Keywords

1 Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the relevant academic literature related to the comparative media systems model, taking into account the case of the Eastern European media as well. In effect, we will try to sketch the main features of the so-called post-Socialist media markets. Based on scientific literature, Hallin and Mancini’s model stands as the most significant framework for wide-scale comparative analysis. Their models, while being ultimately inspired by Wilbur Schramm’s recognition on press systems (Siebert et al., 1956), make use of four main elements: dimensions of the media market, with an emphasis on the relative importance of newspapers and TV; political parallelism; level of journalistic professionalism; and role of the State. As this book is focused on the European media, we will not consider the case of the North American media, as mentioned in the Introduction. When we narrow down the observation to the European context, the missing spot of the picture is, with no doubt, the case of the Eastern media. Here the methodological issues raised in the introduction of this book—how media systems change across time and vary across space—take a very specific character. As we will see, adding a “post-communist” cluster to the four-space model would be largely insufficient to the understanding of Eastern transition and its complexity (Mihelj & Downey, 2012, p. 5)—a purpose for which it is rather necessary to work on the specific features of each country in that region. In any case, here we will assume the usual position that the post-Socialist transition has deeply changed the social and economic tissue of all countries, even though some different interpretations can be detected in literature. In particular, the assumption has been questioned that the Eastern systems were totally insulated, whereas some of them might have been open and “pragmatically interested” in Western contents (Sparks, 2000, p. 32).

2 Conjectures on Eastern European Media

To start with, Hallin and Mancini reflect on their own on the consistency of such a common post-Socialist pattern. By and large, for them the typical feature of Eastern Europe is the fast transition between two different regimes—“all media systems change, of course”, they state, but not all at the same rhythm (Hallin & Mancini, 2013, p. 22). Consequently, Eastern media systems would be in tension between the limited professionalization of the sector—resulting from a sudden commercialization of its assets and from the weakness of civil society—and the high level of politicization and State control, which is the most obvious legacy of communist era. Here we will discuss a few approaches, all originally inspired by this frame (Table 1).

Table 1 Dimensions and indicators for Eastern media systems
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A first relevant analysis has been realized by Castro Herrero et al. (2017), which use the original Mancini and Hallin’s dimensions in combination with four additional aspects, namely, foreign TV share; concentration in media ownership; level of press freedom; and use of online news outlets. With the exception of the latter, those elements seem to directly fit the historical case of post-Socialist countries. By also drawing on their previous research (Brüggemann et al., 2014), the authors list out a series of empirical indicators, synthetized in the matrix below (Table 2).

Table 2 Eastern media systems: a first model
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When we talk about Eastern European media, the convention has it that we refer to them as post-socialist systems: while empirical findings, the authors state, reveal the unsuitability of framing the 11 considered countries in terms of such general categories. Peruško, Vozab, and Čuvalo made a similar attempt, in their comparative analysis of 23 European countries. By merging Hallin and Mancini’s model with their interest in the “institutional character” of any society, they operationalize four main dimensions: economic, political, and social inclusiveness; state of media market, with a focus on ICT and social platforms penetration, and newspaper circulation; advancement of creative production; and index of globalization (Peruško et al., 2015, pp. 347–349). Based on these dimensions, they sort out the countries into four clusters, as in Table 3.

Table 3 Eastern media systems: a second model
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One may notice how this scheme hardly respects Hallin and Mancini’s prototype—with countries belonging to democratic-corporatist and polarized-pluralist areas collapsing in the same cluster. On the other hand, Nordic countries are grouped together, in such a way to remind us of the Scandinavian exception, based on extreme levels of speech freedom and digitalization and by an advanced social function of the press (see Allern & Pollack, 2017). The intuitive and empirically evident specificity of Scandinavian media is rarely accounted for, in comparative media studies. In their analysis on media systems in the digital age, Humprecht et al. (2022) combined the model originally conceived by Hallin and Mancini and operationalized by Brüggemann et al. (2014) with indicators that are better situated to describe the contemporary changes in the media market, such as online audience responsiveness. They also included in their study media freedom as a central variable, which used to be excluded from prior studies that were mainly focused on Western Europe or USA. But as the authors suggest when incorporating onto the analysis countries from Central and Eastern Europe, information freedom provides a crucial point of reference for comparing media systems. Their cluster analysis resulted in three groups of media systems, where the Eastern European media systems as seen below are divided between the polarized-pluralist cluster and a hybrid cluster. According to the authors, the media systems of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Slovakia seem to have commonalities with the media systems of Southwestern European countries, such as Spain or Greece, while Estonia and Lithuania share more common traits with the USA or the UK (Table 4).

