European Media in Crisis

Values, Risks and Policies

Josef Trappel, Jeanette Steemers, Barbara Thomass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317482260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

When the financial markets collapsed in 2008, the media industry was affected by a major slump in advertising revenues, and a formerly highly successful business model fell into a state of decay. This economic crisis has threatened core social values of contemporary democracies, such as freedom, diversity and equality. Taking a normative and policy perspective, this book discusses threats and opportunities for the media industry in Europe: What are the implications of the crisis for professional journalism, the media industry, and the process of political communication? Can non- state and non-market actors profit from the crisis? And what are media policy answers at the national and European level?

Part I
European Media in Crisis

Problems, Perspectives and Definitions

1 What Media Crisis? Normative Starting Points

Josef Trappel, Hannu Nieminen, Werner A. Meier and Barbara Thomass

DEBATING THE “C” OF MEDIA DEVELOPMENT

When the Euromedia Research Group, which is the collective author of this book, started its internal debate on the current state of the media, the letter “C” swiftly became of significance. For some – and those are in the good company of academic scholars – the “C” is best interpreted as crisis, if not collapse. Referring, for example, to the results of the interview-based description of the British news media by Andrew Currah (2009), news brands are being “hollowed out” (2009, p. 130) and journalism in digital newsrooms is experiencing “collateral damage.” (ibid., p. 123) Núria Almiron (2010) found a permanent crisis of journalism that has been deepened by the financialisation of corporate media.

For others, however, the “C” stands for change, challenge or even chance. The media – their argument goes – have always been characterised by constant change, probably on a faster and more permanent track than other industries. Exposed to rapid technological innovations in production and susceptible to cutting-edge distribution technologies, the media industry has managed to turn critical developments into chances for future developments. When radio, and later television, was successfully introduced into media markets formerly controlled by the printed press, the latter reinvented itself, adapting to the changing environment by catering for the changing needs and wants of their readers. Seemingly, the media industry lives up to the saying “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” credited to Winston Churchill.

On what both schools of thought – the “C” for crisis and the “C” for chance – might agree upon is another understanding of the “C,” introduced by Robert McChesney (2013). In his analysis of the implications of capitalism on the Internet, he argues media history can be understood as being driven by critical junctures. These are “rare, brief periods in which dramatic changes are debated and enacted. (…) Most of our major institutions in media are the result of such critical junctures.” (ibid., p. 66f) Critical junctures, he continues, occur when revolutionary new communication technologies undermine the existing system, journalistic content is increasingly discredited or seen as illegitimate and when there is a major political crisis in which the dominant institutions are increasingly challenged (ibid., p. 67). All three conditions hold, so the time of another critical juncture has come. Being a media activist as much as an academic scholar, McChesney’s analysis might contain elements of wishful thinking. Nevertheless, through the meaning of critical juncture the “C” is even more tightly knit into the fabric of contemporary media development.

In this chapter – and actually in the entire book – we intend to contribute to the better understanding of the ongoing media developments that apparently shake up and potentially destroy the existing order. Regardless of whether we call this process change, crisis or critical juncture, some agents and stakeholders profit to the detriment of others, and public communication irrevocably transforms. We are interested in the various forms and the implications of this process. Our joint research question therefore is:

In what way and to what extent are the current processes of media change critical to the pursuit of democratic norms and values in contemporary societies?

This is a highly relevant question as it concerns simultaneously the conditions of access to public communication, the conditions of media fulfilling their part of the social contract within democratic societies, and the conditions of journalistic production and content dissemination. There is a price to be paid when these conditions deteriorate: “Vast areas of public life and government activity will take place in the dark (…).” (Nichols and McChesney, 2010) And this would definitely not be desirable.

In this first chapter of the book we take a closer look at the development of the media from various angles. First, we pay tribute to the notion of crisis in the context of social sciences. Second, we argue that any debate on critical developments is associated with underlying values and norms, as a crisis for one might at the same time be a chance for others. Based on these values, we then observe and discuss drivers of change. We then reflect on the history of crises and their implications on public communication and the media. Finally, we conclude by returning to our research question.

INSTITUTIONAL MEDIA CRISIS

Crises appear to be long-sellers in social sciences. It is indeed a suitable starting point for reflecting social changes – and social life changes all the time. The term crisis holds an explicit dramatic undertone and it is more persevering than the tedious terms change or transformation.

