This paper explores how infotainment elements in television news influence the viewing habits of younger audiences. It compares traditional news formats in Croatia (HRT’s Dnevnik 3) with infotainment-based formats (RTL’s Direkt) to assess their impact on young viewers’ perception and media behavior. Using content analysis and a survey among youth, the study examines differences in news presentation styles and their influence on content perception, source preferences, and attitudes toward news formats. The findings suggest that infotainment elements may play an important role in shaping young audiences’ preferences, with many respondents indicating a tendency to favor more engaging and visually dynamic content over traditional reporting styles. The results also point to a broader media paradox, where the way news is presented may, in some cases, influence audience engagement as much as the informational content itself. This research offers insights into how news presentation styles affect the information consumption habits of younger viewers, linking theoretical insights to empirical data.
This paper examines the relationship between media consumption and political polarization in Croatia, with a specific focus on the differential effects of traditional and Internet-based media. Drawing on cultivation theory and the reinforcing spirals model, the paper examines how media use contributes to political polarization. The paper utilizes survey data from an online opt-in sample of the Croatian population (N = 1,021), to test hypotheses related to media consumption patterns and their connection with political identification. The findings suggest that consuming Internet news tends to increase political polarization. In contrast, television news consumption is associated with more centrist political identification. The study also discusses the broader implications of these findings, highlighting the role of digital media in shaping political identities. By integrating theoretical frameworks with empirical analysis, this paper strives to present valuable insights into the complex interplay between media consumption and political polarization in the digital age.
Regional media play a crucial role in democratic journalism by fostering local accountability and promoting public debate. Yet inequalities between central and peripheral areas may shape the visibility of regional political issues. This study analyzes political news coverage in the main evening bulletins of ERT3, a Greek public television station. Drawing on content analysis, it examines airtime allocation, thematic focus (local, national, and international politics), and story placement within the news agenda. The findings indicate limited visibility of local political affairs and a clear imbalance in favor of central political actors. These results shed light on the structural constraints facing regional broadcasters and contribute to broader debates on media centralization and the democratic role of regional journalism.
Publications by scholars from Europe which are nominated for 2026 Edition of the Media and Democracy Karol Jakubowicz Award.
Populism has become a central theme in contemporary politics and media, raising debates about its disruptive potential or normalization within mainstream discourse. This study explores how early-career Czech journalists, who entered the profession after 2011 when Andrej Babiš and Tomio Okamura emerged as major populist actors, perceive the concept of populism. 55 respondents completed a questionnaire that combined open- and closed-ended questions. The study is exploratory in design, seeking to map dominant patterns in journalistic understandings of populism and generate a baseline for future research rather than to produce statistically generalizable claims. The sample includes journalists from both public and private outlets across television, radio, print, and online media. The analysis addresses three areas: (1) how journalists define and conceptualize populism; (2) whether they regard it as a threat to democracy or a legitimate political strategy; and (3) whether populist figures are considered more appealing than conventional politicians. Findings suggest younger Czech journalists view populism neutrally, as a pragmatic mainstream strategy, while partially confirming its heightened journalistic attractiveness. This study contributes to the ongoing debate on the relationship between populists and journalists.
The paper presents the celebrity image of Marian Kočner as it was presented by selected disinformation media while informed about the murder of journalist J. Kuciak and his fiancée M. Kušnírová. We pointed out that the „celebritisation” of M. Kočner in the Slovak society has been contributed to, among others, by disinformation media, which did so by means of 1) narratives related to the person of M. Kočner and 2) the tonality of published texts (positive, negative, neutral). Through a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 600 articles from five disinformation media sources, the study identifies six prevalent narratives depicting Kočner with predominantly neutral tonalities. Notably, these neutral depictions persisted long after mainstream media began portraying Kočner negatively. This study aims to shed light on the phenomenon of contribution to the image formation of celebrities through disinformation media, even in cases where the celebrity is a negative public persona.
Islamophobic hate speech on social media includes overt toxicity and contextual frames that associate Muslims with invasion, criminality, cultural threat, or racialized exclusion. This study examines 21,326 Spanish-language tweets about Islam and Muslims posted in Spain between 2010 and 2022. We combine human annotation, exploratory discursive coding, Perspective API scores, and a multilingual BERT classifier. Human coders classified 28.2% of tweets as Islamophobic hate speech. Explicit hostility was the most frequent pattern, followed by invasion, cultural threat, criminality, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic burden. Although hate-labeled tweets received significantly higher toxicity-related scores than non-hate tweets, many remained below a 0.70 high-probability threshold. The BERT classifier achieved 0.89 accuracy, 0.97 precision, 0.85 recall, and 0.91 F1 for the hate class. The findings show that generic toxicity measures capture overt aggression more effectively than contextual hostility, supporting target-specific, context-sensitive detection.
This study introduces a novel link between organizational listening and collaborative governance, reframing government communication as a dynamic driver of democratic engagement. Using an in-depth case study in the Basque Country (Spain), it investigates how structured listening practices within government organizations can foster more effective collaboration with citizens. Thematic analysis of qualitative data from policymakers reveals that active participation in collaborative governance transforms how officials interpret and respond to public feedback, bridging the gap between institutional and citizen perspectives. The research highlights how a shared commitment to listening not only enhances mutual understanding but also encourages adaptive, joint policy development. By situating this inquiry within a real-world collaborative governance initiative, the manuscript offers actionable insights for policymakers aiming to embed meaningful listening at the core of democratic decision-making processes.
