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INTRODUCTION
Putting media accountability on the map
Tobias Eberwein, Susanne Fengler and Matthias Karmasin
Media accountability on the rise?
Public interest in media issues has recently reached levels probably unseen in Europe since the 1970s. While the international media landscape is shaken by far-reaching transformations, heated debates about the responsibility and accountability of media and journalism take place that were hitherto unknown in democratic societies within Europe. The inflationary use of politically motivated catchwords like âfake newsâ and âlying pressâ (LĂŒgenpresse) points to a growing concern with the journalistic key values of truthfulness and accuracy, which was initially cultivated by the extreme political right wing but has by now become a strategic tool on the stage of world politics â as the example of Donald Trump demonstrates â while also being debated among social media users. Strategic international actors with vested political interests, like Russia, increasingly use media channels to influence public opinion in Europe, thus challenging the credibility of Western mainstream media. Similarly, democratically elected governments, not only in Poland and Hungary, are putting rising pressure on national journalists â a phenomenon believed to have been overcome after the end of the Soviet regime.
At the same time, the ongoing economization of practical news work, manifesting itself in a transnational trend towards media concentration, an aggravated pressure for profits and, ultimately, an erosion of journalismâs financial basis, make it necessary to reflect on media performance too â not only with regard to autonomy, impartiality and ethics of journalistic actors, but also to mediaâs professional research capacities as the core asset of journalism. Moreover, technological change propels new challenges and questions: How reliable is journalistic information in the age of digital media? How far do algorithms and robot journalism, and social or automated forms of communication, transform the ways in which we attribute responsibility to professional journalists? Or do these new forms of public online communication even make traditional journalism superfluous? In the light of these and other technological, economic and political constraints, it is no surprise that audience trust in journalistic products is under threat. As demonstrated by the Eurobarometer polls, media trust in countries like France and Greece has literally eroded â probably due to the way the media handled the recurrent Islamist terrorist attacks in France and the budget crisis in Greece. It has been stable only in Northern European countries with their well-equipped public service media and still relatively vivid newspaper sectors. In the given situation, media responsibility and accountability seem to be more important than ever, if journalism wants to justify its social function â and survive.
The necessity of discussing and reacting to such challenges has not only been absorbed by journalists and their audiences, but also by media policy-makers. At the level of the European Union (EU), for example, the so-called High-Level Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism put the topic of media accountability on the agenda in 2013 â in an attempt to protect and promote free and responsible journalism in Europe. In its report for the European Commission (Vike-Freiberga, DĂ€ubler-Gmelin, Hammersley and Maduro, 2013), the expert group recommended â among other things â that media organizations should implement or adapt their codes of conduct in reaction to the challenges posed by the current media transformations and subdue themselves to the supervision of independent media councils that should exist in all EU member states. However, the suggestions have yielded fierce protests by the media industry in many countries, which has once more demonstrated the hesitation of media organizations to invest in the transparency they keep on demanding from other powerful actors.
How do journalistic actors across Europe deal with media accountability? Which mechanisms for making media responsible towards the public are currently available â and which of them have proven to be successful? How far does the diffusion of media accountability instruments vary in the media systems and journalism cultures across Europe? Are there any transnational commonalities, or do the differences prevail? Is it possible to detect notable problems or dysfunctional developments? And what does scientific research on media accountability have to say in this respect?
Our European Handbook of Media Accountability attempts to give answers to these and similar questions. It does so mainly by collecting country reports that summarize and evaluate the status quo of media accountability â and media accountability research â in 33 key countries in Europe and beyond, before juxtaposing their findings and providing a comparative perspective. Taken together, the chapters in this volume constitute the first comprehensive analysis of the current challenges and perspectives of media accountability in the whole of Europe, which we expect to be highly relevant not only for the academic field, but also for media practitioners and policy-makers.
However, before the results of our studies are presented in detail, a closer look at the underlying terms and concepts seems indispensable.1
Definitions, concepts and previous research
Western democracies have developed detailed legal frameworks for their media industries in past decades in order to ensure media pluralism (Psychogiopoulou, 2012). Furthermore, organizations at the European level, like the EU via the Audiovisual Media Services Directive,2 are involved in the legislative process shaping national media structures (see for example Nikoltchev, 2006; Keller, 2011). In contrast to the legislative framework regulating the structures of the media industry, journalistic output is safeguarded from almost any regulation by the state (Puppis, 2009b, pp. 57, 61). Basic law ensures journalismâs independence from state intervention, and consequently (at least in theory) the state has, with very few exceptions, no right to interfere in the processes and products of journalism â as it had done for centuries, and still does in autocratic states. However, precisely because journalism fulfils a public watchdog function, and because it can also be considered as a âpublic goodâ, media needs to be responsible to âsocietyâ3 for the consequences of the journalistic practices they employ and their journalistic output (see Russ-Mohl, 1994; Bertrand, 2000; Bardoel and dâHaenens, 2004).
