I am happy to introduce ten final papers produced for my 2025 master level tutorial course Media and Politics at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb. The course aimed to outline the problems of understanding the changes in the public sphere in the hybrid media system environment, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).
Peruško (2021) examined the CEE hybrid public sphere by applying the framework of the political information environment in van Aelst el at. (2017), and showed that a great deal of research and existing knowledge mapping is missing for the Central and Eastern European region, but also for many other countries outside of the EU research core.
The students were asked to participate in collecting and mapping existing research in their own countries. Their mapping focused on the six areas identified by van Aelst et al. (2017): the supply of political information, quality of news, media concentration and diversity of news, fragmentation and polarization, relativism in news, and the degree of inequality in political knowledge.
The essays have not been edited except for adding the first title when necessary.
I am grateful to my Erasmus students who participated in the course and for their essays on Austria, France, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Romania, Singapore, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine. Happy reading!
Professor Zrinjka Peruško
Department of Media and Communication
Faculty of Political Science
University of Zagreb
Centre for Media and Communication Research 