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.

What Drives Selective Exposure to Political Information in Spain?

Communication research underlines two types of selective exposure to the media: one guided by ideological-partisan affiliations and one guided by interest in politics. This work will compare both motivations in the consumption of political information through three media types (digital press, television, and radio) by Spanish citizens during the 2019 November General Election. Through multinomial logistic regressions applied to a representative post-electoral survey, results show that ideological-partisan orientations are the most important variables governing selective exposure, especially for the digital press and the radio. Besides confirming ideological selective exposure, the data highlight an important tendency towards selective avoidance of news media perceived as ideologically incongruent. For television, however, both socio-demographic trends and ideological orientations exhibit a similar explanatory weight, which suggests that political segmentation of the Spanish television market is still being deployed by communication groups, in comparison with the press and the radio.

US Media, Selective Exposure, and the Promotion of COVID-19 Vaccinations in Black and Latino Communities

Through selective exposure, this study examined the role the US news media played in encouraging or discouraging minority races from getting vaccinated. Through content analysis and focus groups, we were able to demonstrate that most media messages focused on prior beliefs in their reporting, therefore, discouraging the black and Latino minorities from getting the COVID-19 vaccinations. Further, while blacks and Latinos based their fears of the vaccines on health effects, white respondents were more concerned about government surveillance and the desire to go back to “normal” life after the quarantine. Ultimately, white respondents were more positive about vaccination arguing that they were tired of the quarantine and wanted normal life back.

Us vs them: Tribalism, selective exposure & how non-partisan online news media engagement can be facilitated

<p>Codeswitching is the action of switching between languages to better impart information to a recipient. This thesis introduces a set of codeswitching translator tools as a method of disrupting the potentially damaging structures of tribal politics through the manipulation of ideologically specific language norms. We first investigate how tribalism and group identity impact our ability to participate in political discourse. Using this insight from a host of different research disciplines, we design an iterative testing environment for a variety of ‘codeswitching’ translators in order to see the impact of translations ranging in complexity from simple word and syntax substitution through to machine learning back-translation. Though back-translation was not found to be an effective technique, simple substitution methods provided a foundation of effectiveness and proof of concept among test participants, especially those that identified as politically aligned.</p>

Us vs them: Tribalism, selective exposure & how non-partisan online news media engagement can be facilitated

<p>Codeswitching is the action of switching between languages to better impart information to a recipient. This thesis introduces a set of codeswitching translator tools as a method of disrupting the potentially damaging structures of tribal politics through the manipulation of ideologically specific language norms. We first investigate how tribalism and group identity impact our ability to participate in political discourse. Using this insight from a host of different research disciplines, we design an iterative testing environment for a variety of ‘codeswitching’ translators in order to see the impact of translations ranging in complexity from simple word and syntax substitution through to machine learning back-translation. Though back-translation was not found to be an effective technique, simple substitution methods provided a foundation of effectiveness and proof of concept among test participants, especially those that identified as politically aligned.</p>

Implications of online incidental and selective exposure for political emotions: Affective polarization during elections

The Internet and social media create an environment in which individuals can selectively approach information supporting their political worldviews while also being incidentally exposed to socially shared information that challenges their beliefs. These competing information consumption patterns may help explain whether and how digital media contribute to affective polarization (i.e. affect-based division between political groups). This study examines how pro-attitudinal selective exposure and counter-attitudinal incidental exposure in tandem influence political emotions. Using data from 2, two-wave panel surveys conducted during the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections, our findings demonstrate that seeking consonant political information is consistently associated with anger toward political opponents and enthusiasm toward like-minded partisans. In contrast, despite the purported democratic benefits endowed on political disagreement, cross-cutting incidental exposure does not temper political emotional responses associated with pro-attitudinal selective exposure. However, we find little evidence that unexpected exposure to disagreeable information backfires either.

Attention Centrality and Audience Fragmentation: An Approach for Bridging the Gap Between Selective Exposure and Audience Overlap

Scholarship on audience fragmentation typically takes one of two approaches: The micro-level analysis of individuals’ selective exposure to partisan news, or the macro-level analysis of audience overlap. To bridge the gap between these levels of analysis, we introduce the concept of attention centrality as a set of macro-to-micro measures that characterize how individual news media selection is situated within networks of public attention. Relying on an online panel survey conducted in the United States (N = 1,493), we examine the relationship between three indicators of respondents’ attention centrality (closeness, betweenness, and reach) and the partisan valence of their news selections. The study finds different patterns of results for the three indicators of attention centrality, indicating that partisan news media are not uniformly isolated to the periphery of public attention. Results are discussed in light of conversations about selective exposure and audience overlap in the United States and around the world.

Selective exposure to COVID-19 vaccination information: the influence of prior attitude, perceived threat level and information limit

PurposeThe massive amount of available information and functionality of the Internet makes selective information seeking effortless. This paper aims to understand the selective exposure to information during a health decision-making task.Design/methodology/approachThis study conducted an experiment with a sample of 36 students to examine the influence of prior attitude, perceived threat level and information limit on users’ selective exposure to and recall of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination information. Participants were assigned to two conditions with or without an upper limit of the number of articles to be examined, and this study collected the number of articles read, the number of articles included in the report and recall score of the articles after one day of the experiment.FindingsThis study found that (1) participants with a negative attitude were more inclined to view attitude-consistent information and recalled attitude-consistent information more accurately, while participants with a positive attitude viewed more balanced information; (2) participants perceiving higher health threat level recalled attitude-consistent information more accurately; and (3) an upper limit on the number of articles to be viewed does not have any impact on selective exposure.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings of this paper pinpoint the disparity of influence of positive and negative attitudes on selective exposure to and selective recall of health information, which was not previously recognized.Practical implicationsVaccination campaigns should focus on reaching people with negative attitudes who are more prone to selective exposure to encourage them to seek more balanced information.Originality/valueThis is the first paper to explore selective exposure to COVID-19 vaccination information. This study found that people with a negative attitude and a higher level of perceived health threat are more prone to selective exposure, which was not found in previous research.