Comparing Post-Socialist Media Systems

The Case of Southeast Europe

Zrinjka Peruško, Dina Vozab, Antonija Čuvalo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000177374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia europea

This book explains divergent media system trajectories in the countries in southeast Europe, and challenges the presumption that the common socialist experience critically influences a common outcome in media development after democratic transformations, by showing different remote and proximate configuration of conditions that influence their contemporary shape.

Applying an innovative longitudinal set-theoretical methodological approach, the book contributes to the theory of media systems with a novel theoretical framework for the comparative analysis of post-socialist media systems. This theory builds on the theory of historical institutionalism and the notion of critical junctures and path dependency in searching for an explanation for similarities or differences among media systems in the Eastern European region.

Extending the understanding of media systems beyond a political journalism focus, this book is a valuable contribution to the literature on comparative media systems in the areas of media systems studies, political science, Southeast and Central European studies, post-socialist studies and communication studies.

1 Introduction

Today, hardly anyone remembers the song Rock Me, which was performed by the Croatian group Riva and which won the Eurovision Song Contest for Yugoslavia in 1989. That year is far better known for the fall of the Berlin Wall – a clear signal that socialism had collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe. The following year (and one day after the Eurovision Song Contest was held in Zagreb in May 1990), the final round of the first post-socialist multi-party parliamentary election was held in Croatia, which at that time was still part of Yugoslavia. Despite many Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries having held their first democratic elections in the same year, Europe was still divided in terms of the Eurovision Song Contest. The only socialist country to participate in that year’s contest was Yugoslavia, which had been a member of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) since 1961. Unlike audiences in Poland, Czechoslovakia, or other Eastern European countries that were members of the Soviet controlled Warsaw Pact, audiences in socialist yet non-aligned Yugoslavia had for several decades shared in the experience of the network of associations and practices of simultaneity, sharing, and belonging represented by the Eurovision’s logo and theme tune (including what is often referred to as the greatest-ever Eurovision song: ABBA’s performance of Waterloo during the 1974 contest).

During the 30 years that have now passed since Yugoslavia’s Eurovision victory, many changes have taken place, including the fact that the country itself has withered away (Jović 2009), shifting from being the most developed, liberal, and progressive state in socialist Eastern Europe to the most troubled area of the Western Balkans. The winner of the 1990 Eurovision Song Contest was Toto Cutugno with Insieme: 1992 (Together: 1992), a tribute to the then upcoming European unification, but somehow also a harbinger of the wider enlargement of the European Union (EU) that was to follow both the milder and the more violent processes of democratization and nation building that took place in the post-socialist part of Europe.

What happened to the media in those countries? The transformations of the media following the fall of socialism involved changes in the institutions – in the rules and values but also in the practices of media professionals (including journalists) and in the media-related practices of audiences. While early research in this area focused on the common aspects of post-socialist transitions and transformations (Splichal 1994; Sparks 1998), later the focus shifted to the need to understand the diversity within the groups of post-socialist media systems. Why are the media systems in Central and Eastern Europe different from those in Western Europe? After 30 years of post-socialist media research, we are still unsure how to answer this question. Several flawed generalizations have contributed to this state of affairs: an overgeneralization of the socialist past, a narrow focus on media reforms during the post-socialist period, and a disregard for the importance of the formative period of modernization in relation to media development. This disregard for the long-term historical influences, or the tabula rasa hypothesis (Kitcshelt 1995), is responsible for many misunderstandings regarding media system and media policy development in the post-1989 CEE countries.

This book is motivated by the theoretical problem of how to explain the divergent media system trajectories observed in the new democracies of post-socialist Europe, with a focus on the least well known of them, namely the countries in Southeast Europe. The book aims to determine why the freedom of expression, independence, and autonomy of the media in countries in that region are consistently rated lower than in Central European countries, despite several decades having passed since the beginning of the post-communist democratic transition. How do these post-communist media systems compare to the media systems in Western democracies? Can sufficient commonalities be found that they could be included in the same typology? Or are these media systems so marked by their communist antecedents that they merit classification as a special type of “post-communist media system”?

