Research has shown that individual-level characteristics such as socioeconomic status and personal motivations have become more important as predictors of news consumption in a rapidly changing media environment. Despite this general trend, this article argues that the importance of individual-level predictors of news consumption varies between national media environments. We use extensive survey data from 16 European countries and multilevel modeling in order to investigate both contextual-level as well as cross-level effects on news consumption.
The results show that media environment characteristics have independent effects on news consumption beyond the effects of personal resources and motivations, but also a moderating impact on these individual-level predictors of news consumption. More specifically, national media environments characterized by higher levels of newspaper-centrism narrow gaps in newspaper reading between those with strong and weak socioeconomic resources as well as personal motivations for attending the news. Higher degrees of television-centrism tend, on the other hand, to erode the “lower class bias” of television news and widen the gap in news consumption between those with and without strong personal motivations. These findings are discussed in light of previous research on news consumption, knowledge- and participation gaps as well as cross-national comparative research.