Chapter 7 by Oxana

The media- player and recorder

Politicians communicate with those whose votes they rely on. To do so they

rely on the media.

The media in Europe does not simply observe political activity but also

helps to drive, structure and police it. It is a source of communication and

interpretation. It produces and reflects ‘public opinion.

In most countries broadcasting in particular was monopolized by states lest

this frighteningly powerful new technology fall into the ‘ wrong’ hands- it is

hardly surprising that the Europeanization of media regimes has been slow.

Variations in usage and style

Television is far and away the most important medium. Newspapers-

reading is more important in Northern than in Southern and Central and

Eastern Europe, but is on the decline everywhere, especially among young

people.

The further south and east you go in Europe, the less people read

newspapers, because mass education and democracies with entrenched

freedom of the press came later to Mediterranean countries and

Eastern and central Europe.

The further south you go, the more television people watch, the big

exception to the rule being the UK. There adults watch well over 3,5

hours a day.

These regional variations also apply to media styles: for ex. The

Scandinavian media, despite its mass reach, takes its mission to inform

and educate more seriously than most and when it comes to local

newspapers is financially supported by the state for so doing.

The North of Europe seems to have more appetite for news than the

south and the east where relatively law use of newspapers is not, it

would appear, made up for by watching television and listening to the

radio.

Yong Europeans use traditional for news much less frequently than

average.

One aspect of the media in Europe that is seemingly universal is ‘news

values’- the criteria that determine whether editors include or reject a

story

Structure and regulation

We would be hard pushed in some countries to assert the

existence of a national newspaper market. The latter might exist

in the UK with the main division between downmarket ‘tabloids’

and upmarket ‘broadsheets’. But regional titles continue to play a

big role. This is expected in a federal republic such as Germany,

where many of the titles routinely cited in overseas press reviews

are regional newspapers, albeit nationally distributed.

While regional titles do cover national new, citizens in those

countries more likely to think that what goes on in regional and

local politics counts for something and even more likely to turn to

television for national-level political information. This serves to

reinforce television’s dominated role as most people’s main

source of political information.

The newspaper market in all European countries has seen a fall in

the number of titles, as well as increasing concentration of

ownership of those that survive, the huge entry costs into the

market also make it very difficult for newcomers to make it.

Owning newspapers is now a rich man’s sport and rich men are

not generally noted for their left-wing views. This does not mean

that all Europe’s newspapers are conservative.

Television may be dominant in Europe, but it has undergone

considerable changes in recent years as technological progress

and free-market ideas have combined to turn what was once the

fiefdom of a few terrestrial providers into a fragmented multi-

channel world of round the clock choice.

Governments have to reconcile the demand for free speech with

the fact that the market can potentially lead to monopolistic

media empires narrowing rather than widening the range of

opinions on offer. This requires them to pass media laws that are

often controversial.

In most west European countries some foreign ownership of

newspaper titles occurs. In Spain, the campaigning daily El Mundo

is Italian-owned, while in the UK US-based News International

owns a number of British titles. But it is still quite uncommon.

States still have their own rules-dictating the number of titles and

channels in which a single firm is allowed to have a stake based on

proportions of shares owned and audience share. Some even give

this responsibility to lower tiers of government: public

broadcasting in Germany may be controlled by a supposedly

socially representative Federal Broadcasting Council.

The media is subject to country-specific regulation and

restrictions on ownership, but these are being undermined by EU

law and a tendency toward commercial concentration and co-

operation.

State and public service broadcasting

In 1980, television in every European country was public

television but by 2000 every country had allowed commercial

competition.

Television in Europe has changed considerably since the 1980s

towards a more commercial and multi-channel environment, put

public broad-casting is still important-and, in some countries, still not

entirely free from government interference.

European governments’ support for public broadcasting-

symbolized both by funding and by the common insistence that

cable services must include public channels in their subscriber

packages- is driven to preserve national culture and well-informed

civil society.

Most politicians in Europe are now used to the fact that state

ownership no longer provides them with direct access to

quiescent cronies dedicated to serving the needs of the

government of the day.

Ex. Each incoming administration in Madrid gets to appoint a new

Director General of public broadcaster TVE, whose news

broadcasts are widely criticized for favoring the government of

the day- by the public and journalists.

French broadcast journalists have also compiled about the way in

which their bosses seem to indulge in anticipatory self-censorship.

‘Politics-over-broadcasting systems’ mode of government. They

operate the kind of ‘formally autonomous systems’ which exist in

the UK and Sweden.

In Italy, the ‘politics-in-broadcasting’ mode was taken to its logical

extent by giving control of each state channel to one of the main

political parties.

The connection between media systems and political systems.

In 2004 Daniel and Hallin and Paolo Mancini published what

must rank as one of the most important books in the field of

media in politics. They argue that it is possible and useful to

categorize Europe’s media systems and link them to types of

political systems that rest on the distinctions familiar to

comparative politics: first distinction is between polarized and

moderate systems, second is between majoritarian and

consensual systems developed by Arend Lijphart.

Hallin and Mancini argue that it is fruitful to think of European

countries as members of one of three media systems:

1. Polarized pluralist model – state and parties involved in

many aspects of life, including the media, both among the

general public and journalists, meaning that there is

relatively little sense of an object common good.

Politically active minority consumes heavily-slanted,

comment-heavy output of serious newspapers, while

less-interested majority sticks more to television.

2. Democratic corporatist model – Extensive state

intervention in the market-to facilitate the representation

and reconciliation of different interests and viewpoint.

The latter ensure that while journalists may advocate for

one side or other, they do so within a framework of

shared professional norms.

