One of the goals of current media policies is media pluralism. Media pluralism as a goal is supported through quantitative research that originates from an techno-economic paradigm that holds the media choices of audiences as public interest. This way media users are soley seen as consumers acting in a free market, and not as citizens participating in a public sphere. Croatian media policies follow Western European policies without much adaptation to local circumstances. With such practices the interest of the public is left in the hands of either political or economy elites. Free market principals of regulating the media industry enable such creation of media policies, thus effectively minimizing the influence of citizens on media regulation, but also on the public communication that is key to producing and maintaining the public sphere. In this paper it was assumed that media users have multiple dimensions of interests and are not soley acting as consumers. With that in mind, a qualitative analysis was conducted of young, educated audiences whose characteristics assume sufficient resources to understand and use different media sources. Such an analysis can provide a detailed insight into the needs of media users that go beyond the choice of a particular content or media. The results show that online oriented audiences show a naturalization of market oriented media regulation through 1) choosing a few mainstream media outlets that are not expected to provide quality contents, 2) understanding important topics as individually rather than publicly determined, 3) their unwillingness to financially support the public service media and 4) direct and indirect support of exclusively market determined media production. Despite this naturalization, user’s descriptions of ideal media correspond to media as conceived in the classic-liberal media approach of the public sphere. Media contents that are the byproduct of politically dependent and profit oriented media were described as undesirable.