The media play a decisive role in democracy’s functioning. In contemporary Europe, the quality of the democratic process is strongly shaped by the media, since this is the main channel by which political information reaches citizens, as well as the primordial arena of collective debate and expression of a plurality of points of view. However, the various types of media that operate in a particular context, and the relations between them—what are usually called media systems—differ strongly in the degree to which they perform these functions (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Santana Pereira 2012, 2016; Brüggeman et al. 2014).

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