Exogenous shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic unleashes multiple fundamental questions about society beyond public health. Based on the classical concept of 'need for orientation' and the literature on the role of the media in times of crisis, we investigate to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic affected news consumption in comparative perspective. Based on a two-wave panel survey in 17 mostly European countries, our study targets the role of both legacy news brands (TV, radio, newspapers) and so-called contemporary news media (Internet-based and social media) during this global health crisis. Our results show an overall rise of news use across countries, but only for some types of news media. We find an increase of TV news consumption, and a higher reliance on social media and the Internet for news and information. This indicates that in times of crises and an unusually strong need for orientation, people mainly turn to news sources that are easily available and offer a more immediate coverage. Furthermore, we find the rise in news use to be mainly present among those who already have a higher level of trust in legacy media and among people that were more concerned about the impact of the pandemic.

Democracies around the world are facing a rising wave of right-wing populism and new nationalism, which often relies on strategic exploitation of anti-immigration sentiments. While media have long been acknowledged as important channels of anti-immigration rhetoric, the evidence of the actual impact of news consumption on attitudes to migration and support for populist parties is still inconclusive, and largely limited to pre-digital media ecologies. Combining a representative twowave panel survey (N=819), digital tracking of real-time electronic measurement of television, radio and online media exposure, and an analysis of news content, this study explores the effect of news consumption on anti-immigration attitudes and electoral behaviour during the EP2019 election campaign in the Czech Republic. Our analysis reveals that being exposed to news about migration-particularly on websites and on commercial television stations-increases the likelihood of voting for populist parties, while exposure to public service media leads to less negative attitudes towards immigration. At the same time, being exposed to more news sources intensifies, rather than reduces, anti-immigrant attitudes. This result challenges the assumption that a more diverse news media diet could serve as an antidote to selective exposure and "echo chambers", commonly linked with radicalization of political views.

Only a few studies have measured the expansion of European Union competences and they have relied on information derived from consecutive treaties, producing measures that do not vary in between. But decisions on the allocation of authority to the EU also occur regularly through secondary legislation. This article presents a new index of the Europeanisation of policy based on an expert survey. The index provides a valuable new resource, encompassing 1957 to the present day, on the distribution of authority between the EU and member states across policy fields, and on the ideological content of primary and secondary legislation. The paper discusses the contributions made to existing scholarship, presents key findings from experts' assessments, and demonstrates how the dataset can advance research on European integration.

In recent years, links between selective news exposure and political polarisation have attracted considerable attention among communication scholars. However, while the existence of selective exposure has been documented in both offline and online environments, the evidence of its extent and its impact on political polarisation is far from unanimous. To address these questions, and also to bridge methodological and geographical gaps in existing research, this paper adopts a media repertoires approach to investigate selective news exposure and polarisation in four Eastern European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Serbia. Using a combination of population surveys, expert surveys and qualitative interviews, the data for the study were collected between November 2019 and May 2020. We identify five types of news repertoires based on their relative openness to counter-attitudinal sources, and show that selective news repertoires are present in 29% of the entire sample. Our findings also reveal significant cross-country differences, with the more selective news repertoires more prominent in countries characterised by higher levels of polarisation. Furthermore, while the selection of news sources is in line with people's electoral (and to a lesser extent ideological) preferences, our findings show that exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can also be strongly correlated with political and ideological leanings. Our qualitative data suggest that this is because exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can reinforce attitudes, and potentially contribute to polarisation. Qualitative data also highlight the influence of environmental factors (e.g., family), and suggest that selective news consumption is associated with normatively different conceptions of media trust.

Over the past decade, the rights of people whose sexual orientation does not conform to prevailing norms have become a divisive issue in many countries. Despite a long tradition of research on media and sexual minorities, the role of the media in these recent backlashes remains poorly understood. We argue that this is partly because work in this area is often underpinned by a simple, linear narrative that unambiguously links visibility to empowerment. We highlight the ambivalent impact of mediated visibility and argue that in the context of elite-driven polarization, illiberalism and low levels of media freedom, visibility can become a vehicle of control. To explore this proposition, we examine the link between media and public attitudes to same-sex relationships in four east European countries, combining a population survey with semi-structured interviews. The results confirm the need to consider the conditions of mediated visibility in particular socio-political contexts, showing that where control over the conditions of visibility remains in the hands of homophobic elites, both Public Service Media and digital media can contribute to negative attitudes.