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Media Policy: Another European Union Struggle?

Review by
Giovanna Dell’Orto 
University of Minnesota

Media Freedom and Pluralism: Media Policy Challenges in the Enlarged Europe, by Beata Klimkiewicz, ed. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-963-9776-73-9. 362pp.

At a time of severe financial distress and on-the-street upheavals, skepticism about the European Union is growing in both scholarly discourse and the popular press. The authors of this rich collection of essays edited by Beata Klimkiewicz offer a timely perspective on another area of struggle for the enlarged union—its ability to encourage and protect a diverse and free media system.

In the introduction, Klimkiewicz, a professor in the department of journalism and social communication at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, points out that a fast-changing technological environment and globalization are challenging European policymakers to revamp their regulatory models, especially those concerning audiovisual media and public service broadcasting. An added challenge to a common European communication policy, as to most other E.U. policy areas, is the wide variety of existing national frameworks that tend to stifle collective efforts.

The fourteen chapters range from theoretical and normative explorations to case studies centered on newer E.U. members from Eastern Europe, offering diverse assessments that invite readers’ critical engagement. They all focus, however, on three main concerns for regulators: A European-wide model for protecting freedom of expression, including citizens’ rights to access full information; The updating of audiovisual-centered regulatory directives to reflect new technologies, especially on-demand services; and a broad definition of media pluralism that can be strengthened across all 27 E.U. states.

In addition to providing a painstakingly detailed picture of historical and current regulatory regimes in the European Union, very useful to students of European media, the book also offers a European perspective on universal communication quandaries. It tackles, among others, such urgent problems as the effect of media ownership concentration on pluralism, the role of public service and community media in an increasingly commercial system, and the survival of region- and culture-specific programming under the onslaught of American offerings.

The first section of the book, with three chapters, paints a broad framework for the role of mass media in the European Union and the normative understandings that have shaped its media regulations. A shared concern is that the imperatives of commercialization are threatening the media’s ability to provide a common public sphere for Europeans—an identifier that tends to be abstract to most citizens because of the enduring differences in national cultures, collective memories and languages. The authors call for policies that make central the citizens’ right to accurate, diverse and culture-sensitive programming and to the freedom to be heard through the media. One of them, Halliki Harro-Loit of Tartu University in Estonia, argues for the integration of education and communication policies to best serve the public’s ability to interact with media.

In the book’s second section, five chapters critically analyze existing E.U. and national content and service media regulations, particularly the Audiovisual Media Services Directive adopted in 2007 and its attempt to include new technologies like on-demand online services and the blogosphere. Péter Molnár of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, criticizes the directive for needlessly limiting freedom of speech, at least as compared to U.S. standards, under the guise of protecting social values. Václav Štetka, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, finds that the program quota policy—aimed at supporting cultural diversity by requesting broadcasters to provide “at least 10% of their transmission time … for European works”—has failed in its goal of promoting European cultural integration. Instead, Štetka argues using Czech television as an example, domestic rather than Europe-wide programming dominates, followed by imported U.S. formats. That testifies to “virtual resignation on the attempts to challenge the national viewing habits and to enable the national television audiences across Europe with more opportunities to confront their own lifestyles and collective imageries … with the ones from their fellow European countries” (p. 118).

The six chapters in section three focus on the major challenges in protecting media pluralism through public service, community media and other regulatory options. Péter Bajomi-Lázár of the Budapest Business School in Hungary begins by posing a provocative question: “Why do many viewers say that they despise commercial television and keep watching it?” (p. 175). His implication is that audiences are freer to extrapolate meanings than most legislators believe, so that there is less need for content regulation in commercial media. In contrast, Karol Jakubowicz of the European Science Foundation argues for the continued relevance of public service broadcasting despite new media’s increased personalization of information. Three chapters deal with the so-far ineffective regulation of media concentration, especially ownership concentration, and its negative effects on diversity in media content and opinion. The last chapter spotlights the need to craft legislation that enables community-centered, not-for-profit media, particularly radio, as essential to participatory democracy.

One criticism is that the book focuses almost exclusively on broadcasting and, less frequently, on online platforms, with almost no mention of the press, even though print and video are both converging online in many media companies. Also, the narrative is often process-heavy and bogged down by some of the unnecessary complexity of eurospeak, from acronyms like E-Europe+ and COST A30 Action to documents with logorrheic titles like “The Commission Staff Working Paper ‘Media Pluralism in Member States of the European Union.’”

In its most useful chapters, however, the book gives readers helpful primers on crucial debates, including the role of mass media in the overall project of European integration (ch. 1 by Hannu Nieminen), rationales for broad speech freedoms (ch. 5 by Péter Molnár), and the debate over regulating anonymous comments in blogs (ch. 8 by Andrej Školkay). Overall, the volume presents a thought-provoking reflection on the status of European Union media and communication regulation that gives readers everywhere a fresh perspective from which to engage pressing question.