In an era of polarization, lies and conspiracy theories, walls are going up between people with differing views, religions, and politics. With limited opportunities to talk and listen in a respectful way â to deliberate â what will it take to break down those barriers? While attention often focuses on what politicians and the media should do, what about the creative sector? What role can artists play in preserving freedom and promoting deliberation in order to bring communities closer together?
The Faculty of Journalism, Information and Book Studies, University of Warsaw, in collaboration with the Media Diversity Institute Global, is organizing an event which will explore the contribution the arts, culture and media sector can make to social cohesion.
Mediadelcom publicised a video on Youtube in what “talking heads” provide insights on Media Freedom â picked at the congress of the Polish Communication Association (in GdaĆsk, Poland, September 2022). The piece has been produced by the doctoral students of the Adam Mickiewicz University (PoznaĆ); backed up by CEJC, PTKS and Com.press.
Mediadelcom had a session of its own at the congress (cf. Podcast #30). Some people from the Mediadelcom consortium appear also in the video.
Mediadelcom presented a panel at the 9th European Communication Conference by ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association), hosted on 19 – 22 October 2022 in Aarhus, Denmark. The conference carried the theme ‘Rethink Impact‘.
As described in the Conference Booklet, âthe theme âRethink Impactâ serves as a frame for discussing how media and communication research, education, and training interact with, impact on and reflect society. /- – -/ Impact concerns the conditions of translating research insight into tangible outcomes for society, policy and business. Impact also suggests that such outcomes from research and education can be (and should be) quantified and validated.â
Mediadelcomâs panel Monitoring Media Change: Concepts and Cases appeared at the International and Intercultural Communication section of the conference. Hereby, we present the abstracts of the contributions at the panel. Also, there are the slides of the opening presentation available.
It is undisputed that media and journalism fulfil important functions in democratic societies and that the media transformations of the recent years have brought along various new possibilities for informed decision-making and deliberative communication. At the same time, media change also leads to new risks that may undermine social cohesion: Trends like disinformation and hate speech are just two examples of dangerous tendencies that have been propelled by technological transformation processes and must be considered a threat for democratic societies.
In the course of the 21st century, European media and communication research has triggered an overabundance of studies that deal with such problems as well as other phenomena of contemporary media change. However, its capability to highlight problematic trends in an early phase and work out operative scenarios of media development for policy makers and media experts has obviously been limited. Although the existing knowledge is voluminous, even a cursory review reveals that it is dispersed and fragmented.
The proposed panel intends to provide an inventory of the scope and quality of media and communication research in Europe. In how far can existing studies and further data sources help to provide a reliable monitoring of current media change processes? What, in fact, are the key risks and opportunities of the media and communication development in the 21st century? And in how far can our discipline contribute to securing a functional media environment for deliberative communication in democratic societies?
These questions are in the centre of a large-scale Horizon 2020 project which is currently realised by 14 research institutions in all parts of the European continent. The presentations collected in this panel will summarize key results from the first project phase, combining innovative conceptual insights with meta-analyses of previous studies and original empirical research.
The first presentation will serve as an introduction by conceptualizing risks and opportunities for media development and providing a comparative overview over the media monitoring potentiality in the 14 participating project countries. The second presentation will focus on the specific challenges of monitoring media accountability in Europe, also drawing on the findings of a recently completed global study on the diffusion of different instruments of media self-regulation. Presentations 3 and 4 will offer exemplary case studies from selected countries in Western and Eastern Europe: The analysis of the Italian case highlights trust in journalists as an indicator of deliberative culture and showcases results from a representative survey among Internet users. The Bulgarian country study uses the technique of PEST analysis to discuss to most pressing challenges for the national media system. The fifth and final presentation turns the spotlight on the special conditions of communication and media research in smaller European countries (such as Austria, Croatia, Estonia, and Latvia) and analyses their value for the international research community. In sum, the panel not only helps to broaden our understanding of different aspects of comparative media research, but also collects valuable hints with regard to the practical relevance of media and communication research in European societies.
