Taking Political Alternative Media into Account: Investigating the Linkage Between Media Repertoires and (Mis)perceptions

In most studies on news repertoires and the linkage between media use and (mis)perceptions of social and political matters, the use of political alternative media has not been included. In this paper, we therefore investigate how people combine both traditional and political alternative media into different media repertoires, and how these media repertoires are related to misperceptions. We rely on a two-wave panel survey, conducted in 2020 and 2021, with a probability-recruited sample of the Swedish population. Measures on the use of a wide range of media, including political alternative ones, are used to conduct a Latent Profile Analysis. This analysis distinguishes five media repertoires in the data. The results show that these repertoires coincide with different levels of misperceptions, with those dominated by TV use showing higher levels of misperceptions and those with higher newspaper and alternative media use showing lower levels of misperceptions. Results also show that media repertoires do not affect over-time changes in misperceptions.