Keywords

1 Introduction

The media in Europe have radically changed since 1990. The number of TV channels has increased dramatically, and at the same time privatization and commercialization have become dominant. In the same period, the newspapers have presented a considerable decline. The advent of the Internet and the digital media has caused further changes with the analogue media world giving its place to the digital one.

By and large, the European media sector has entered in an almost permanent period of changes driven by the forms of technological advances, increasing competition and new consolidation in the ownership status and the developments associated with the process of Europeanization of Europe. These new developments are, on the one hand, creating a new market and, on the other hand, altering the dynamics of the existing structure. Nevertheless, these developments are not new. In effect, they have been refocused by several contemporary trends.

On the other hand, we used to define the European media in comparison to the US media and to contrast them among themselves (Papathanassopoulos & Negrine, 2011, pp. 17–20). By and large we used to differentiate the European model from the US one, in terms of ownership (public or private), competition among the broadcasters as well as the role of the state, especially before and after the World War II. Broadly speaking, the state in Europe used to be responsible for the development of almost all aspects of the media sector—from technology developments, distribution, production to funding.

But even within Europe the processes or mechanisms of “oversight” varied according to individual political and cultural traditions. In the past we used to distinguish between the West and East European media systems, the nowadays called “old” and “new” Europe. In those days, one used to differentiate the Western European or “Social responsibility” media model from the East European or Soviet (McQuail & Windhal, 1981, pp. 88–92). The former was a mixed system which used to predominate in Western Europe, while the latter was in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In the latter, broadcasting used to be controlled by the party through a state committee, while all the newspapers and periodicals were published by elements of the party government or by government-approved organization. By and large, all the media in the Eastern European and Soviet countries, either print or electronic, were owned, supervised and controlled by the Communist Party and fully subsidized from the state budget (Sparks, 2000, p. 45; Stevenson, 1994, pp. 194–195; Vartanova, 2002).

The second and in effect a major element of the European media has been that they have been characterized by great diversity. In effect, there are not only different media systems between the “old” and the “new” European countries but also among the southern, central and northern European countries. A multitude of examples illustrate this. For instance, the broadcasting organizations in some countries were “state-owned” and/or state-controlled (Greece, Italy, Spain); in other countries some were publicly funded or wholly or partially funded through means of a licence fee paid by all owners of sets (Britain, Ireland, Finland), and in some others they were funded by a combination of public and private (i.e., commercial advertising) funds (Germany, France). The case of newspaper market is another example: the national daily newspapers in Britain have been very strong, but in France, Germany and other European countries, regional titles are very popular.

2 The Heritage of Hallin and Mancini Today

Hallin and Mancini, in their seminal work Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics in 2004, have suggested three models which describe the media systems in mainly “old” Western Europe, but their approach, to a certain extent, might apply to “new” ex-Eastern Europe too. At the same time, their model has served as a theoretical landmark for most of comparative media systems studies and can still provide a useful framework for current comparative research on the media field. As Flew and Waisbord (2015, p.13) suggest, “media systems are points of convergence of political, economic social, and cultural forces grounded in the local, the national, and the global”, and we should think of them “as analytical units to understand how and where multiple dynamics intersect as well as the comparative weight of actors and institutions in shaping the media”.

Hallin and Mancini identified four basic dimensions for the analysis and comparison of media systems: “media markets”, “political parallelism”, “journalistic professionalism” and the “role of the state”. This four-dimension analytical approach revealed the existence of three distinct models of media systems in the countries under examination:

  1. (a)

    The “Polarized Pluralist Model”, characterized by highly politicized media, heavy TV use and low levels of newspaper circulation and journalistic professionalization, includes all the European Mediterranean countries.

  2. (b)

    The “Democratic Corporatist Model” gathers all the Northern European countries with welfare state traditions, and it is described by high newspaper circulation, strong professionalization of journalism, relatively high degree of political parallelism and strong state intervention, in the form of prominent public service broadcasters and press subsidies.

  3. (c)

    And finally the “Liberal Model” is characterized by high reach of the press market, a weak role of the state, low degree of political parallelism, strong professionalization and a journalistic culture of neutrality and objectivity journalism, mainly reflecting the media landscape of Anglo-Saxon countries.

As no model can account for every detail of complex systems, a few spurious cases will fall outside the established patterns: French media market, for instance, shows features of different categories, while other factors have been added to the original framework, ranging from the focus on clientelism (Hallin & Papathanassopoulos, 2002) to the application to non-Western countries (Castro Herrero et al., 2017; Hallin & Mancini, 2012; Sparks, 2000; Thomass & Kleinsteuber, 2011) and to the diffusion of the web and digital media (Wessler et al., 2008), which—quite surprisingly, one may say—are not considered at all by Hallin and Mancini. To which extent digital disruption has affected the nature of media systems is an open question (Mancini, 2020) that we will address throughout our book.

