Europeanised Politics? Edition 1 by Klaus H. Goetz & Simon Hix

Author:Klaus H. Goetz & Simon Hix [Goetz, Klaus H. & Hix, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Comparative Politics
ISBN: 9780714681665
Google: i3Th9IBHKBgC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 747597
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2000-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

JOURNALISM AND MEDIA ORGANISATIONS

Just as the media systems have changed, so too have media organisations. New technology, new media, new generations of journalists, and the more competitive marketplace all contributed to changes within news organisations. Studies of journalism as a profession and journalists’ norms and values, for example, have revealed interesting cross-national differences. While journalists’ own perceptions of the roles of news media have remained broadly similar in the US over the past decade, differences in the role perceptions have been observed in several European countries.29 This has important implications for the way in which both domestic and European politics are covered in the news.

Cross-national differences in traditions surrounding the coverage of political parties during elections in broadcast news may also be changing (potentially diminishing) due to changes within news organisations.30 Broadcasters today pay far more attention to what the audience wants, whereas the public service ethos in the past meant a greater emphasis on ‘educating’ and ‘informing’ the electorate with special attention to what politicians had to offer. Take, for example, the recent comments of a political editor in the Danish public service broadcasting organisation on the low turnout in the 1999 European Parliamentary Elections: ‘It is not our responsibility if the turnout is so low. There have been no issues to cover and we know from our survey that our audience wants to know about fraud and scandals, so that is what we cover.’31 In Holland, the second Editor-in-Chief of Dutch public service broadcasting echoed these sentiments: ‘The low voter turnout at recent elections is not our responsibility. An increase in the number of people choosing not to vote is a statement that we must respond to. If the lack of interest is evident, we will also make a deliberate choice not to give the elections too much attention.’32

European integration, in particular, has had implications for the European news organisations in terms of their allocation of resources, strategic placement of correspondents and editorial staff, and choices for constructing news stories. The organisation of news desks in media organisations has been largely national, but advances in European integration have led news organisations to respond to the shift towards supranational levels of governance. As the Editor-in-Chief of the BBC Nine o’Clock News put it: ‘Earlier we compared ourselves to America, today we are much more likely to compare ourselves to another European country such as Germany or France … We now have bureaux in Brussels, Frankfurt, Paris, Berlin and Rome and we can tap onto BBC World’s correspondents in places such as Warsaw and Vienna.’33 The implications of European political integration for news organisations is echoed by the Editor-in-Chief of Britain’s Channel 5 news programme who said: ‘When setting up the programme, we had to decide whether to have a bureau in Washington DC or in Brussels. We opted for Brussels as almost anything that comes out of there has importance, directly, for Britain, much more so than what comes out of Washington.’34

The range and scope of implications of European integration for news organisations and journalists are likely to increase in the coming years.

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