Media Choice in Times of Uncertainty —Media Richness Theory in Context of Media Choice in Times of Political and Economic Crisis

What drives the audience’s choice of media is one of the most studied topics in mass communication research. Both academia and field professionals benefit from the studies that cast light on this fundamental issue. However, there is a lack of attention to interdisciplinary approaches. The purpose of this study is to implement Media Richness Theory (MRT), rarely used in mass communication research to address the issues, which otherwise would remain unexplained since none of the existing mass communication theories combine factors such as a crisis situation, visual richness of media content and media choice of audience simultaneously. Findings of multivariate analysis of variances applied to survey data from the European Social Survey support the researchers’ hypotheses that during the political and economic crisis in Greece, the assumptions of MRT explained the changes in audience’s behavior towards a decrease in visually “lean” in favor of using visually “rich” media.