European Media Governance

National and Regional Dimensions

Georgios Terzis

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781841501925
• eBook ISBN: 9781841502199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

A multitude of factors affect how the European media industry is governed, including commercialisation, concentration, convergence and globalisation. George Terzis' collection, European Media Governance, is the first volume to concentrate on analysing and explaining how European countries are slowly conceding control of the media from the government to the market, professional and public forces.

This impressive volume provides a detailed examination of all aspects of media governance, including media ownership structures, government policies, citizen's organisations and union's accountability systems, for 32 European countries. European Media Governance includes recent research into technological developments and provides sources for more information in each country. In addition to this incredibly diverse scale of research and analysis, the book provides a companion website with regular updates. Terzis' European Media Governance addresses all aspects of media governance in Europe, reflecting contemporary developments in both the countries analysed and their media, creating a comprehensive and reliable source.

THE EASTERN EUROPEAN/POST-COMMUNIST MEDIA MODEL COUNTRIES

INTRODUCTION

Karol Jakubowicz

The collapse of the communist system led to a debate among media policy-makers and scholars as to the direction and expected final outcome of that process. Some assumed straight transplantation of generalized ‘Western’ models. Others argued that media change was an open-ended process and that the “idealized Western European model” had either vanished or become inaccessible (Sukosd and Bajomi-Lazar 2003; Mungiu-Pippidi 2003).

Had Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) book come out earlier, it would have been clearer that though the process may be open-ended, the range of options is not limitless. Hallin and Mancini confirm that media systems are shaped by the socio-political and cultural features of their countries, including notably the degree of democratic consolidation and the level of actual or potential societal conflict. In other words, they display a high degree of what we may call “systemic parallelism”. We will take this as our point of departure in the following analysis. The goal is to see whether Central and Eastern European media systems can be compared to any of Hallin and Mancini’s systems.

The term “post-communist countries” covers nations in the following regions: Central Europe (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and the Baltic States – Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia); eastern Balkans (Romania, Bulgaria); western Balkans (Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania); European CIS countries: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova); south Caucasus countries: (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia); Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) and Mongolia. They differ widely in many respects (history, culture, religion, level of development) and practically the only thing many of them have in common is the legacy of the communist system.

Some of these countries have few prospects of progress towards a democratic system (see Carothers 2002; Krastev 2006). However, there are also examples of relatively encouraging post-communist democratization, though what has been achieved so far are hybrid forms of democracy, including formal democracy; elite democracy; partitocrazia; or a system of a tyrannical majority (Cichosz 2006). In these cases, parallels with systems identified by Hallin and Mancini may, perhaps, be sought given that they identify precisely political system development as the main factor affecting the shape of the media system, including especially the fact of early or late democratization (and by the same token the degree of consolidation of democracy achieved in a particular country).

Sitter (2005) discusses two approaches to comparative analysis of political systems in Western and Eastern Europe:

Looking at similarities with earlier developments in Western Europe. Perhaps the most obvious comparison, says Sitter, is to the Mediterranean transitions to democracy in the 1970s, or even post-war democratisation in Germany and Italy;

East European exceptionalism.

We would agree with Sitter that developments in the region since 1989 have been less ‘exceptional’ than is sometimes argued. Also with Dryzek and Holmes (2002: 256) who state that “differences between at least the more democratized CEE states and the West look to be of degree rather than kind” (see also Sukosd and Bajomi-Lazar 2003).

Sitter’s suggestion that comparison of the situation in post-communist countries with the Mediterranean ones is potentially most fruitful seems to be supported by Splichal’s (1994, 2004) use of the phrase “Italianization of the media” to describe the process of media change in post-communist countries.

Like the countries with the “Mediterranean” media system, post-communist countries are characterized by late democratization and incomplete, or (in some cases) little advanced, modernization and weak rational-legal authority combined in many cases with a dirigiste state (for analyses of the situation in Mediterranean countries, also in terms of their media systems, see, e.g., Statham 1996; Marletti and Roncaloro 2000; Papatheodorou, Machin 2003; Mancini 2000; Hallin, Papathanassopoulos 2002). Like their southern European counterparts, they also display features of “state paternalism” or indeed “political clientelism”, as well as panpoliticismo, i.e. a situation when politics pervades and influences many social systems, economics, the judicial system and, indeed, the media; the development of liberal institutions is delayed; and there is a political culture favouring a strong role of the state and control of the media by political elites.

Another shared feature is highly tumultuous political life. Discontinuous social change (rapid change, broad in scale) generally has pathological consequences, generating especially intense conflicts (Eckstein 2001). This cannot but affect the media system.

Theorists of post-communist transformation often call it an “imitative” or “mimetic” process. It can be seen to contain two forms of imitation:

Deliberate copying of Western European arrangements

Natural repetition or replication of the same processes in comparable circumstances, when more or less the same factors and forces impact on the situation as in other countries

Where post-communist countries sought to approximate western arrangements, many policy or legislative measures in the media field represented the first form of imitation. Later, as the new political systems and market forces began to affect media systems, imitation increasingly began to take the second form.

The Newspaper Industry

Change in the print media after 1989 involved three main process: the increase in the number of titles, growth in the number of companies and the emergence of new market segments (Gulyás 1999). In most post-communist countries, demonopolization of the media was followed by a veritable flood of new print media, many of them published by new political parties. Demand for party newspapers proved to be non-existent, however, and soon this category began to disappear.

With time, consolidation of the market, much of it foreign controlled in many post-communist countries, went hand in hand with its segmentation, especially the appearance of segments which had previously been underdeveloped or non-existent, such as tabloid newspapers, hobby magazines, women’s and fashion magazines and so on. At the same time, democratization of the market also meant that local and community newspapers, NGO publications and minority newspapers made their appearance.

Chorazki (1999) has identified the following sequence of events with reference to local and sub-local dailies and periodicals in Poland:

1988–1991 – a heroic period of civic and public service involved in spearheading the process of change;

1992–1993 – a period of party political involvement, as the media scene is politicized and new political parties win control of many media;

From 1994 onward – a period of market-driven changes and consolidation (with two main trends observable since 1997: on the one hand, the influx of foreign capital into the local and sub-local media market, and on the other – the consolidation of strong Polish publishers of regional chains of dailies and periodicals of this nature).

Similar processes have taken place in the newspaper industries in all the countries under consideration in this volume. Tabloidization, falling circulations and the survival of only limited numbers of quality newspaper now appear to be the norm in all of them.

Political Parallelism

Immature democracies produce either “politics-over-broadcasting” or “politics-in-broadcasting” systems. This is very much the case in post-communist countries. Political parallelism is high in their media systems, especially in public service broadcasting. This is reflected first of all in the manner of appointing members of broadcasting regulatory authorities. Two methods are most prevalent:

Appointment by legislative: “the Central European model” (Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia)

Appointment by both executive and legislative: “the French model,” adopted in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Ukraine

In both cases, care is usually taken to ensure direct reflection of the balance of political forces in Parliament in the composition of the regulatory body.

Another area where political parallelism is evide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• The North Atlantic/Liberal Media Model Countries
• The Northern European/Democratic Corporatist Media Model Countries
• The Mediterranean/Polarized Pluralist Media Model Countries
• The Eastern European/Post-Communist Media Model Countries
• Conclusions
• About the Authors