Table 4 Eastern media systems: a third model
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With respect to the main object of this chapter, one may become aware of the fact that Baltic media systems have been deeply affected by the Scandinavian influence too, despite their formal belonging to Socialist and post-Socialist order—or even, they “identified more with Scandinavia than with Soviet Union” (Jakubowicz & Sükösd, 2008a, p. 28, 2008b). Not accidentally, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania easily cluster together with Western or Central European media markets, depending on the scope and metrics of the analysis (i.e., Castro Herrero et al., 2017; Dobek-Ostrowska, 2015, 2019; Jakubowicz & Sükösd, 2008a, 2008b; Peruško et al., 2015). This discrepancy between geopolitical and information patterns, while striking a blow to the notion of post-communist system itself, poses a big question as to whether comparative media theory should rely on existing categorizations—which is what Hallin and Mancini have partially done, with respect to Giovanni Sartori’s work (1976, p. 13) on political and societal pluralism. Upon the “relative independence” of any social field, to recall Pierre Bourdieu’s legendary lesson (1983, p. 40), finding the right place for the media is not an easy task—how largely they depend on institutional power; how intertwined they are with general economic affairs; how autonomously they carry own their own strategies; and how strongly they impose a sectorial hegemony of their own. And how autonomous media have to be from the geo-cultural context surrounding them, in the end, will be the conceptual knot to be undone, also for the purposes of EU regulation of digital platforms (more in Miconi, 2022). As an evolution of the previous research, in any case, Peruško eventually came out with the proposal of three geo-cultural patterns, as shown below (Table 5).

Table 5 Three empirical patterns
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Two significant indications have to be noticed here. The first is the inclusion of the economic version of “parallelism” alongside to its classical one, stating the intrinsically political role of private powers and media owners. The second is the taking together of alleged Eastern and Western countries in the second cluster, which reminds us of Central Europe as it used to be and of the redrawing of its map during the Cold War, resulting in the exclusion of “key cities” and countries of the Mitteleuropa (Carpentier, 2021, p. 5). One may put into question, on the other hand, the choice of a typical categorization in terms of open versus closed systems, where—as Thomass and Kleinsteuber would put it (2011, p. 27)—“the western liberal model is the measure of classification and uses the binary code of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ media”.

What is equally interesting is how the above clusters neither respect the three spaces defined by Hallin and Mancini nor totally overlap with East/West territorial distinctions. In some way, a similarity between the Mediterranean and the Eastern system could be suggested by the presence of Greece and Portugal—and then Greece and Italy—in the first cluster. Late transition to democracy appears to be a main factor here, as also confirmed by comparative analysis of public communication and public relations in the two areas (Rodríguez-Salcedo & Watson, 2017). In the end, Peruško, Vozab, and Čuvalo propose a sophisticated analysis while also reflecting on the consequences of systemic arrangements on audiences’ practices (2015, pp. 355–357).

With a similar ambition but in a different vein, Boguslawa Dobek-Ostrowska tried to sketch an Eastern-European trajectory, in a certain manner independent from Mancini and Hallin’s model. According to her, some habitual categories would not apply to Eastern Europe as they are modeled after the Western example. The latter is the case of “political parallelism”: a property that can hardly be observed and measured in situations of structural transition, as already noted by Mancini himself (Mancini & Zielonka, 2012, p. 382). Hence, Dobek-Ostrowska imagines four consecutive stages of institutional and societal reformation: pre-transition; primary transition; secondary transition; and late or mature transition. The specific position of each of the 21 analyzed countries would therefore result from the intersection between this and other variables, related to the overall state of the system: freedom and freedom of speech (based on the position in World Press Index, Freedom of the Press Freedom House, and Democracy Index); GDP; and penetration rate of the Internet. Four different Eastern media systems emerge, which can be eventually identified as hybrid liberal, politicized, transition, and authoritarian (Table 6).

Table 6 Eastern media systems: a fourth model
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When we compare Dobek-Ostrowska’s results with those presented by Peruško, Vozab, and Čuvalo, it appears how four of the countries included in the first cluster are grouped as in the previous case (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia), while the other three are sorted out in a different way (Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia). The second cluster also largely overlaps with Peruško, Vozab, and Čuvalo’s first pattern, which included Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia, and Romania, while Belarus, Russia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Moldova, and Ukraine are not considered in Peruško’s two taxonomies.

Probably, the most controversial category is the last one to appear in Dobek-Ostrowska’s scheme—that of authoritarian systems, sometimes including Hungary (Bajomi-Lázár, 2015, pp. 60–62), along with the usual case of Russia (i.e., Becker, 2004). The problem is not too different from that of Schramm, Peterson, and Siebert’s concept of “authoritarian” press (1956), which was even imbued, on its part, with some judgmental and normative value. A further distinction has been advanced in this sense by Jakubowicz and Sükösd, by means of an aggregated analysis of institutional reports on freedom of speech (i.e., those of Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders). In the end, they distinguish among three clusters (2008a, 2008b, p. 31):

  • “Democratic” systems, as in Baltic States and East-Central Europe

  • “Dictatorial” systems, such as Belarus; three different kinds of “authoritarian” media systems: “etatist” in Russia; “paternalistic” in Kazakhstan

  • “Depressed” in Moldova and Southern Caucasus

As to all instances related to democracy and freedom of speech, one may object that a Western bias is embedded in the free press indexes commonly cited—and it may well be, when it comes to their utility for framing non-Western realities. As insoluble as such a dilemma risks to be, the analysis of perception has been proposed as a mitigation answer—with the focus shifted on people’s satisfaction with media and political institutions, rather than on official global rankings, which blink an eye to supposedly universal values.

