more diversified news repertoires. Additionally, the overall structure of the data indicates that the online-only users are still a small minority, consisting of younger individuals who are less likely to work and more likely to vote for left-wing parties.