Making the News: Journalism and News Cultures in Europe by Paschal Preston

Author:Paschal Preston [Preston, Paschal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2008-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

These recommendations went totally unheeded.

Recent concerns due to political and technological changes

As far as our review is concerned, with the exception of Britain and France, there appears to be little research literature engaging with the influence of economic factors on editorial cultures and practices in most of the countries under study.

We observe that economic aspects of the media received relatively little attention from academic researchers until the end of the 1970s, as most media worked at national level and far from the upheavals of globalisation. Things changed from the 1980s down to the late 1990s, a shift linked to the ‘cultural turn’ in analyses of the media (Curran, 1990).

Indeed, research literature on economic factors comes later and is often linked to the political changes and technological advances which also affect the new media organisation: privatisation and creation of commercial channels constitute one of the major consequences of democratic transitions.

In the comparative study, there is obviously a clear-cut separation between former communist countries and European democracies when it comes to the speed of change. On the one hand, researchers point out a very quick shift from totally state-controlled media towards commercial or market-based systems of press freedom. Journalists had to cope with a new approach to newsmaking and question the professional codes of ethics. In just a few years, they passed from propaganda to information models and their newly gained independence was not necessarily easy to defend in the face of commercial interests and market forces. For instance, in Hungary, if journalists had a long-established experience of resisting political pressures, they appear to be unprepared when pressures come from publishing companies or major advertisers (Kovács et al., 2006:10). In Slovenia, the transition towards democracy brought radical changes such as privatisation of the media, liberalisation of the print media market, and little regulation in the field of broadcasting (Zagar and Zeljan, 2006b: 7). Very quickly, the interests of profit strengthen and journalists are urged to adjust to satisfy advertisers’ demands (Zagar and Zeljan, 2006b: 7). The Serbian case is different and results from the political crisis following independence and particularly the beginning of Milosevic’s regime in 1997: there was a fierce repression and most Serbian journalists and editors working for major media were dismissed, forbidden to write and replaced by liege men who could serve the regime’s nationalist propaganda. Since 2000, when the democratic opposition in Serbia won the elections, political pressures have lessened.

On the other hand, European democracies went through a slower process of change, in three stages. First, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most broadcasting monopolies were abandoned. Second, deregulation policies were adopted, leading to the creation of independent or private commercial media competing to extend their share of the advertising market. Third, in the 1990s, media concentration became a rule within and across countries with the expanding role of a limited number of big companies investing in media outlets, including News International and Sky (under Murdoch’s control), Bertelsmann, Berlusconi, or Lagardère Médias (Mattelart, 2005).

Common trends affect all

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