Abstract
The concept of exposure diversity, the diversity of information that people actually access and use, has recently gained prominence in media policy debates. This aspect of media diversity, however, remains difficult to define, measure or implement in actual policy. In this article, we propose an empirical approach that operationalizes exposure diversity in terms of news and current affairs providers in the media repertoire of different social groups. This can be studied through cluster analysis of survey data on respondents’ combinations of use of different media providers and outlets. The article first discusses exposure diversity as a media policy aim. We then outline our proposal on how to take the debate a step further through empirical analysis of media repertoires, with an illustration of how such an analysis may be conducted using survey data from Norway.
Highlights
Policy and regulatory debates on media diversity have traditionally revolved around either structural diversity, which mostly refers to media ownership and the number of different outlets, or content diversity, understood as the range of content available to audiences
Debates on media diversity have increasingly turned to the notion of exposure diversity, which refers to the diversity of information and viewpoints that people access and use, as opposed to all the content that is available in principle (Helberger, 2012; McQuail, 1992; Napoli, 1999)
The notion of exposure diversity remains a multifaceted media policy objective that cannot be reduced to any single empirical indicator
Summary
Policy and regulatory debates on media diversity have traditionally revolved around either structural diversity, which mostly refers to media ownership and the number of different outlets, or content diversity, understood as the range of content available to audiences. The case of Norwegian media policy provides direction for an operationalization of exposure diversity through (a) its founding in a normative idea of deliberative democracy (as opposed to, e.g. radical democracy) and (b) its explicit focus on news and current affairs (as opposed to a wider interest in, say, expressive cultural content).
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