Media monitoring potentiality in 14 European countries: Risks and opportunities
By Halliki Harro-Loit (EST) & Tobias Eberwein (AUT)
Social acceleration has been a catalyst for rapid changes concerning the communication scapes of European societies. Democratic societies need deliberation, but what kind of communication cultures are supported by different stakeholders and structural possibilities? The aim of this introductory contribution is to conceptualize and analyse the risks and possibilities concerning the monitoring potentiality of the performance and normative regulation of news media (journalism), media usage patterns and competencies of different actors who influence the news and communication culture of societies. Until now, however, there is no holistic approach to analyse media-related risks and opportunities. The contribution will therefore develop a novel conceptual approach that enables focusing on relationships between news production and consumption as well as contextual factors related to normative regulation and media literacy. The monitoring potential is related to various stakeholders who gather data on media and media usage, transform the data into knowledge and use this knowledge for media policy.
What interests and values are served by which stakeholders and how does this actual monitoring serve the media policy in different European countries? What is the role and resources of media researchers? These research questions will be answered with the help of an extensive literature review and a comparative analysis of the monitoring potentiality of 14 European countries, based on original case studies that offer a synthetic review of the âmedia-related risks and opportunities discourseâ in the studies on media transformations and innovations. The contribution will, thus, broaden the theoretical understanding of risks and opportunities for deliberative communication and fill a knowledge gap by synchronising existing dispersed studies and data into a concept that enables evaluating risks and opportunities for deliberative communication from a transnational perspective. At the same time, it will offer a first inventory of available monitoring instruments in different communication cultures across Europe.
Media accountability: Global trends and European monitoring capabilities
By Marcus Kreutler & Susanne Fengler (DEU)
The concept of media accountability has long been analysed with a focus on Western or European democracies and on instruments developed in these countries. Even in Europe, comparative research has so far mostly highlighted the situation at singular points in time, sometimes limited to few instruments. To broaden the view on the topic, this paper follows a two-step approach: In a first step, it highlights trends in media accountability from a global perspective in order to develop a comprehensive framework of instruments and their interplay in different social settings. In a second step, building on this framework, monitoring capabilities for media accountability in 14 European countries are being evaluated.
The analysis of global trends in the field is based on a study of 44 countries across world regions and political regime types. Findings show that the concept of media accountability has a âlimited capability to travelâ, as observed by Voltmer (2012) for media systems in general.
Existing literature (e.g., Puppis, 2007) has described media governance as a continuum, from media regulation, to co-regulation, to professional self-regulation. However, this âliberalâ model, developed against the backdrop of established press freedom in Anglo-Saxon and Western European countries, does not accommodate the nuanced phenomena of media accountability our study has portrayed.
Instead, we find âmedia councilsâ in countries with the tightest media control â clearly examples of âmedia captureâ (Mungiu-Pippidi, 2013; Coskun, 2020). We find media accountability instruments which are maintained by foreign actors, as media markets are too weak to sustain local initiatives. Co-regulatory practices and statutory councils are more common, but pose a risk of being exploited for political purposes in countries marked by patrimonialism and clientelism. Several Post-Soviet country reports show that if media accountability systems do not mature, there is a considerable risk of falling back into a state of media regulation. Traditional liberal models may also no longer fit to explain changing media ecosystems in Western countries.
The findings described above have also structured the study of monitoring capabilities in Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Sweden. Beyond the status quo, the capability to monitor changes and trends over time has been of particular interest. A general observation is that even in countries with relatively well-developed monitoring and research structures, much of the available literature is focusing on normative questions, and available data is not necessarily comparable longitudinally or cross-nationally. International efforts like the MediaAcT project or handbooks of media accountability (Eberwein, Fengler & Karmasin, 2018; Fengler, Eberwein & Karmasin, 2022) have inspired key publications in a number of countries, but are rarely followed up by a continuous monitoring of developments in the field. Several cases describe a common reason for monitoring deficits: Weak professional culture among journalists leads to ineffective and often neglected media accountability measures, which in turn limits research funding activity and funding opportunities.
