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The new trend of politically polarized media in Spain has led the authors of this paper to rethink the relationship between media and citizens within selective exposure, perception and retention theory and its influence on electoral behavior. The selection of political information contents by citizens during electoral campaigns forms a diet that influences their votes. Therefore, this research article attempts to clarify the relationship between the consumption of political information from mass media and the voters' electoral behavior amid the new media reality of the country. For this, and per the post-electoral surveys of the Center for Sociological Research (CIS, for its acronym in Spanish), it studies the effects of citizens' media exposure during the 2015 and 2016 general elections on voting. In these years, there was a crisis in the party system in Spain after several decades of bipartisanship and institutional stability. The results allow concluding that the political discussion in the country builds on two lines of confrontation: ideological (left-right) and territorial, which politically polarizes those citizens from territories with their own identity (mainly Catalonia). Media positively influence the political narrative since voters consume political information from related media as a symbol of electoral reaffirmation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The act of publishing common editorial articles in newspapers with different ideology and origin was a technique used along Spanish Transition to defend democratic positions in disestablishing circumstances, like terrorism. Once democratic state recovered normality, these practices fell into obscurity. But more than three decades since then, twelve newspapers from Catalunya, among them the leading La Vanguardia and El Periódico, published on 26 of November an extensive editorial defending the Statute of Autonomy of Catalunya and Catalan identity with the title "The dignity of Catalunya". The combined editorial can be a valuable resource to express shared common grounds on facts that require so, nevertheless, this conjunctural agreement should not imply a lack of pluralism [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]