Does Digital Media Diversity Weaken Public Consensus on the Important Societal Issues?

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Sílvia Majó-Vázquez, who notes that the current media ecology may no longer guarantee a common ground of information amongst audiences; the diversity of the issues that people consider to be important may be increasing, and this may mean that people no longer agree on a set of common political issues that are important to be addressed in society.

This would mean that we are now seeing the emergence of competing or fragmented public agendas – yet most ness consumption online is still driven by major legacy media, online as well as offline. The theoretically unlimited diversity of issues online is thereby counteracted by a persistent tendency to focus only on a handful of major popular issues.

Do digital media weaken public consensus on what issues are important, then? Do they increase the number of issues considered important, and increase the diversity of such issues? The present project draws on major issues self-reported by 725 surveyed individuals in Spain, but with their permission also tracked the online activities of some half of these individuals; Catalans were excluded here because of the substantial effect that the independence movement had on what issues were considered important in Catalunya.

The project explored the commonality of the top issues across these participants, as well as their agenda diversity (how different?) and agenda capacity (how many?). It correlated these measures with participants’ online media diets, determined from both self-reported and observational data. It also controlled for levels of political interest and frequency of news consumption, and adjusted (over-)reported media use information by taking into account actually observed media use.

The observed online news diet positively affected agenda diversity, common agenda, and especially agenda capacity. This means that digital media diets do not erode public consensus over what issues are considered important; it is necessary to drill down to media diet, not number of news sources visit. All of this must also be seen against the backdrop of informal ways of acquiring information through social networks and other platforms, however; this may well affect news diets as well.