This paper departs from three basic assumptions of the uses and gratifications model (Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch, 1974): The audience is conceived as active; the audience supplies the media with audience data; audience orientations are supplied on its own terms. Digitally disrupted media-audiences, democratisation of usage and the massive expansion of digital advertising, large scale political and geo-political manipulation and interference, misinformation, disinformation, online scams have called into question the actuality U&G’s mass-media era assumptions. The very concept of audience has been subverted by the commercialisation of user data that is readily monetised by corporations and entrepreneurs. Likewise, no longer are audience orientations supplied on its own terms. The discursive-material approach that informs MeDeMAP on the role of the media as “signifying machines” is used here. The “processes of coordination, synchronization, and harmonization” and the “capacity for validation, legitimation, and authorization” (Carpentier, 2017) have been disrupted by market and political forces and are called into question by the audiences themselves. The MeDeMAP focus groups and interviews with citizens reveal widespread “digital angst”. “I don’t trust anything” is a common refrain. Many deem the media as untrustworthy, manipulated by commercial, political and malevolent actors of all stripes identified with powerful economic interests. Although the internet is the least used medium for news (Reuters, 2024), it taints the “multiplicity and diversity of media assemblages” (Carpentier, Wimmer, 2024) with suspicion. Audiences display marked nihilism and contradictory sentiments regardingthe media. Unwillingly, out of an abundance of mistrust, many reject all media, feel powerless, truth deprived, confused. The smartphone is “full of bad things” and “algorithms harm democracy”. But unanimously and vigorously audiences believe that a free press is essential for democracy, although it does not contribute to active participation in the democratic process. TV is the unacknowledged major news source, and still the most trusted. User activity is now a defensive necessity. “Truth" is sought from the crude comparison of free online titles and headlines by supposedly trusted brands. Admittedly, it is a flawed, cumbersome and incomplete process since the full stories are behind off-putting pay walls. Misleading thumbnails and teasers don't tell "the real story” and are dismissed as clickbait. The advertising-supported "bad news is good news" business model is poorly understood. News are dismissed as “dark” or sensationalist commercialisation of morbid curiosity. According to Reuters (2025), journalism is shifting from producing news to producing “content” and “Big Tech” is in the “pursuit of clicks” (Reuters, 2025). Audiences became suppliers of attention inventory, a transactional commodity of manipulative actors, even when the audience apparently becomes an active participant in the digital maelstrom. The Portuguese government, journalist bodies and media managers call for EU wide media regulation to prevent marketing intrusion into journalism, branded content disguised as journalism, click baiting to the product (Torres et al., 2025). The internet is accused of being captive and manipulated by advertisers leading to the advocacy of internet regulation, but not of freedom of expression (Applebaum, 2025).
Nuno Cintra Torres (Thu,) studied this question.