On the other hand, it is still under question, whether media systems clusters have to overlap geographical distinctions or be built on broader, transnational and, so to speak, more abstract indicators—as a matter of fact, in Hallin and Mancini, it all began with this very oscillation (2004, pp. 6–7). Somehow, we can take advantage of this theoretical impasse, for reflecting on the relation between the ideal-typical model and the geo-cultural variety it has to encompass and to account for. In this sense, Brüggemann et al. (2014) have tried to test it. As Mancini and Hallin explicitly have called for more data, the authors break down the 4 original dimensions into more than 20 measurable indicators, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Dimensions and indicators for empirical analysis
Full size table

In short, the authors split Mancini and Hallin’s dimensions—or, we should say more properly, their fields—into detailed variables, and they add some interesting research questions too. The role of self-regulation (and self-censorship) as an instrument for journalistic autonomy, for instance, is an often-overlooked problem, which would deserve specific investigations, as the comparative assessment realized by Fengler et al. (2015) on 14 countries. As a result of quantitative analysis, more broadly speaking, four clusters emerge that Brüggerman, Humprecht and Engesser simply label by referring to the geographical coordinates. As one can see, there are some slight differences between their pattern and that of comparative media systems (Table 2).

Table 2 Empirical clusters and original dimensions
Full size table

In place of the three original spaces, we find therefore a four-class model; and, by adopting alternative variables, we could have—actually, we do have—endless possible “clusterizations”. The reason behind that is very simple: history is continuous, and geography too, while theoretical categories are discrete, as in Weber’s separation between the level of empirical reality and that of knowledge objects (1904), which is the epistemological foundation of the media systems model, among many other things. Exactly for this very reason, the relevance of the above-cited research is not due to the proposal of a new classification—on the very contrary, it is due to the light shed on the unstable relation among the different indicators. As Mancini and Hallin themselves would eventually state (2017, p. 158), the four dimensions and their related sub-dimensions do not necessarily vary at the same pace or by following the same rule—and this is perhaps the main methodological assumption to be met, as we will discuss again in the final section.

In the last 15 years, there were some prominent attempts tried to put into test the standardized measures of this framework, resulting in the refinement of the proposed indicators (Brüggemann et al., 2014; Mattoni & Ceccobelli, 2018; Mellado & Lagos, 2013), as well as studies, that seek to elaborate on ways by which qualitative comparative approaches could complement quantitative research designs (Downey & Stanyer, 2010). The advent of digital technologies, the political developments in Europe and the processes of globalization have given a new dimension to their approach. Nonetheless, we still believe that typologies and classifications as such provided by Hallin and Mancini’s model are still of value as a theoretical starting point, since even if the market forces and the triumph of digitalization have managed to erode the national differences in different European media systems, this “convergence was not a one-way-street” (Hallin & Mancini, 2010, p.64; Mancini & Zielonka, 2012).

Such a possible evolution of the model had been already foreseen by Hallin and Mancini, as we know, with the idea of a convergence towards the Liberal model. By and large, this would be due to market forces becoming dominant and organized politics being in decline (Voltmer, 2012, p. 231), thus reflecting the alleged triumph of neoliberalism at the global scale. As Mancini and Hallin note, though, the idea of such a convergence or homogenization of media orders has been repeatedly rejected by the scholars and the more so in non-Western regions (2012, p. 62). Wide research realized on 13 national broadcasting industries in the period 1977–2007 (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and UK), for instance, reveals a mild tendency towards convergence, while also indicating how the original frame does not match the country grouping based on the forms of political communication (Esser et al., 2012, pp. 265 and 257). As the homogenization thesis appears not to be confirmed, either by in-depth investigation (Flew & Waisbord, 2015) or by wide comparative research (Nielsen, 2013), a more nuanced approach will be necessary, which deals with both convergence and divergence as main forces shaping the European media landscape.

On the totally theoretical side of the discourse, a complication is implied by media convergence usually being analysed in parallel with globalization tendencies (Mancini, 2020, pp. 5765–5766). To what degree these tendencies are bringing about a homogenization process, though, is still to be understood. As a matter of fact, globalization itself is a double-edged weapon, as it relies on a wide range of forces variously fostering convergence and divergence. In a passage that bizarrely echoes David Harvey’s analysis of capitalism (2015), Thomas Piketty notes how in the last decades we have been observing both an increasing in domestic imbalance within each country and a decreasing of the economic inequality among different countries (2013, p. 80). Manuel Castells’ (1996) idea of global connection coming at the price of local disconnection can also frame this new world order, from the standpoint of the Internet studies. One may wonder if this twofold tendency is what is making so complicated the identification of convergence as a dominant contributor to the evolution of media systems.