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter might be credited for pioneering and introducing crisis (and innovation) into mainstream social science research. He criticized the oversimplified understanding that crises happen whenever something of sufficient importance goes wrong. Rather, he argues, crises are incidents of cyclical processes and cannot be regarded as “isolated misfortunes that will happen in consequence of errors, excesses, misconduct” or any other failure (Schumpeter, 1942, p. 41). And he states these cyclical processes “by nature [are] a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary.” (ibid., p. 82) Apparently, Schumpeter had economic developments in mind, but his notion of cyclical occurrence of crises became prominent for the analysis of other fields as well.

Scholars interested in public communication have used the term frequently but somewhat inconsistently. During the relatively prosperous 1990s, Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch published their book The Crisis of Public Communication (1995). They bemoaned the decay of institutions and traditions of public communication. “Institutions that previously organized meaning, identity and authoritative information for many people structured their political preferences and simplified the process of democratic power-seeking – notably political parties, the nuclear family, mainstream religion, neighbourhood and social-class groupings – all have waned in salience and influence.” (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995, p. 2) Furthermore, journalism, in particular its watch-dog role, “is often shunted into channels of personalization, dramatizations, witch-huntery, soap-operatics and sundry trivialities.” (ibid., p. 1) In short, Blumler and Gurevitch stipulate: “It would be no exaggeration to describe this state of affairs as a crisis of civic communication.” (ibid., p. 1) emphasis in the original

In the context of the 2009 ECREA summer school, Hannu Nieminen put a question mark on the title of this contribution, Media in Crisis? (Nieminen, 2009) He contextualizes the media crisis within a much wider “epistemic turn” (ibid., p. 36) that rearranges the place of the media in society at large. “It seems plausible that the more complex society and people’s everyday life become, and the faster the everyday life choices and decisions have to be made, the less the traditional universal newspaper seen as a department store of information can offer solutions to people’s epistemic needs.” (ibid., p. 39) In this sense, media need to adapt to the changing social life and if they do, they can avoid the crisis.

More recently, Núria Almiron (2010) identified a severe crisis of journalism, following from the financial market crises that started in 2007. In her reading, the culprits are to be found among financial capitalists. “In the media sector, the 2007–2009 crisis had a strong impact. (…) Nevertheless, the financial and economic turbulence that began in 2007 was by no means what made corporate journalism enter a crisis. Nor was it the Internet or ICTs and digital convergence and their new business models waiting to burst. Nor was it the advertising slump or changing consumer patterns. Rather, financialized corporate logics have been demolishing the democratic foundations of journalism throughout the last decade.” (Almiron, 2010, p. 176)

Equally in 2010, a special issue of Journalism Studies (Vol. 11, issue 4) was published. In his foreword, Jay Blumler suggests to think of a crisis “with two legs”: “One is a crisis of viability, principally though not exclusively financial, threatening the existence and resources of mainstream journalistic organizations. The other is a crisis of civic adequacy, impoverishing the contributions of journalism to citizenship and democracy.” (Blumler, 2010, p. 439) In the same issue, James Curran puts a critical question mark behind the claim of British publishers that there is no crisis and “the future of journalism is safe in their hands.” (2010, p. 465)

In 2012, a group of scholars around Manuel Castells and Gustavo Cardoso published an edited volume, Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis (Castells et al., 2012). There, John B. Thompson further elaborates on one of Jürgen Habermas’ early works (Legitimation Crisis, 1988). Crises occur when systems of some sort break down. Habermas differentiates system crises from identity crises. The former occurs when the self-regulation mechanisms of a system break down, the latter when social integration breaks down: “(…) it arises when members of a society become aware of the major disruption and feel that their own lives or ‘collective identity’ is in some way threatened.” (Thompson, 2012, p. 62) Thompson argues there are overlaps and the distinction is somewhat artificial as system crises may become identity crises and vice versa. Instead, he suggests making a distinction between political crisis, which involves a breakdown of the political system or some serious challenge of the government, and social crisis, “which is a broader social malaise in which people feel that their world is being disrupted in some fundamental way.” (ibid., p. 64)

This comprehensive and by no means exhaustive literature review demonstrates the diversity of scholarly understandings of (media) crisis. Blumler and Gurevitch use the term crisis to describe the malaise of public communication they observe. Nieminen refrains from calling a mid- to long-term transformation process a crisis, while Almiron argues journalism is in a permanent state of crisis. Thompson, again, limits crisis to the possible or expected breakdown of systems, which in its social variation also includes the disruption of people’s lives.

