In order to understand the role of contemporary journalism and the media system it is vital to consider consumers’ relationship with news content in terms of trust and perception of dubious content. This analysis is particularly relevant in a context where intense flows of information raise serious questions about individual ability to interpret, validate, and reproduce content. This analysis explores a news literacy scale used by Maskl et al. (2015) and Fletcher (in Newman et al., 2018) to investigate the links between news literacy profiles and their relationship with content, with particular focus on illegitimate/doubtful news pieces. Results suggest individuals with higher news literacy tend to trust news in general but not when content originates in social media. Higher literacy profiles are also associated with increased concern regarding online content legitimacy. These conclusions are particularly relevant in the currently volatile media sphere, highly dependent on a substantially informed public to ensure the legitimacy and importance of journalistic content and to distinguish it from other kinds of content flooding communication networks. These efforts depend not only on the journalistic sphere but also on democratic systems themselves as they rely on a well-informed public to guarantee a healthy and inclusive debate.

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Compreender quais são os factores sócio-mediáticos que impactam na confiança dos cidadãos nas autoridades locais e regionais revela-se de extrema importância, em sociedades crescentemente polarizadas. O presente trabalho pretende, através do uso de dados do Eurobarómetro, com um total de 27.746 participantes dos 28 Estados-Membro da União Europeia, contribuir para uma clarificação do papel dos media na confiança nas instituições locais e regionais. A operacionalização passa pela implementação de um modelo de regressão logística, que permita medir o impacto dos media e determinantes sócio-educacionais na confiança nestas instituições de proximidade. A demonstração empírica permitiu concluir que quem confia e usa os media tradicionais tende a ter maiores probabilidades de confiar nas autoridades locais e regionais. Estas evidências remetem-nos para a ideia de que os maiores utilizadores dos media digitais devem ser o foco de políticas públicas que visem a literacia mediática e digital. Deste combate depende a democraticidade das sociedades europeias.

The issue of the Europeanisation of national public spheres is a question as to how a discursive media space can be created within the EU. There are forces of convergence at work, such as networking within the borderless digital space. At the same time, there are counterforces: increasing nationalism and populists who identify ‘Brussels’ as a target for their criticism of elites. The vision of a European public sphere appears to share the same fate as the European project as such; as a result of years of crisis, optimism has given way to disillusion. Using coverage of the 2019 EU elections in seven European countries (a total of 57,943 articles from Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and the UK), we draw a picture of a heterogeneous EU public. What is particularly clear is that the phenomena of horizontal and vertical Europeanisation require more nuanced interpretations. While a high degree of horizontal Europeanisation indicates convergent and pro-European media coverage (as in the cases of Germany and Portugal), a high degree of vertical Europeanisation may indicate polarised publics or an unfree media landscape (as in the UK and Hungary). From a methodological point of view, the study shows that a combination of computational content analysis and international cooperation between scientists can advance research into the European public.

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