From the first decade of the post-socialist transformations onwards, the media systems of CEE countries were analyzed in comparative terms to demonstrate (largely to Western audiences) how the media and their political context in Eastern Europe differed from those in the West, thereby implicitly continuing the normative classification of the Cold War era (Siebert et al. 1956). In an effort to identify commonalities in the media development trends in the CEE region, especially those that differentiated CEE media from Western media, the significant differences that existed in the institutional conditions and media manifestations between the countries were overlooked. This search for commonalities was often normatively framed in relation to the expected outcomes of media reform as a form of media democratization, and it focused on the gap between the empirical state of affairs in CEE countries and the desired outcome of democratic media and political communication/media system reform (cf. Peruško 2014). While normative approaches regarding media and democracy also predominated in much of the Western political communication research (Pfetsch and Esser 2012, pp. 26–28), having provided important insights into the gradual democratization of the CEE post-socialist media landscapes (Splichal 1994; Paletz et al. 1995; Paletz and Jakubowicz 2003; Sparks 1998; Petković 2004; Sükösd and Bajomi-Lázár 2003; Jakubowicz and Sükösd 2008; Czepek et al. 2009), such approaches do not clarify the processes and conditions that shape or produce specific media system characteristics.

The majority of studies concerning the media systems of CEE countries are either country studies, country-by-country monograph-style comparisons, or focused on specific issues. The predominant preoccupation with journalism, media and politics or media policy issues has been expanded to focus on culture, nation, and transnational trends (e.g., Downey and Mihelj 2012; Mihelj and Huxtable 2018). Prior comparative empirical research on media systems and/or their dimensions within CEE countries shares the trend of comparative research in the field of communication and media studies more generally (Esser and Hanitzsch 2012), with descriptive studies or monographic comparisons preceding theoretically shaped empirical analyses. Examples of country-by-country studies focusing on the macro level of media systems in cross-European research include the first EUROMEDIA studies conducted during the 1980s (Humphreys 2012, p. 160), while the CEE countries also appear in subsequent broader compendiums, such as the work by Terzis (2007) and the Open Society Institute’s (2005, 2012) “Television Across Europe” and “Mapping Digital Media” projects. These provide interesting baseline comparative data, although they lack a theoretical framework. An interesting and useful comparative project is Popescu et al.’s (2011) “Media Systems in Europe” project, an expert survey conducted in 34 countries, although it shares the challenges (and advantages) of other data sets based on expert opinion, including the Freedom House Freedom of Expression Index and the Reporters Without Borders Index on Press Freedom (Maestas 2018).¹

Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) theory of three media systems in Western Europe and North America has provided a theoretical framework for comparative media system research in a disciplinary climate characterized by a growing interest in all kinds of comparative research in the field of communication and media studies (Esser and Hanitzsch 2012). Despite the many valid critiques of their model (Norris 2009; Hardy 2012; Humphreys 2012), as well as their own doubts regarding the usefulness of their theory with regard to non-Western systems (Hallin and Mancini 2004, 2012), for research into CEE media systems the original model also functioned as a useful empirical benchmark for broader theoretically informed comparisons (thereby replacing the earlier, normatively framed studies).

Three approaches to comparing the media systems of CEE countries

With regard to comparing the media systems of CEE countries, it is possible to identify three distinct approaches. The predominant approach involves their classification into a fourth type of “post-socialist,” “transition,” “mixed,” or “hybrid” media system (Terzis 2007; Jakubowicz 2007, 2008; Curran and Park 2000; Puppis et al. 2009; Elvestad and Blekesaune 2008; Voltmer 2008; Aalberg et al. 2013; Nimrod et al. 2015). This fourth “type” has never been empirically described, neither by Hallin and Mancini (2004) nor by any of the cited studies.

