Younger and Older Europeans’ Attitudes towards Healthy Media Diets

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is David Nicolas Hopmann, presenting on a multinational study of Europeans’ attitudes towards their news media diets as part of the curiously named ThreatPie project. The present paper explores people’s ideas about what a ‘healthy’ diet is; what diets they actually consume; and what perceptions they have of the media their peers consumed. This was done for Germany, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the UK, with younger (18-25) and older (55+) adults. A larger survey of 18 countries will follow.

Younger adults had a clear idea of a healthy media diet: a balance of sources, not being too exclusive, using quality news, including public service news where available, and carefully selecting sources. Older adults emphasised the quality of the ingredients, the importance of knowing who produced the news, and the diversity of news diets. But in practice younger users also acknowledged their fragmented approach to media use, their serendipitous exposure to the news, and their interest-driven news use; older people praised newspapers and other legacy media.

Younger people also saw older people as less savvy, vulnerable, and gullible news consumers, but similarly saw other young people as having unhealthy, even toxic news diets. Older people had similar perceptions of themselves, and saw young people as uninterested in politics.

Overall, the ‘media diet’ metaphor turned out to be very productive for these conversations: there was a clear normative awareness of ‘proper’ media diets across these groups; there was a clear awareness of their own groups’ consumption habits; and a clear normative awareness of what others did. This also shows that people in either groups don’t need convincing that healthy media diets are indeed important – but they do need further help in maintaining such healthy diets.