Trust in journalists among the public as an indicator of deliberative culture: The case of Italy
By Sergio Splendore, Augusto Valeriani & Diego Garusi (ITA)
Media trust is one of the most debated issues in political communication. Nevertheless, it represents a concept that has required continuous refinement from a methodological and empirical point of view (StrömbĂ€ck et al., 2020). In the contemporary high choice political information environment (Van Aelst et al., 2017), characterised by the construction of highly personalised media experiences (Castro et al., 2021), it is even more crucial to understand how trust changes with respect to citizensâ media repertoires.
This contribution aims to study a neglected issue regarding media trust: trust that people maintain toward journalists (i.e. those that are professionally trained to gather, process, and distribute information of public relevance). However, the overall scenario has been rapidly changed and a wide variety of other actors, professional and non-professional, including citizens themselves, perform similar actions within increasingly crowded information ecologies (Lewis, 2012; Carlson & Lewis, 2015).
In such a context, the study aims to answer the following questions: (1) How much do citizens trust journalists? and (2) How do their media consumption repertoires influence their perceptions? Considering trust in journalists makes it possible to capture citizensâ judgements regarding the ability of the journalistic professional system to still perform a public service in contemporary societies.
Media trust is one of the most debated issues in political communication. Nevertheless, it represents a concept that has required continuous refinement from a methodological and empirical point of view (StrömbĂ€ck et al., 2020). In the contemporary high choice political information environment (Van Aelst et al., 2017), characterised by the construction of highly personalised media experiences (Castro et al., 2021), it is even more crucial to understand how trust changes with respect to citizensâ media repertoires.
This contribution aims to study a neglected issue regarding media trust: trust that people maintain toward journalists (i.e. those that are professionally trained to gather, process, and distribute information of public relevance). However, the overall scenario has been rapidly changed and a wide variety of other actors, professional and non-professional, including citizens themselves, perform similar actions within increasingly crowded information ecologies (Lewis, 2012; Carlson & Lewis, 2015). In such a context, the study aims to answer the following questions: (1) How much do citizens trust journalists? and (2) How do their media consumption repertoires influence their perceptions? Considering trust in journalists makes it possible to capture citizensâ judgements regarding the ability of the journalistic professional system to still perform a public service in contemporary societies.
The study presents the results of a CAWI survey to a representative sample (n=1563) of the Italian population of Internet users in the age range 18â74, interviewed in the second half of May 2020. This was a crucial context to study trust in journalists because the first mass lock-down following the COVID-19 pandemic just ended, then citizens needed to find information and to develop new (or consolidate old) relationships of trust with information sources (Scaglioni & Sfardini, 2021). At the same time, the cacophony of voices, as well as the centrality assumed in the communication space by doctors, scientists, and others non-journalistic actors, has created a context capable of significantly impacting trust patterns in the traditional âexpert mediatorsâ of information.
This research considers trust in journalists as an indicator of potential deliberative communication. The higher the trust, the more citizens feel as aware and informed participants of the public debate. The ways how the determinants of this trust operate indicate what are the risks that hinder the realization of the deliberative communication and the opportunities that are reserved for it. The main results emerging from the estimated multivariate models show that there is a negative correlation between the use of social media for information on matters of public importance and trust in journalists. In addition, those who use politiciansâ accounts as a privileged source of information on social media have lower trust in journalists. Among other issues, these results pose one of the most frequent questions concerning political communication, i.e. which role social media are playing within the political communication environment.
Challenges of deliberative communication in the Bulgarian media ecosystem
Contemporary societies are undergoing significant transformations which correlate with the dynamic developments of the information and communication technologies. Today these transformations are being catalysed by the intensity of the media ecosystem, encompassing all actors and factors whose interaction allows the media to function and to fulfil their role in society. It combines the mission of the traditional media with the potential of the blogosphere, social networks and mobile communications. Situated in the context of globalisation processes, the media themselves are undergoing multi-layered transformations. Using PEST analysis, the paper examines the political, economic, social and technological challenges to the Bulgarian media ecosystem within the framework of deliberative communication.