The second group of empirical studies, which were predominantly conducted by CEE scholars from Lithuania (Balčytiene 2009), Poland (Dobek-Ostrowska 2012), and Croatia (Peruško 2012, 2013a), highlight the differences in the cultural traditions and contexts of the investigated countries, in addition to identifying certain common trends. The initial expectation that the new CEE democracies would all fit into the Mediterranean polarized pluralist model due to them being the most polarized politically and having the lowest levels of professionalization of journalism was only partially supported, as Poland was already showing conflicting trends. An important exception in relation to the early studies is de Smaele’s (1999) study of the Russian media system, in which she recognizes the cultural, political, and historical differences between Central European, Southeast European, and Eastern European countries and notes that differences should also be expected in their media systems.

An intermediate approach between a multi-country quantitative analysis and country studies involves comparative aggregate data, albeit in an interpretative fashion. This approach is exemplified by the work of Dobek-Ostrowska (2015), who proposes four types of media systems in the post-communist part of Europe – the hybrid liberal model, the politicized media model, the media-in-transition model, and the authoritarian model. The investigated countries were allocated to specific groups based on the interpretation of the country rankings within international indexes describing four dimensions – democracy, freedom of the press, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and Internet penetration with the most weight given to the character of the political system.

The third approach includes a handful of multi-country comparative studies that use aggregate data and statistical modeling (i.e., hierarchical cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, multiple regression). To date, only two studies have investigated the media systems in CEE countries, namely the work by Peruško et al. (2013, expanded in Peruško 2016), who analyzed both Western and CEE countries, and that by Castro Herrero et al. (2017), who only studied CEE countries. All these studies primarily rely on the media systems survey data gathered by Popescu et al. (2011) in addition to aggregate data obtained from the European Audiovisual Observatory, World Press Trends data, and so forth. The studies operationalize the theoretical model proposed by Hallin and Mancini (2004) for quantitative analyses based on media systems, their dimensions, and their relationships. The four examined dimensions – the professionalization of journalism, political parallelism, media market development, and the role of the state – are intended to provide an account of a mass media system that pivots on the journalism-politics relationship. The fifth dimension (i.e., the political system) was not included in either of these studies.

The media systems of CEE countries cluster with those of Western European countries

The CEE media systems appear in two of the three empirical clusters/models obtained by means of hierarchical cluster analysis in the work by Peruško et al. (2013) and by Peruško (2016). The three empirical media system models resemble to some extent Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) three models and the associated characteristics. The Mediterranean model derived from Hallin and Mancini’s typology resembles the South/East European model proposed by Peruško et al. (2013) in terms of three media system dimensions: the media market (newspaper circulation is lower than average in the analyzed group of countries), higher political parallelism, and lower professionalization of journalism. The group also exhibits a lower to medium quality of public service television, which was the indicator used to show the role of the state. The democratic corporatist model derived from Hallin and Mancini’s typology is similar to the empirical Nordic model proposed by Peruško et al. (2013), except in relation to political parallelism, which is found to be low in the empirical model (also found by Brüggemann et al. 2014), as opposed to the high political parallelism envisaged by Hallin and Mancini (2004). Low political parallelism was a characteristic of the liberal model included in Hallin and Mancini’s typology. This finding might indicate developments in this dimension that were actually envisaged by Hallin and Mancini (2004) with regard to their expectation of convergence to the liberal model. The third empirical European mainstream model is differentiated by the moderate values of both political parallelism and journalistic professionalism. It includes countries from all three models featured in Hallin and Mancini’s typology (Table 1.1). This cluster also includes several CEE countries.

When the analysis is extended to also include non-EU CEE countries for which data were available in the study by Popescu et al. (2011), we ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Explaining the transformations of post-socialist media systems
• 3 Prelude to modernity
• 4 Media systems in socialist modernity
• 5 Toward democracy: Post-socialist media systems in digital modernity
• 6 Why the media systems are the way they are
• Methodological Appendix
• References
• Index