Political Identity and News Media Choice: The Polarizing Logic of Selective Exposure During the Catalan Independence Conflict

ABSTRACT

Political communication scholars have explored selective exposure by focusing on the left-right cleavage, overlooking how other sources of political identity might guide news consumption, partly because of the U.S. dominance of the discipline. We address this gap by exploring how political attitudes on the national divide influence news choices for three news media types (television, radio, and newspapers) in Catalonia over a seven-year period (2010–2017) that covers the development of the Catalan independence conflict, including four regional elections, a controversial independence referendum, and the suppression of autonomy. Binomial logistic regressions applied to four post-electoral surveys indicate that support for independence and national identity are significant predictors of Catalans’ news media choices, and that support for independence becomes increasingly relevant as a driver of news choices for broadcast media as political polarization on Catalan independence grows. We discuss the implications for democracy of such audience segregation, and underscore how political context influences media choices.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Acknowledgments

This article has greatly benefit from the insightful comments of Kevin M. Carragee, Charlotte Ryan, Cristian Vaccari and Lance W. Bennett, and the methodological expertise of Juan Ignacio Martínez Pastor and Tomás Baviera.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The question’s exact wording was: “Regarding your knowledge of Catalan, could you tell me if you can write it correctly?” The knowledge of Catalan indicator is therefore quite specific: it is based on the written command among all possible language skills – such as oral or listening skills. In this regard, it is important to highlight that it is possible to have a poor command of written skills in a language, but still have good comprehension, especially when the language is closely related to the native language of the speaker. In other words, a Spanish native speaker with no written command of Catalan is still capable of understanding news media content in Catalan and vice versa.

² The magnitude of the log odds for Catalan national identity (57.6812) is a result of the 2015 sample for radio choices only including 39 individuals feeling exclusively Spanish: one preferring a regional radio station, and 38 having national preferences. We have run the same regression model to allow comparisons across years and media types, but we should emphasize that this result needs to be interpreted very carefully. Still, bivariate calculations indicate that these differences between radio choices among individuals who feel only Spanish are significant at a 95% confidence level, despite the limited sample size (n = 39).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lidia Valera-Ordaz

Lidia Valera-Ordaz (PhD, 2014) is Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Valencia, where she teaches Political Journalism and Media Industries. Before, she worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Valladolid (Spain), and as a postdoctoral researcher at Suffolk University (Boston, MA) and the University of Valencia (Spain). She has been a visiting scholar in Paris 8, Boston College, Suffolk University and Sciences Po (Paris, France). Her research interests focus on public opinion, political communication and media sociology.