3. Liberal model- state not so involved. Journalists are less

concerned with representing interest groups and

ideologies than with playing a watchdog role on behalf of

citizen-consumers. Many still read papers but rely more

on television for news.

Research into how variations in countries’ media systems

may be connected to their differences in their political

systems is at early stage.

The changing coverage of politics

Media coverage of politics is more fragmented across a bigger

range of outlets, possible more personalized, and less respectful

towards politicians. This has led to increasing cynicism on the part

of voters or a serious loss of agenda-control by parties is

debatable.

Many European media outlets are cutting down on their coverage

of politics and current affairs not just in between elections but

also during them. For commercial newspapers and broadcasters,

this is largely on the grounds that elections and politics more

generally do not deliver audience. But even public service

broadcasters are seen to be backing away from what used to be

thought of as a responsibility to inform and educate voters.

Programmers and editors are less willing to allow politics and

politicians to operate in some kind of ‘reserved area’ in which

normal news values are suspended at crucial times in order to

give people what they supposedly need as citizens rather than

what they apparently want as consumers.

There is a tendency by journalists in many European countries to

assert their autonomy from politicians in the face of increasingly

intense efforts on the part of the latter to control the news

agenda and the way they are presented within it. Political parties

all over the continent have professionalized their media relations

or at a very least adapted their practice to changing media

technologies.

To maintain control and cope with media change, parties in

Europe are engaging in what one critic calls ‘ institutionalized

political impression management’- the agenda setting and

celebrity-handling that we now routinely associate with ‘spin

doctors’.

European journalists have taken to ‘disdaining the news. They use

strategic or game frames in political elites and their success or

failure in playing the political game at the expense of the policy

concerns that motivate ordinary citizens.

Journalists have also become less deferential and even aggressive

moving to so-called ‘attack-dog journalism’ that seems to assume

that all politicians are in it for themselves and out to put one ever

on the people.’ Attack dog ‘ stance was first evident in the US and

it spread first to the UK.

France provide something of a contrast: ‘there remains a strong

journalistic culture of deference to politicians at the apex of the

state apparatus’.

Talk of a struggle for control between politicians and journalists,

they are still playing what is essentially a collusive, albeit edgy,

game with each other- one that in many ways exclude the very

public both sets of players claim to represent. This is most

obvious at elections.

Bias and its effects

The ability of the media to influence both voters and politicians,

even indirectly, is easier to assume than to prove, not least

because there are so many other influences at work.

Most politicians at election time are less worried about media-

fuelled cynicism than they are about whether they are getting a

fair deal on TV and the press compared with their opponents.

Smaller parties sometimes on the extreme of the political

spectrum, claim that they are squeezed out of mass coverage by

their larger and possibly more mainstream competitors.

Mainstream parties will reply that coverage should be based on

support and the likelihood of getting into government, not on

some abstract idea of giving all voices an equal say.

In many countries free election broadcasts are allocated

according to party support. Ex.: in Spain parties are allocated

between 10 and 45 min in total, though they can his set up

between however many individual spots they like.

While the common wisdom nowadays is the ‘ elections are won

on television’ or ‘people vote the way they do because they

believe what they read in the papers’.

Few newspapers in Europe nowadays can be dismissed as no

more than mouthpieces for particular parties. Many have faced

closure a few party organs still exist, but they sell very few copies.

In France and Germany regional and national newspapers do not

lean fairly obviously to the left or to the right.

Pressure groups and populists

Changes in the way politics is covered arguably advantage media-

savvy pressure groups and populist politicians at the expense of

more conventional actors.

The groups’ now-professionalized media staff do a lot of the

investigative work news organizations cannot afford to do easily

digested formats that the organizations can rapidly turn into

finished product. Their sometimes conflictual mass protest,

during stunts. They also provide journalists with an alternative to

more conventional news sources.

Groups are also finding that the Internet helps them mobilize and

aggregate otherwise passive and fragmented audiences whose

feelings can then been used to outflank companies and states.

The impact of ICT

The internet may really change and open up politics, but it

has yet to realize that potential- and because of access and

its capacity to insulate users, it may not be an unalloyed

benefit if it does. At the moment, mobile, television and

consumer databases are having just as big an impact.

It seems clear that the web is becoming an evermore more

interactive medium. In 2007 an authoritative British report

confirmed the huge boom in internet shopping, but also noted

that social networking sites like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook.

Research from the US suggests that a steadily increasing number

of people do use the web to get political information.

Blogging by journalists, politicians, party activists is one

potentially fruitful example. But of course blogs can also have

much less benign effects: the destructive November 2005 riots in

France were in part fuelled by bloggers on sites like skyblog.com

who were accused of urging other young people to burn cars and

attack the police.

The fact that the impact of the internet on politics is might not be

such a bad thing. To them the digital divide seems likely to

perpetuate existing political participation rates.

The media and ‘Europe’

The media may be Europeanizing when it comes to regulation and

ownership, but not when it comes to content. Coverage of the EU

varies according to country and issue, but is generally very low.

European media integration faces a huge hurdle, the

cultural and language barriers that do so much to make the

continent the diverse place it is.

Attempts to create ‘Euro TV’ have so far proved difficult: the

audience share of ‘pan-European channels ‘rarely passes the

1 per cent mark’. Ex.; in 2003 ‘pan European satellite

services offered 188 chat channels, 80 teleshopping

channels, 36 music channels, ect.

There are some differences between countries, the European

media as a whole is not very different from its US counterpart

in providing only a very limited window on a world that is

supposedly more interconnected and interdependent than

ever.

Irrespective of exposure to media, Europeans remain more

aware of things going on beyond their countries’ borders than

Americans, their media is no less prone to the hierarchy of

coverage that applies elsewhere.