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Abstract
How the media influence the trust that citizens have in institutions such as politics and science seems more important than ever, given the decline of institutional trust in Western societies, and the increasingly diversified media landscape. This paper focuses on the relationship between media repertoires, institutional trust, and two socializing contexts (parents, social networks). Applying Latent Class Analysis, this paper examines (a) how parental socialization and social networks predict membership of media repertoires, and (b) how repertoires are associated with levels of institutional trust. Outcomes reveal five distinct media repertoires, among which the emerging type of cross-media news consumers. Membership of repertoires is associated with both parental socialization and social networks. There are clear differences in the levels of institutional trust among media repertoires: Popular media omnivores and quality news consumers have the most trust; the non-print-oriented the least.

This article contributes to the study of legitimate authority and symbolic power in the media field by analyzing what I call the "validation repertoires" of audiences, that is, the various ways individuals combine in a single set of beliefs separate judgments of how valid or worthwhile they regard the opinions of a media worker with a specific institutionalized background. The empirical analysis focuses on cultural mediators and has three aspects: (a) mapping repertoires via latent class analysis, (b) explaining adherence to repertoires by links to positions in the field, and (c) predicting how repertoires affect the concrete use of recommendation systems. The results show that, currently, validation repertoires are mainly organized according to the degree of validation, not the degree of institutionalization; the validation of mediators appears to be multifaceted, influenced by cultural and media-related resources and generalized institutional trust; and repertoires have an impact on choice behavior.

Traditionally, media critics play a central role in the attribution of symbolic value to cultural products. This article studies empirically how the process of cultural evaluation is affected by the rise of peer-produced criticism online. More specifically, I examine how the discourse that critics employ to substantiate their aesthetic evaluations differs across media platforms and is affected by the institutionalization of critics, the symbolic dimensions of the reviewed film and the overall media attention paid to that film. Empirically, this study involves a multi-level analysis of 624 film reviews, which attends to media-level and film-level characteristics. The results reveal that the ascendance of peer-produced content not only challenges the hierarchical model of cultural evaluation, which remains in use, but adds a further dimension. At the same time, differences across media platforms (print, webzines, film blogs, amateur postings) reveal continuous rather than dichotomous patterns, thus emphasizing the blurring of media boundaries.

This article studies trends in gender inequality in the domain of fiction books between 1960 and 2009 in France, Germany and the United States by analysing bestseller lists and literary award winners. It is argued that gender inequality is larger in fields or genres where more status is at stake for individual agents, as this causes an influx of men who then 'edge' women out of the field. The study finds evidence for this mechanism, as the presence of female authors in bestseller lists (exponent of the popular culture system) is larger than that among literary award winners (highbrow culture system) in all three countries. Cross-national differences are consistent (US smallest inequality, France largest), emphasizing the importance of field characteristics in explaining social inequalities in cultural production.

This study offers a cross-national multilayered analysis of music flows between 1960 and 2010. Advancing on previous empirical studies of cultural globalization, it attends to the global and country level, while adding the individual level of music flows. Concretely, the authors analyze the international composition of pop charts in nine countries by (a) mapping trends, (b) comparing countries, and (c) conducting multivariate analyses. The results show that pop charts increasingly contain foreign music, with the exception of the United States. Explanatory analyses of foreign success confirm that limited cultural distance results in greater flow as found in film and television studies, while revealing additional positive impacts of centrality of production (e.g., artists from more "central" countries in music production are more likely to chart abroad) and the "star power" of artists. Both the innovative methodological approach and findings of this article offer promising research avenues for globalization, media industry, and celebrity studies.

Today's complex film world seems to upset the dual structure corresponding with Bourdieu's categorization of 'restricted' and 'large-scale' fields of cultural production. This article examines how movies in French, Dutch, American and British film fields are classified in terms of material practices and symbolic affordances. It explores how popular, professional, and critical recognition are related to film production as well as interpretation. Analysis of the most successful film titles of 2007 offers insight into the film field's differentiation. Distinction between mainstream and artistic film shows a gradual rather than a dichotomous positioning that spans between conventionality and innovation. Apparently, the intertwining of small-scale and large-scale film fields cannot be perceived as a straightforward loss of distinction or an overall shift of production logics, but rather as 'production on the boundaries' in which filmmakers combine production logics to cater to publics with various levels of aesthetic fluency and omnivorous taste patterns.

In this article we study how the frequency of book-reading – a form of legitimate culture – develops in the period from adolescence to young adulthood and how it is influenced by parents' education, parental reading socialization climate, school and their interactions. In disentangling parental and educational effects we contribute to the cultural reproduction–cultural mobility debate. We use multi-actor panel data on three cohorts of Dutch secondary school students (and their parents) who took part in a classroom survey between the ages of 14 and 17, and who participated in at least one of the follow-up surveys two, four and six years later. We find that the amount of book-reading is more strongly associated with education than with parents' reading socialization. The influence of parents increases slightly in the period from adolescence to young adulthood. Differences in reading behaviour between students of different educational programmes increase during secondary education, but decrease in the period after secondary schooling. The transition to tertiary education hardly affects the frequency of reading. Overall, the results are more in line with the cultural reproduction model than with the cultural mobility model.

This study looks at population response to government containment strategies during initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in four high-trust Northern European countries-Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden-with special emphasis on expressions of governmental trust. Sentiment analysis and topic modeling analysis were performed using Twitter data from three phases during the initial European lockdown, and results were compared over time and between countries. Findings show that, in line with existing theory, assertive crisis responses and proactive communication were generally well-received, whereas tentative crisis responses or indications by the authorities that the crisis was manageable were generally met with suspicion. In addition, while government support was high in all countries during the height of the crisis, messages critical of the government as well as conspiracy theories were nevertheless widely circulated. Importantly, countries with the least assertive strategies, rather than clear negative responses, saw heightened polarization of sentiment in the population. Furthermore, in the case of Sweden, a laissez-faire strategy was generally accepted by the population, despite strong criticism from other countries, until mortality rates started to rise. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed with an emphasis of prior trust as a potential explanatory factor. Future research should seek to replicate these findings in other countries with different levels of prior governmental trust or with a different severity of the COVID-19 outbreak than the countries in this study as well as triangulate the findings of this study using alternative methods.

This article studies how people across Europe think about cultural value, including cultural heritage, and how this is related to their media usage. Drawing on data from the Eurobarometer in October 2017, which were designed with EU cultural policy goals in mind, we examine which cultural value orientations are most prevalent among citizens in European Union countries, and how these are related to their use of legacy news media and online media, their trust in professional journalists and social networks, and the media system their country belongs to. Our findings show three distinct types of cultural value orientation among Europeans: valuing cultural heritage, valuing cultural exchange, and skepticism towards European culture. These orientations map onto two out of three pillars of EU policy goals. While individual media usage and trust are important predictors of these orientations, we find limited effects of media systems, including market shares of public broadcasters.

This article examines how cultural classification processes develop over time. Specifically, we analyse author selection in literary textbooks for Dutch secondary education, and how this selection has changed since the 1960s. The content analysis of 34 literary textbooks addresses both structural properties of classifications (levels of consensus, hierarchical order and innovation) and background characteristics of selected authors. Results show textbooks increasingly focus on a more limited group of authors, raising the overall levels of consensus and hierarchy. At the same time, textbooks have become more heterogeneous and innovative, inasmuch as they increasingly include female, ethnic minority and semi-literary authors as well as authors who recently made their debut. These results suggest, first, that literary experts continue to influence curriculum content and, second, that the erosion of boundaries between `high art' and `low art' may not be as clear-cut as has recently been suggested.