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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, specific types of media, which are controlled by ruling elites, including Public Service Media, can contribute to negative attitudes, while digital media play a more ambiguous role.

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.