By way of applying Habermas’ and Thompson’s line of thinking to the media field, system or political crises translate into institutional media crises. Such crises consequently occur when media (self-) regulation mechanisms collapse and media institutions are critically challenged. Institutional media crises are likely to carry the characteristics of system or political crises, but they do not – at least not until now – qualify as social crises. Various institutional stakeholders are affected in their core business by the critical changes, thus qualifying as a Habermasian system crisis. Journalists, newspaper publishers, advertising retailers, online media providers are among them. Contrary to these centrally affected stakeholders, people (audiences) are much less concerned about the media crises, as there is a plethora of new ways and means to be entertained and informed through Internet-based channels, far beyond incumbent media organizations. The media crisis is much more the crisis of media institutions than a social crisis of the people. People’s attitudes might be ignorant and inadequate but this understanding as institutional crisis has important repercussions on the range of possible remedies to cure the media crisis. Such institutional media crises are likely to occur in (Schumpeterian) cycles when McChesney’s conditions apply: revolutionary technologies, discredited journalism and challenged institutions.

To conclude, media crises are understood as cycles of institutional crises, which occur when media order and regulation in significant segments of the media field break down, forcing actors and stakeholders to take disruptive decisions. Institutional media crises may transform into social media crises if the conduct of people’s lives is upset by these crises. Media change, in contrast, refers to the constant process of transformation over time.

VALUES AND NORMS

Institutions, order and regulation are essential subjects for the understanding of media change and media crisis. All three subjects are closely related to the set of norms and values that are socially agreed upon and enacted in any form of democratic society. Processes of change (and crises), therefore, will impact on this set of norms and values – change and crises are never neutral when it comes to implications and their assessment.

Therefore our analysis of media changes affecting the pursuit of civic virtues needs to make explicit those norms and values that constitute contemporary democracies. Christians et al. (2009, p. 37ff) identify several concepts of values for public communication that are bound to concepts of the order of society. In a corporatist order, which builds strong links inside social groups, truthfulness of public discourse is the prominent value that allows for a peaceful exchange of ideas and decision making. Freedom for those participating in the public sphere is the distinguished normative requirement in a liberal order as no other regulating force than the notorious invisible hand of the market and consequently the marketplace of ideas ensures unrestricted deliberation and decision-making. Deficits in this market-orientated understanding of communication led to the idea of social responsibility in public communication, which is the leading understanding of communication values in pluralist democracy. And civic participation became an important orientation in the postmodern period where individualism and fragmentation of members of society require new forms of exchange and decision-making. A normative perspective of communication thus tries to answer the question: How should public discourse be organized to find solutions (and take decisions) in cases of conflicting interests in society?

Modern pluralist democracies share fundamental values for public communication. Freedom of opinion, of speech and of information, democratic deliberation, protection and promotion of culture, promotion of diversity, universal access and privacy rights are among these values, which are present in all pluralist democratic societies (Babe, 1990; Napoli, 2001). Furthermore, the values of empowerment and participation are highlighted in particular in relation to news. “News (…) can empower citizens by informing them about the social, political and economic events and issues that shape their lives. News (…) is the informational fuel considered vital for a democracy to remain healthy.” (Cushion, 2012, p. 43f) Similarly, Blumler and Gurevitch stress the role of the media in activating citizens by providing incentives “to learn, choose and become involved, rather than merely to follow and kibitz over the political process.” (1995, p. 97)

These values are firmly rooted in the era of enlightenment, which established the normative fundamentals for the modern political order with civil and human rights and fundamental principles for public communication. Free citizens should have the right to free speech, which should be performed in a public sphere, where public issues are debated and decided following the better arguments. Civil and human rights, the freedom of assembly, of opinion and of the press and the right to elect the government brought a new balance to power.

Today, the public sphere can be understood as a forum where conflicting interests are mediated and debated, where legitimacy and performance of econ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Part I European Media in Crisis Problems, Perspectives and Definitions
• 1 What Media Crisis? Normative Starting Points
• 2 Systemic Media Changes and Social and Political Polarization in Europe
• Part II Media Industry Crises and Transformations
• 3 European Communication and Information Industries in Times of Crisis Continuities and Transformations
• 4 Broadcasting is Dead. Long Live Television Perspectives from Europe
• 5 Crisis of the Commercial Media
• Part III Crisis in Journalism Values, Public Communication and Representation
• 6 Safeguarding Newsroom Autonomy Tensions Between the Ideal and the Actual
• 7 Crisis of the News The Framing of the Euro Crisis and the ‘Greek Problem'
• 8 Gender and Media in Times of Crises
• 9 A Crisis in Political Communication?
• Part IV Looking to the Future Policy Perspectives
• 10 Challenges and Confusion in Media Regulation A Four-Country Comparison
• 11 Renewing the Public Service Media Remit
• 12 Can Civil Society Mitigate Consequences of Crises?
• Conclusions
• 13 Grappling with Post-Democracy Media Policy Options
• Contributors
• Index