We updated the understanding of political opinion leaders’ news media use based on the increasing variety of news sources in the modern high-choice media environment. Building on seven decades of opinion leader research and integrating a contemporary news repertoire approach, we conceptualized and empirically investigated how opinion leaders navigate the modern news environment. We analyzed data from a representative general population survey (N = 1,572) in Germany to show that opinion leaders’ news use today is less homogenous than found in prior studies. An omnivore repertoire with many offline and online sources was equally effective in aiding opinion leadership as a quality-oriented news repertoire. Those with an omnivore repertoire were lower in political satisfaction, calling into question the traditional part played by opinion leaders in the process of democratic opinion formation.
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Mangold et al. (2018) studied this question.
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