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 televisions dominated role as most peoples 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 mans sport and rich men are
not generally noted for their left-wing views. This does not mean
that all Europes 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 Europes 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.