For the proper functioning of the contemporary media ecosystem, a number of political issues of the basic pillars of Europeâs audiovisual model are becoming increasingly important, such as: freedom of expression and access to information; pluralism of opinions and variety of content; professional standards and journalistic ethics; transparency of ownership and accountability to the audiences; protection of underage and vulnerable social groups; cooperation between regulation, self-regulation and co-regulation; the expansion of social media, etc.
The sustainability of these principles is a decisive factor for the democratic functioning of the countryâs human-centred societal developments.
In contemporary times, the media and telecommunications sectors are among the industries that feel the strongest economic effects of the digital transformation. Internationalisation of economy and convergence of modern communications favour the prevalence of multi-sector and multinational corporations. At the same time, the globality and uniformity of the Information Society are dissolving into the separatism of glocality.
Today, transformations in the communication environment are catalysed by the social impacts, which also lead to a paradigm shift in the media â from mass media channels to individual media services. A virtual online mosaic culture has been created which, due to its interactive nature, acts as integrating while having alienating and restrictive effects on people, destroying their âliveâ communication. This phenomenon is significant to understanding such phenomena as information overload and digital fatigue that consumers are facing.
The technological factors are the most active among those elements, affecting the construction rate and the functioning of the contemporary global information society. Therefore, media, information and digital literacy skills acquire additional importance in todayâs intercultural dialogue in the communication environment. The ICTâs developments are so intense that it is difficult to define whether because of technological and economic convergence the media sector will evolve to the ever-increasing deregulation in favour of the market or to the serving of the public interest.
Some of the findings of the study have been disseminated to policy makers, media managers, and academia.
Media and communication research in smaller countries in Europe
By Ragne KĂ”uts-Klemm (EST), Zrinjka PeruĆĄko, Dina Vozab (HRV), Anda RoĆŸukalne, Alnis Stakle, Ilva Skulte (LVA), Tobias Eberwein (AUT)
Big and small states are equal in respect of functioning as comprehensive entities â they all need state apparatuses, the ability to provide services for citizens, the capacity to protect themselves, and appropriate media systems to guarantee a deliberative communication space for the democratic processes. Nevertheless, the resources of smaller countries can be limited and this can have an impact on the performance of their functions. Small states deserve special attention. Not only can the development of media systems in smaller countries have specific implications, like Puppis (2009) suggests, their self-reflecting capacity manifested as institutionalised media research can have limitations deriving from their smallness, too.
âSmallnessâ is a relational concept. For our contribution, we will define it broadly â based not mainly on the GDP per capita, but on the actual and perceived size of the population as well. Perceptions of smallness can also derive from the neighbouring of giant same-language countries (Meier & Trappel, 1992).
We will compare the monitoring and research capabilities of media developments in four small countries in Europe that represent contrasting historical backgrounds as well as different types of media systems: Austria, Croatia, Estonia, and Latvia. We will use the data collected for a case study of a large-scale H2020 project â a comparative research initiative that intends to highlight risks and opportunities for deliberative communication in the European media landscape. In the course of this case study, researchers from the participating countries conducted an extensive review of available academic publications and additional data sources in the fields of media regulation and accountability, journalism, media usage, and media-related competencies.
The aim of our comparative analysis is to identify factors that can have an impact on the monitoring and research capabilities of smaller countries. It will answer the following questions: What are the research interests of academic media studies in these countries? Is the research oriented toward national society or more broadly? How is academic research integrated into the international research community? At what stage is the research in respect of institutionalisation of communication as a scientific discipline? The results of the analysis will not only broaden the ongoing debate about comparative media systems research, but also offer valuable insights for media managers and policy-makers in smaller (European) countries.
The second semi-annual meeting of Mediadelcom in 2022 takes place in Bulgaria, at the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication of Sofia University âSt. Kliment Ohridskiâ.
