European Media Policy for the Twenty-First Century

Assessing the Past, Setting Agendas for the Future

Seamus Simpson, Manuel Puppis, Hilde van den Bulck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317516453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Media policy issues sit at the heart of the structure and functioning of media systems in Europe and beyond. This book brings together the work of a range of leading media policy scholars to provide inroads to a better understanding of how effective media policies can be developed to ensure a healthy communication sector that contributes to the wellbeing of individual citizens, as well as a more democratic society. Faced with a general atmosphere of disillusionment in the European project, one of the core questions tackled by the volume's contributors is: what scope is there for European media policy that can exist beyond the national level? Uniquely, the volume's chapters are structured around four key policy themes: media convergence; the continued role and position of public regulatory intervention in media policy; policy issues arising from the development of new electronic communication network environments; and lessons for European media policy from cases beyond the EU. In its chapters, the volume provides enriched understandings of the role and significance of policy actors, institutions, structures, instruments and processes in communication and media policy.

1 Contextualising European Media Policy in the Twenty-First Century

Manuel Puppis, Seamus Simpson and Hilde Van den Bulck

DOI: 10.4324/9781315719597-1

The Current State of the Media Landscape: Convergence and Its Problematics

The European media environment is complex. It derives much of its character from a set of heterogeneous political and economic structures, languages and cultures, and social and education systems. This is evident both within and between the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU) and numerous non-member states elsewhere on the continent. Added to the mix is a set of structures and processes constituted at the EU level which sit both in complement – and often in tension – with the national level. It is within this context that the seismic changes which have affected and continue to shape the media sector have taken place and find specific expression. Much of that change can be accounted for by ongoing processes of convergence taking place at a number of levels. Notwithstanding the commercial hyperbole that inevitably accompanies developments in media that exemplify convergence, it is still the case that the contemporary media sector is radically different in appearance even from that recognised less than 20 years ago when the agenda of convergence focused on the coming together of broadcasting, IT (Information Technology), publishing, and telecommunications and was given particularly controversial airing at EU level through the European Commission’s Green Paper on Convergence (European Commission, 1997). The defining development in the interim has been the rise to prominence of the Internet as an increasingly sophisticated, international communication platform through which an online world of media production and consumption has developed, epitomizing much of the benefits and potential – but also the problems – of media convergence.

These changes have presented media policy makers and policy scholars alike across Europe with a burgeoning roster of policy challenges. Such has been the growth of the online world, with its – by nature – high profile in the commercial sphere and public eye, that it is understandably tempting to conclude that to make sense of and prescribe policies for the online media environment requires a brand new set of lenses and tools. However, two important points are worth making. First, despite the degree of change witnessed thus far, it is still the case that a very significant part of media production and consumption takes place in what might be termed the traditional manner. This is particularly relevant where currently linear television and radio broadcasting continue to thrive, despite significant utilisation of the Internet’s capacity. Thus, in policy terms, many of the traditional conundrums and vexations of media systems – such as media ownership and concentration, universal service, and the role of public service content and providers – continue to confront key policy actors nationally and at the EU. Second, it is the case that whilst the infrastructural, service and content based contexts of media are increasingly those of the Internet, many of the tools and perspectives of media policy developed historically provide an important basis from which to develop better understandings of the policy challenges of convergence. This is not to argue for a wholesale transposition of offline media policies and practices – as well as analyses of them – to the online environment. Rather, it acknowledges that policy knowledge about the fundamentals of human communication structures and processes, developed through many decades and across successive waves of infrastructural, content and service-based changes in media technologies, are relevant experience repositories and knowledge tool kits for European media policy in the twenty-first century. What is more, understanding evolutions in policies regarding relatively un-researched media such as teletext, provide often strong resonances of current debates (see Chapter 2 [Moe & Van den Bulck], this volume).

One of the most daunting current and future media policy challenges in Europe, and indeed beyond, concerns the roll out, deployment and use of upgraded and new infrastructure. As was the case from the earliest days of electronic communication, the network provides the physical conditions for human communication agency to play out, with all its potentials and problematics. The refurbishment of the fixed link electronic communications network and further development of wireless infrastructure are arguably the largest infrastructural communication policy challenges of at least the last 50 years and have the pursuit and realisation of sophisticated media convergence at their core. The EU’s Digital Agenda, for example, has set ambitious targets for accessibility to high speed broadband services to be realised by 2020 (European Commission, 2010). The policy goal of creating widespread next generation networks based on optical fibre technology is, in particular, both large and complex. It presents a major time consumptive and costly civil engineering challenge, before even the cost of the electronic components of the network itself is considered. The pattern, extent and timing of roll out of this new enabling infrastructure is of the utmost significance. It raises network access issues which relate to, and take forward, traditional analyses of universal service in Europe in both broadcast and telecommunication-based media, both intra- and cross-EU Member State.

