Selective Exposure and the Politics of Spanish Football

The third paper in this ECREA 2018 session is by Carlos Aguilar-Paredes, who shifts our focus on selective exposure in sports reporting. This is an unusual approach as such selective exposure is mainly discussed in political contexts. However, sports articles are amongst the most widely read news content.

The present study examined this for the case of Catalunya, where there is also an ideological element to such coverage, as particular teams and their fans, but also the media that cover them, are associated with specific left/right and nationalist/unionist perspectives. Individual sports papers also have close relationships with particular clubs.

This makes it possible to position newspapers on these three axes (left/right, nationalist/unionist, Real Madrid/FC Barcelona), and to survey news users about their media preferences and practices. Users recognised the position of the different papers in the space spanned by these dimensions, and consumed the print version only of the papers they were themselves aligned with (an example of selective exposure); however, they consumed the online versions of these papers independent of their positioning (an example of non-selective exposure).

This was especially pronounced for FC Barcelona supporters, for whom presumably nationalist issues mattered more immediately, and less so for Real Madrid supporters, who may be less invested in the Catalunyan independence debate.