This article presents the results of a study of the attitudes of local and hyperlocal media representatives towards disinformation. Between October 2024 and April 2025, 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives of selected media from the Warmia and Mazury region (Poland). The objective of the study was to determine how local and hyperlocal media experience disinformation in their daily editorial practice and what content verification rules they apply. The study reveals that knowledge of the local context and the ability to quickly verify information make local and hyperlocal media a reliable source of content, counterbalancing anonymous reports on local social media channels. Due to their specific nature, local and hyperlocal media can play a crucial role in building resilience against disinformation.
National elections – or “first-order elections” (FOEs) – are regularly the focus of research studying election campaigns, whereas supranational elections are often handled as “second-order elections” (SOEs). Social media tend to normalize existing power relationship and equalizing political competition during election. This paper analyzes political campaigns on Facebook during the European Parliament (EP) elections 2019 and the national elections held between 2020 and 2022 in Germany, Hungary, and Romania. From a cross-country perspective, the research investigates the volume of campaign content conducted on Facebook during the EP and the national elections. Results of a manual content analysis of (N=5934) posts of 20 political parties that gained seats in the EP and national parliaments suggest that Facebook contributes to equalizing political communication. However, the prevalent topics of the campaigns vary considerably across countries. Our research contributes to the discussion on normalization and equalization theses and addresses FOEs and SOEs from a comparative perspective.
Populism is defined by its perception and is used by discussants in political debates, and by commentators and academic observers when they intend to unmask or disqualify certain propositions, political attitudes, campaign platforms or manifestos of political parties. Although Lithuania’s media elites’ perceptions of populism matter because their filtering of contents impacts on public opinion, research has not investigated the topic. This study is based on the findings of a questionnaire and a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with selected Lithuanian media elites. The study reveals a pronounced divergence from the negative views of populism of large urban and regional newspapers, to the ambivalent views of local newspapers. The study speculates the use of contrasting reader-feedback mechanisms may be the cause of the divide. The study places the findings within the broader context of information methodology practices in the press in both Lithuania and other countries.
In a region haunted by grave geopolitical tensions, Moldova’s nation branding is an overlooked research topic, despite the country’s long-standing self-promotion efforts. Addressing this gap, our article presents a critical discourse analysis of strategies undertaken by Invest Moldova Agency, the governmental institution in charge of Moldova’s brand communication. Here, beyond a traditional post-socialist melange of market-oriented and globalist discourse, we find a strategy to build a consistent self-image in high internal diversity. Although the presence of the separatist pro-Russian region of Transnistria disrupts the consistency of the image of Moldova as “transition society”, it also encourages the promoters to rethink the Soviet legacy. The article contributes to understanding commercial nationalism as a framework for managing political and cultural heterogeneity through commodification.
This paper undertakes an analysis of two divergent strategies aimed at driving culture towards the extremes: one involving stark minimalism and the other, gaudy maximalism. The former approach is predominantly embraced by the avant-garde, who possess the means to surround themselves with an array of commodities, thereby creating a distinguishing factor in a world characterized by excess. Conversely, maximalism, the origins of which can be traced back to the conception of luxury as abundance, seeks to eliminate fear. This study investigates the representation of minimalism and maximalism in a vast corpus of English-language articles. The research addresses two questions: 1) How are the representations of lifestyles expressed in the most popular articles related to minimalism and maximalism? 2) What meanings do these representations convey? The findings of this study shed light on the discourse surrounding minimalism and maximalism, as well as the motivations and justifications for adopting these lifestyles.
The article is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon known as the United Television Marathon (Telethon), which was launched after the beginning of the 2022 fullscale invasion of Russia into Ukraine. Ukraine’s leading nationwide TV channels joined together to inform citizens about events in the country—24/7—around the clock. However, despite the apparent advantages of such a phenomenon, the United Telethon has also been a subject of criticism due to noncompliance with journalistic standards and engagement. In our article, we analyzed the content of the telethon during the most significant events that took place in the Autumn of 2022. For the study, we chose separate slots for all the Ukrainian TV channels involved in the production of the television marathon. The subject of the study concerned the approaches to inviting guests to the audiovisual recording studios of the channels, the indicators (in percentage ratio) regarding specific categories of guests, the tendency of invitations to the guest studios of speakers from political parties, state organizations, and independent experts. The next stage was the analysis of the uniqueness and importance of the information broadcast on the telethon air. To find out how often Ukrainian media refer to information from the telethon as a primary source, we conducted a content analysis of Ukrainian online media regarding the sources of information they refer to in their materials.
Acknowledging the notoriously ‘incomplete’ nature of privacy has little effect on the considerable expectations the notion implies. Self-determined privacy points to reflexivity, critical practice and tech literacy. While privacy scholarship illustrates those points and explains how agents constantly fail in meeting these expectations, we ask the inverse question. What are the limits of privacy? Interviewing Polish and German activists who engage in privacy-conscious social and professional relations, this qualitative study strives to understand how self-determined privacy is realized. Focusing on how individuals shape their privacies as social agents, including the motivations and contexts of their practices, our insights serve as a case study highlighting the challenges of realizing the everyday endeavor of privacy in datafied environments.
This article investigates the rhetoric of the enemy in former President William J. Clinton’s justifications for the use of force. It examines the links between two themes from the perspective of David Zarefsky’s persuasive definitions. The former President’s responses to international conflicts demonstrate that the enemy drives presidential military decisions. Clinton’s rhetoric shows that the descriptions of the enemy differ between presidential announcements of airstrikes and presidential statements of commitment of USA ground troops to the fight overseas. Content analysis of Clinton’s speeches regarding the use of force in Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Kosovo demonstrates these claims and indicates the role of language in the former President’s effort to lead the American public on the use of force in post-Cold War foreign policy.