The enabling nature of such new networks and their future course has inevitably called into question the usage of existing electronic communications infrastructure. A number of policy issues appear particularly pertinent. The demands of the mobile communications network operators for spectrum, allied to the capacity promises of fixed-link next generation networks (NGNs), have raised questions over the use of spectrum for digital terrestrial TV (see Chapter 8 [Michalis], this volume). Second, the affordances of NGN technologies to take media convergence to a new level of breadth and intensity have also called forth a series of policy issues in respect of the applications which sit on such networks, as well as the content and services delivered through them. Whilst rich capacity and high speed communication are the promised endpoint of the journey to NGN, en route considerations of how to manage communication traffic for network efficiency, security and economic equity have become high profile. Equally significant has been the debate on whether to offer better quality – that is, higher speed – Internet access services based on the ability to pay. All currently key parts of the debate on net neutrality (see Chapter 9 [Musiani & Löblich], this volume), the idea of neutrality is open for – and arguably in pressing need of – re-interpretation. Ideas of equity, balance and parity of esteem and treatment are staples of the traditional communication system expressed in universal and public service practices of broadcasting and telecommunication. However, in contrast to the traditional public interest Internet philosophy of non-intervention to achieve ‘neutrality’, securing these new public interest staples of the online world requires direct intervention (Simpson, 2015). In other words, drawing on the traditional and re-working it in the context of the new, has the potential to create a set of viable media policies for the still converging media environment. Acceptance of this as a policy principle and modus operandi is merely the start of a complicated process of designing and implementing effective European media policies for the twenty-first century. Such a project has entailed within it a number of daunting tasks explored by various contributors to this volume: a fundamental re-working of the governance of media convergence (Chapter 12 [Flew]) is needed that addresses a range of issues to do with the regulation of traditional media content now delivered predominantly online, such as journalism (Chapter 3 [Katsirea]) or universal service (Chapter 10 [Batura]; Chapter 13 [Righettini & Tonellotto]); the development of effective regulation online to protect children (Chapter 5 [Lievens]) and understanding social media and its place in hybrid and new public service media environments (Chapter 4 [Kavanagh]), to name but a few. As these contributions suggest, this policy project goes beyond the technological and industrial-economic questions that are receiving the lion’s share of attention in the age of convergence and encompasses the search and need for a media system that can guarantee, for example, the production of quality journalism and original radio and televisual programming in an environment dominated by international Internet service companies that show no interest in providing these types of content. A key question, then, is by whom – and how – can this vital policy project be delivered?

The Relevance or Otherwise of Public Sector Intervention in a Market-Dominated Media Environment

The nature of the changes described above point strongly towards a consideration of the magnitude of policy action required to deal with them and leads to the question of the respective roles of public and private interests in their realisation. It is important to underline that, in Europe, media law and policy developments pre-convergence mainly took place at the national level and different media fell under different legal and policy regimes, reflective of the Zeitgeist in which they originated and dominated the media scene. The press, after a heavily controlled origin in the authoritarian era, was considered part and parcel of the democratisation of western societies. Not surprisingly, freedom of expression in many constitutions was written down as freedom of the press, which has remained a strong starting point for any press regulation up to this day (Czepek, Hellwig & Novak, 2009). Press freedom was formulated first and foremost in relationship to the state, either in a negative interpretation as freedom from interference from the state, restricting the press mainly to commercial and some social-profit initiatives and, in a positive sense, as the obligation of the state to create a media system necessary for a working democracy (Baker, 2001). Guidelines and restrictions mainly were and have been limited to self-regulation.

After a brief experimental period in the early 1920s, radio was quickly nurtured by the state, following the belief in the visible hand of government and the social responsibility of the state towards the media. The most well-known exponent hereof, of course, is public service broadcasting (PSB). This view extended to television as it started to spread post–World War II and lasted well into the 1980s (Price, 1995; Van den Bulck, 2001). Whereas the ‘liberalisation’ and marketisation of broadcasting – an extension of a neo-liberal approach to society and the belief in the invisible hand of the market from the 1980s onwards – ended the public service broadcasting monopolies, in most European countries television remained subject to much regulation with regards to content and commercial communication. Even at the EU level (e.g., through the Television Without Frontiers Directive) this type of control was maintained (Wheeler, 2004).

Telecommunication, for a long time, was not considered as part of media law and policy and its regulation, based in international agreements (on frequencies, for example), was technology- (rather than content-) based. Telephony was not regulated with regards to what could be said on the telephone as it was not considered as part of mass (one-to-many) communication, to which media regulation and policies applied, but to interpersonal (one-to-one) communication of which regulation was limited with regards to the right to privacy, the latter mainly defined in relationship to the state (Bannister, 2005).

Convergence has shaken up these old regimes considerably. Clear distinctions between media – and in particular between mass and interpersonal communication – have become less relevant. Convergence has blurred distinctions between media content and markets and has opened up traditional markets to services and service providers, most notably those from the once distinct sector of telecommunications, now widened definitionally as information and communication technologies (ICT) (d’Haenens & Brink, 2001; Hendriks 1995). Similarly, convergence, and especially the introduction of Web 2.0 social media, overturned the distinction between ‘senders’ and ‘receivers’ of mass media messages as audiences became not just consumers but active producers, so-called prosumers. This has led to a blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private.

As a result, convergence is not just a technological and economic reality. A discourse of convergence has permeated media and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) policy-making (Sampson & Lugo, 2003). In these policy debates, two main positions can be identified. Optimists, from a technological determinist position, promote convergence and its innovative possibilities, usually with economic growth as the ultimate goal. This is often accompanied by a technological nationalism, policy stakeholders promoting convergence to improve economic investments and political prestige (Van den Bulck, 2008). Convergence also features positively in a discourse of technological democracy as an engine for increased autonomy of, and new possibilities for, the citizen-user (Iosifidis, 2006). This argument is embraced both by stakeholders attempting to obtain a dominant position in new and potentially lucrative markets, and by the cultural and minority sector that believes new media can fulfil ‘old’ ambitions regarding alternative media for voices not heard elsewhere (Cammaerts & Carpentier, 2007). Optimists by and large argue that, due to the explosion of services, devices, and platforms, regulation has become obsolete or at least impos...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Contextualising European Media Policy in the Twenty-First Century
• Section I Understanding Media Policy in an Environment of Media Convergence
• Section II The Relevance of Public Regulatory Intervention in Media Policy
• Section III Regulatory Policy Issues in Advanced Communication Network Environments
• Section IV Lessons for European Media Policy from Cases beyond the EU
• List of Contributors
• Index