At such meetings, the consortium fine-tunes the concepts and variables for the research. This time, the first book details are being addressed, as well as the visions for comparative research among the 14 participating countries. Also, the agent approach and the resultant agent-oriented modelling is getting more focused as a tool.
The consortium is carefully listening to the feedback from the distinguished professors from the Advisory Board, Daniel Hallin and Kaarle Nordenstreng, and will adjust sail based on that.
Also the arrangements for intensified dissemination of the results have started to let the professional, academic and public audiences to get the load of the observations, conclusions and policy recommendations by the Mediadelcom project.
The Mediadelcom consortium meets this week in Dubrovnik, Croatia to discuss the issues of WP3. This contains the fuzzy set approach in qualitative comparative data analysis, which the consortium is setting up for further research.
Also, the publication plans are under discussion. As to the Grant Application, there will be two books published during the project.
In parallel, the 10thGraduate Spring School & Research Conference on Comparative Media Systems is running to cover the topics of deliberative communication. This is co-organized with the ECREA CEE Network & Mediadelcom, titled âMedia System Characteristics as Risks or Opportunities for Deliberative Communicationâ.
Mediadelcom podcasts started to introduce in more detail the domains, which as the hypothesis suggests create the most of risks and opportunities for media. These domains are: legal and ethical, journalism, media competencies, media usage patterns.
Podcast episode #3 provided some insights into the legal-ethical domain.
Contributors of the Podcast #3.Snapshot from the Teams screen.
Prof. Halliki Harro-Loit, the Mediadelcom project coordinator, provided the general introduction into the particular domain saying:
The legal and ethical domain provides a normative frame for the other domains of journalism, media usage and competency. It’s also true that legal regulation and the accountability system have both been described by previous research teams. Still, this domain is important for the risk analysis, especially because we have to check first if there is a legal basis for deliberative communication. And then, of course, it’s more even more important how the legal regulation is implemented in national contexts.
Marcus Kreutler from the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany, has been working on the aspects and variables for the accountability (largely self-regulation) topic, for which he provided an abstract:
Our domain of regulation on the whole is concerned with what the media and what journalists can or should do. This concerns mainly two questions. First, what can be published, in legal terms, that would be a freedom of expression. And second, how to gather the material to be published, in legal terms, that is freedom of information.
Liberal constitutions try not to interfere with what can be said or what can be published for very good reasons. And there are only few exceptions defined by law. But that doesn’t mean that everything else is acceptable or helpful for the society or from the perspective of media ethics. And this is where media accountability actually comes into play. We are looking at non-state mechanisms that try to hold the media accountable to society, which they are supposed to work for.
Ideally, media accountability is filling that relatively huge space that is free of legal regulation. But it can also be seen as a step ahead to avoid legal interference. When media accountability instruments are working, legal action in that field is simply unnecessary. That leaves a kind of freedom that is actually desirable. If we’re looking at it historically, institutions like voluntary press councils or ombudsmen were often an attempt to prevent external legal interference. These statutory institutions or state institutions could govern what the media are supposed to do. So it can be a way to safeguard the autonomy of the media. It doesn’t mean that the reel of journalism or media ethics is necessarily narrower on Twitter than the legal framework is. To give you an example, journalism ethics demand that journalistic sources are protected by the journalists. But penal laws, on the other hand, might require to identify these sources.
The mechanisms of media accountability differ in each country context. So this is an important area of research within the Mediadelcom project. What we are trying to do here is to look at both agents within but also outside journalism to get a complete picture. So if we are looking at media accountability mechanisms, from a very narrow point of view, we are basically concentrating on journalistic agents and mechanisms that are in place inside journalism. But of course, the picture can be broadened to have a look at other agents who also play a role here.
If you think of some countries, particularly in Northern Europe where we have a very highly institutionalized framework of media self-regulation, of media accountability, we are quickly thinking of press councils, or established codes of ethics or ombudsmen that work either for the industry as a whole or for single media houses.