Media self-regulation, then, is the process of setting, implementing and sanctioning rules by the members of the profession themselves (Puppis, 2009b, pp. 36, 57). Bertrand offers a wide definition of media accountability, including not only media professionals, but potentially media users to the process also, when he defines media accountability as âany non-State means of making media responsible towards the publicâ (2000, p. 107). Media accountability may also subsume the concept of media transparency that has recently been discussed as another promising means to regain or preserve trust in journalism (Meier and Reimer, 2011), implying that media organizations make information about editorial processes, as well as the journalistic actors involved, available to the public (e.g. media ownership, profiles of journalists, newsroom blogs and links to sources).
We can classify media accountability instruments (MAIs) by using a slightly modified version of Shoemaker and Reeseâs (1996) model of spheres of influence on journalism.4 Russ-Mohl (1994), Nordenstreng (1999) and Hafez (2002) have similarly suggested classifying media accountability instruments according to the specific actor groups involved in the accountability process â be they on the individual, the organizational, the professional or the extramedia level.
The earliest MAIs were located at the professional level: Ethics codes and trade journals have been published by journalistsâ associations and unions since the late 19th century, and press councils have been set up to decide cases of malpractice in journalism since the 1950s (Brown, 1974; Wiedemann, 1992). Moreover, after the deregulation of the broadcasting sector in Western Europe in the 1980s, media journalism in the mass media gained some prominence (Fengler, 2003).
Accountability efforts by individual news outlets (the organizational level) have played an increasing role since the 1970s, when media organizations started to employ ombudsmen and introduce organizational codes of ethics (Marzolf, 1991, p. 196). In many journalism cultures, however, the newsroom has been neglected as an institution of media accountability and responsibility up until today (Meier, 2010).
In the digital age, many new media accountability initiatives have emerged online, among them media and newsroom blogs (e.g. the Editorsâ Blog of the BBC News5 in the United Kingdom), but also media watchblogs run by media users (like the German BILDblog6), and other media-critical activities on the social web. These new instruments increasingly have participatory features and extend the existing portfolio of media accountability practices at the individual, organizational and extramedia levels (see Domingo and Heinonen, 2008).
Our European Handbook of Media Accountability intends to place accountability much higher on mass communicationsâ research agenda, as â despite the political and public relevance of the topic â empirical studies are scarce, even in Western European countries with a decades-long tradition of media accountability, and are almost non-existent in Southern and Central Eastern Europe. Therefore, this volume aims at encouraging scholars across Europe to become involved in the study of media accountability, and thus provide most valuable insights to questions crucial to the long-term survival of European democracies. Given the lack also of normative texts and the non-existence of many accountability instruments, even in a number of EU countries represented in this book, we are grateful to our authors who have flexibly tackled the subject with broader and more practical insights into specific journalism cultures in cases where academic texts were unavailable. We are confident that this volume will provide valuable insights into accountability practices, and thus more generally into the journalism cultures and media systems that are frequently overlooked within Europe â such as Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta, among others. As all authors provide a short overview of the media landscape in their respective countries, this handbook is also a helpful tool for everyone interested in a condensed overview of EU media systems.
Generally, media accountability has not ranked highly among European mass communication scholars before the EU-funded project âMedia Accountability and Transparency in Europeâ (MediaAcT), which has provided the first comprehensive comparative study of media accountability in 14 European and Arab states (Eberwein, Fengler, Lauk and Leppik-Bork, 2011; Fengler, Eberwein, Mazzoleni, Porlezza and Russ-Mohl, 2014). MediaAcT has produced desk studies on media accountability and transparency in each of the evaluated countries, a report on innovative online accountability practices based on qualitative interviews with international experts and a quantitative survey of 1,800 journalists assessing the context factors and impact of media accountability. This handbook expands the MediaAcT network not only to each of the current 28 EU member states plus Norway and Switzerland, but also to Israel, Russia and Turkey, as selected countries with strategic significance for Europe. As those countries are characterized by remarkably different relationships between media and politics, we also continue our debate about potentials and pitfalls of media accountability in journalism cultures with restricted press freedom, starting with the inclusion of two Arab states in the MediaAcT project, and to be continued in the follow-up project to this volume: the Global Handbook of Media Accountability.
MediaAcT could build on significant pioneer studies provided by Laitila (1995), who accomplished a comparative analysis of press codes, and Bertrand (2000), who has studied the existence of press councils and ombudsmen in Europe. Furthermore, Nordenstreng (1999) has analyzed structures and practices of media self-regulation in several European countries, while Hafez (2002), as well as Limor and Himelboim (2006), has compared international press codes. Wiedemann (1992), Pöttker and Starck (2003), as well as Puppis (2009b), have compared the history and structure of press councils across Europe. Besides, comparative approaches to the study of media accountability and media self-regulation are rare, as the comprehensive MediaAcT database with national and international studies in the field demonstrates.7 In this respect, the European Handbook of Media Accountability is intended to move media accountability research to a new level â by summarizing and re-contextualizing existing studies, highlighting conspicuous research gaps and developing ideas for future analyses.
Aims and structure of the book
In order to facilitate orientation, this handbook offers a country-by-country overview of the practices and context factors of media accountability in 30 European st...
