The paper explores how and why public affairs coverage in terms of information commitment and political commitment varies across media outlets and countries in Europe and how this influences citizens’ cognitive engagement with the political process. Information about the most important news media in over 30 European countries is linked through multilevel statistical models to recent data from cross-national surveys about citizens’ political knowledge, opinionation, and self-declared interest in politics. The thorny issues measuring theoretically driven concepts in a large number of countries are mitigated by an expert survey devised for this purpose and including a large number of variables that address central questions in media systems, journalism and media policy research. It is used in conjunction with a range of hard data on media markets, socio-economic development and political system features. The paper shows that the extent to which mass media can help citizens make sense of politics has a significant cross-national variation, which is related to the characteristics of the actual information environment. Information commitment is essential, whilst political commitment not in itself bad for citizens’ political knowledge. The content type valued by professional journalism (accuracy, argument richness, depth, range, balance) does matter for citizens’ understanding of politics; different aspects of content and structure support distinct facets of citizen cognitive engagement. The media system as a whole matters, as well as soft factors, specifically journalistic culture/professionalism.