But there could be other means as well. Aspects like media-critical coverage, both inside journalism, but also outside journalism that play an important role. The risk really lies in the mixture of mechanisms in daily action. If you think of press councils again, a council to deal with audience complaints was introduced pretty early in the United Kingdom, for example, but it failed to be very stable in the long run. So other mechanisms could really come into play.
The Greek team from ELIAMEP has been working on the legal variables. Anna Kandyla spoke about these considerations.
For identifying risks and opportunities for deliberative communication in the legal domain, we have chosen to follow the fundamental rights perspective. Fundamental rights do provide the necessary basis for the democratic process for citizens to be able to take part in decision-making to exercise control over it in democracies. Fundamental rights provide some consistency, when it comes to approaching various legal areas.
Within the framework of the Mediadelcom project, we have decided to take free speech as the backbone, but to dissect the freedom to freely express opinions from the right to seek, receive and impart information. We single out freedom of expression as the first conceptual variable in the study of the legal domain, and freedom of information as the second. Freedom of expression will be covered through a set of operational variables that we are developing, aspects that are related to the freedom to express ideas, views and opinions. Freedom of information – this conceptual variable will focus on elements specifically related to access to public information.
We will base assessing risk and opportunities on two criteria. The first is the existence of regulatory safeguards that create an enabling environment for the exercise of each of these freedoms in the countries covered by our project. And so we’re not merely interested in the formal existence of particular provisions but whether these provisions are really creating conditions for exercising these freedoms. And of course, international codes and conventions and other standards of good practice are relevant for forming this evaluation.
Still, assessing risks and opportunities is not just a matter of evaluating the relevant legal codes. Sometimes we have them looking good on paper but, in practice, they are not enforced. Thus, the implementation of the rule of law has important implications for freedoms of expression and information. Hence, our second criterion focuses on the effective application of rules and standards. In assessing risks and opportunities, we try to take both dimensions into account, and see how they interact and what the end result would be.
The Swedish researchers present conceptual variables on journalism. Screen-shot from the Teams plaform display.
The H2020 project MEDIADELCOM officially started today, as the four-day kick-off meeting started. Several founding aspects were discusses, including the essence of deliberative communication which is what the entire project is all about.
Some of the focus of the project has been introduced in our earlier website posts, both written and oral. We continue to produce our outreach materials on the project activities and brainwork.
The rest of the kick-off meeting will be focused on several aspects and tools (e.g., variables, templates etc.) being addressed in the project, especially upon WP1 – Work Package 1 – but also on dissemination of findings, research ethics, reporting to the EC.
The consortium will hear about the simultaneous EU funded projects in the field of Evolving Media Landscapes and Europeanisation â Mediatized EU and EUMEPLAT. In parallel, the advisory board members and the surveying EC officers will give several addresses to the consortium members.
The current webpage is under construction. Thus, you may witness some pecularities during the development work. All items on the webpage are subjected to change.
Also we would appreciate, if you let us know about possible errors, shortfalls and suggestions at projectmediadelcom.eu.
The MEDIADELCOM is carried out by 17 teams representing 14 EU countries. The project pays special attention to CEE.
The project MEDIADELCOM is titled Critical Exploration of Media Related Risks and Opportunities for Deliberative Communication: Development Scenarios of the European Media Landscape, which is financed within the EU’s funding programme for research and innovation Horizon 2020. The project is coordinated by the University of Tartu (Estonia) and is to start in March 2021.
The overall objective of MEDIADELCOM is to develop a diagnostic tool (multiple scenario building model) for policy makers, educators, media critical bodies and institutions, as well as for media experts and journalists, which enables the provision of holistic assessment of risks and opportunities concerning deliberative communication and consequently social cohesion in Europe.
The MEDIADELCOM diagnostic tool enables drawing multiple risks and opportunity scenarios of the European media landscape at large, as well as the development of media landscapes in individual countries. Conceptual and operational variables for multiple scenarios will be created by thoroughly examining the diachronic and synchronic changes in news media ecosystems in 14 European countries with special attention to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).
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