3 Structure of the Media Market: What About Digital Media?

In what follows, we present a discussion of the changes introduced by new communication technologies, considering the consequences of the “technology critical juncture”, as Mancini put it (2020, p. 5764), in order to provide a revised understanding of each dimension, originally proposed by Hallin and Mancini, under the scope of the media digitization era. The media market dimension refers to the media market development in a country, taking into consideration the news media industry and the dominant patterns of media consumption. Hallin and Mancini place the development of the print press at the centre of their media market analysis as well as they tried to identify alternative patterns of news consumption diet, comparing newspaper and TV news.

Nossek et al. (2015) suggest the discussion over the future of print media is an open debate among stakeholders and academic experts. Even though the press and broadcasters still are an integral part of the media market, current studies suggest that there is a shift in citizens’ news consumption repertoire:

Firstly, citizens are turning more to the Internet for their daily news information, a situation accompanied by a parallel decline in printed press readership (Nielsen et al., 2016). According to Pew Research Centre (2018), the majority of young Europeans choose to get their news from the social media platforms at far higher rates than older people, a trend that might pave the way for a future displacement of the print news media in favour of their digital counterparts.

New players but also old ones have expanded their activities in the digital media sector, underlying the need for a different approach on the market dimension, context-driven, with an emphasis on the audiences, market fragmentation, as well as the specific traits of the local advertising market (El Richani, 2012, p. 4).

Furthermore, citizens now access news content through a variety of different media services, platforms, and devices, rather than just merely relying on one channel or platform.

However, the existing patterns of media use and penetration of technology are the result of a varying response that each European country has produced under the particularities of its specific contextual societal issues and economic abilities (McCain, 1986, p. 233).

Under the scope of these pressures and in accordance with Mellado and Lagos’ suggestion (2013, p. 17) that the study of media market development should not exclude media types, we used supplementary indicators (referring to the digital media market) to better capture the current media landscape in Europe and, thus, to offer the opportunity “to go beyond the narrow realm of traditional news production” (Brüggemann et al., 2014, p. 1038). Subsequently, we aimed at scrutinizing the changes brought by the new technologies in the entire media spectrum (press, radio, TV—both traditional broadcasting and IPTV—as well as the advent of social media use as news information sources), going beyond the simple contrasting between newspapers and TV, originally made by Hallin and Mancini. That been said, we tried to examine if there is a concrete “response” to the “digital challenge” between the countries.

4 The Role of the State: Fading Glory, But Still Powerful as Regulator

According to Hallin and Mancini (2004, p.41), the state plays a significant role in shaping the media system in any society, although the extent and the forms of this intervention might significantly vary. The digital disruption provoked by global intermediaries sets a huge challenge for the sustainability of small national media markets, and even transnational regulatory bodies like the EU are facing a hard time to regulate digital platforms that are based overseas. As a result, some scholars argue in favour of the “declining state thesis”, while others suggest that at the national level, governments still exercise power in policy making (for a thorough discussion, see Iosifidis, 2016). Despite the need of a concrete supranational “answer” to the threat established by platforms like Facebook or Netflix, policy making in the regional level still matters (Enli et al., 2019). More than the diminishing role of state interventions in the shaping of media markets, we are witnessing a change in the form of these interventions.

As Mancini has suggested (2020, pp. 5770–5771), the role of the state as owner has almost disappeared in the digital era, and it could be evaluated only in the funding and regulatory level. In other words, there cannot be a digital market, without digital infrastructures, which are state made, and digital media can be regulated or unregulated, following different rationales and patterns (Mattoni & Ceccobelli, 2018, p.5). Other, suggest that the dimension of “state intervention” is in fact a multidimensional category and propose its further distinguishment in three indicators in order to better standardize and measure the state’s role in the media market (Brüggemann et al., 2014). More precisely, in their revised model for comparing media systems, Brüggemann et al. (2014) distinguished and measured three different forms of state intervention (all of them included as sub–dimensions in Hallin and Mancini’s dimension role of the state), which were labeled “public broadcasting”, “press subsidies” (that support commercial media, either in the form of direct or indirect press subsidies), and “ownership regulation”. Accordingly, the operationalization of the three dimensions that must be seen as integral parts of the state interventionism can be established based to the following indicators: The “public broadcasting” dimension can be measured by using as indicators the market share of public TV; the public revenue (licensed fees) of public broadcasting; the “press subsidies” dimension, respectively, by looking at direct subsidies and/or tax reduction; and the “ownership regulation” dimension by looking into TV ownership regulation, newspaper/publisher ownership regulation and cross media (print/broadcast) ownership regulation.

5 Journalistic Professionalism: A Prerequisite of Media Trust?

More precisely, Hallin and Mancini (2004, pp. 34–36) provide three indicators that can be used to better operationalize the journalistic professionalism index in different countries. The first indicator is the degree of professional autonomy that journalists enjoy as a group. Journalistic autonomy can be either limited by external forces, such as political or economic pressures, or compromised by managerial pressures in the newsroom (by publishers or media owners). The second indicator for journalistic professionalism is the development of distinct professional norms and code of ethics. The last indicator is the degree of journalists’ orientation towards an ethic of public service.

The absence of journalistic professionalism paves the way for the instrumentalization of journalists by economic or political interests, which in turn harms their credibility (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, p. 37). New technologies have altered the daily working routines of journalists, but overall, the role played by journalists in the news production cycle has not been replaced. As Wiik (2009) suggests, fears of de-professionalization of journalism are groundlessness, since even if journalism is being reshaped as an answer to the critical changes in the journalistic field, it still holds its traditional professional ideals (at least in a theoretical level). These traditional journalistic ideals are the tools for the legitimizing of journalism. Thus, the indicators proposed by Hallin and Mancini for the evaluation of journalistic professionalism are still of value.

Ιn their study, Henke et al. (2020) investigated how the use of evidence in journalistic outputs promotes the credibility of a news story and concluded that scientific sources, statistical information and the visualization of statistical data are all forms of journalistic evidence that can enhance the quality evaluation and the perceived credibility of a journalistic story. In other words, the issue of journalistic epistemology is now more crucial than ever. Or put it in Humprecht’s et al. (2022) words, “the existence of quality criteria and norms that signal journalistic excellence for most journalists can still be regarded as an important dimension of journalistic professionalism”.

6 The Organization of the Book

In effect, we consider that theoretical approach envisioned by Hallin and Mancini might still be a place for the concept of media systems among comparative studies in the digital era considering the new developments in the media systems. The latter are not simply a consequence of processes of globalization but also outcomes of technological change, policy making and economics and the Europeanization process which help give shape to the new world and to the media order. We consider that in Europe there is a dialectic relationship between the national and the international, the global and the regional and the old media and new media. Besides, a contextual, comparative research is better equipped to address common pitfalls regarding the rise of digital media, since “a context aware analysis avoids variants of technology centrism or media centrism that may lead into technological determinism” (Liu et al., 2020, p. 5758).

This book is part of the project EUMEPLAT (European Media Platforms: Assessing Positive and Negative Externalities for European Culture) that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004488. The information and views in this book are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Neither the European Union institutions and bodies nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein.

This book aims to present an account of the contemporary media field focusing on the trends as well as on the problems the national media systems within the European Union face. It covers a broad spread of media markets, highlighting the new sectors that are emerging and outlining the factors driving the media business into the digital era. It finally examines the current structure of the various sectors that make up the European media market (broadcasting, the press, the Internet), identifies and assesses the major issues as well as provides an overview of each sector of the industry.

This book apart from the present Introduction is organized in five chapters and conclusions. The next chapter “On Western and Eastern Media Systems: Continuities and Discontinuities” deals with the theoretical evolution of the media models envisaged by the seminal work of Hallin and Mancini, and then it attempts to discuss the validity of these models in the age of media convergence, digitalization and platformization. Chapter “Europe and the Media in 1990–2020” is an overview of the state of the media developments in Europe between 1990 and 2020. Following chapters “The Media in North-Western Europe in the Last Three Decades”, “Nordic Media Systems”, “Southern Media Systems; Continuities, Changes & Challenges” and “The Media in Eastern Europe” are consist of more detailed reports regarding the development of media for each region, West, Central, North, Eastern and Southern Europe.

Our hope is that this book contributes to stimulating ongoing conversations in comparative media analysis, and we thank our colleagues for their contributions given the many challenges they surpassed in producing this work. Within this context, we should note that the task of collecting data for such a long period of time and with so many countries was proven extremely and, surprisingly, difficult. We were astonished by the lack of available data, their compatibility, even in the case of data that were coming from the same research institutions. In some cases, there were no data at all, especially in the case of the Eastern European countries, while in others the continuity of data, and thus their validity, ceased in 2014, as in the cases of newspapers or in others, the providing institutions did not allow us to publish them, or in some other cases, they changed the methodology they followed for a decade. Even so, we have tried with our colleagues to integrate most available data and to offer to the European media research community at least some continuity regarding the contemporary history of the European media.