In Auksė Balčytienė and Kristina Juraitė’s work (2015), based on the aggregation of data from the European Social Survey, three alternative clusters would emerge in this sense, with Bulgaria standing as a particular case. Given the wide variance in data related with information consumption, the authors mainly use these indicators for assessing the polarization tendencies in Eastern Europe. As to the credibility awarded to media outlets, though, it remains unclear whether local perception is shaped by how the national media work, or it refers to the information system per se. More abstractly speaking, the doubt is to which extent a particular media pattern can affect a country, without its effects spilling over into other areas. However, before tackling a related and decisive issue—the normative facet of the media systems model—a few words about a concept specific to the Eastern case is that of transition (Table 7).

Table 7 Clustering of eight Eastern European countries by public perception of media and democracy
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3 Media Systems in Transition?

The concept of transition is even too heavily used in literature, to the point that some have started to speak about “transitology,” for mocking the tendency to frame Eastern European history in such a way (Sparks, 2008, p. 44). In the original Hallin and Mancini’s theoretical framework, one may recall late and problematic transition to democracy was actually a feature of the polarized-pluralist system, including countries that restored their parliamentary democracies in the 1970s or underwent a turbulent post-War experience. To a certain extent, this could suggest similarities between the post-Socialist and the Mediterranean case, as already noticed by a few scholars and even referred to as Italianization of Mediterraneanization of Eastern media systems (Dobek-Ostrowska, 2012; Jakubowicz, 2008; Wyka, 2008). Analogous conclusions are reached by Peruško and Čuvalo (2014, p. 149) in their analysis of post-Socialist Croatian TV or by Örnebring in his fieldwork on media clientelism in ten Central-Eastern European countries (2012); and what is more, Hallin and Mancini themselves seem tempted to endorse this hypothesis (2013, pp. 18–20).

Even though explicit reference is rarely made to his work, such association between Eastern and Southern European countries can probably be explained upon Samuel Huntington’s idea of democratization cycles. Here history is made of a continuous alternance between waves of democratization and anti-democratic “reverses”—according to an alleged Schumpeterian regularity, which shape the contemporary landscape (Huntington, 1991, pp. 13–26). Mediterranean and Eastern European countries, as schematized in Table 10, tend to cluster around a specific pole—that of post-1974 “third wave” of democratization, starting with the Portuguese revolution and then affecting all the continents and peaking in 1989 and post-1989 events in South Africa and in the former Soviet Union (Table 8).

Table 8 Democratization waves in Southern and Eastern European countries
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A direct application of Huntington’s work is claimed by Kleinsteuber, while replacing the notion of transition with that of transformation, allegedly able to explain all cases of non-linear change or “blocked transformation”—when historical evolution is not paralleled by a democratization process or by a proper delinking between state control and media ownership (2010, pp. 24–25). In his view, Eastern European transformation would belong to a third historical wave, following the first one in Spain, Greece, and Portugal, between 1967 and 1974, and the second one in Latin America, during the 1980s (2010, pp. 29–30). As influential as Huntington may be, nevertheless, the focus on the broader characteristics of post-communist institutional change can hardly give justice to the variety of Eastern systems. As it has been observed, the insistence on “common aspects of post-Socialist transition and transformations” is typical of the early stages of comparative studies, which more recently have rather specialized in the differences among regions and countries (Peruško et al., 2015, p. 2). What is interesting is that closer analyses have shown the emergence of alternative media patterns yet back in the Socialist era, as it appears on Mihelj and Huxtable’s comparative study, based on four main variables: infrastructural development; level of State control; transnational orientation and “openness to the West”; and position in the core-periphery scheme (2018, pp. 81–87) (Table 9).

Table 9 Three models of socialist TV systems
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Though limited to the TV industry—or perhaps, the more so—Mihelj and Huxtable’s work reveals a more nuanced picture while also giving substance to the long durée analysis repeatedly called for by Zrinjka Peruško. To some extent, the historical legacy of the above Socialist patterns is also visible in Dobek-Ostrowska’s taxonomy (2012), with the former “hard-line” countries being, not accidentally, the farther from the hybrid liberal pole. The overall definition of Eastern systems as transitional, what is more, can be quite problematic, as it often reflects the idea of a broader change-over towards more advanced institutional arrangements. As a matter of fact, the development of media sector has been paralleling the growth of democratic and representative institutions while at the same time following opposite trends, such as biased coverage of the events, ownership concentration, and dependence on political powers, which can hardly be considered typical of democratization processes (Georgieva et al., 2015, p. 108). This problem probably derives from a more general one: the implicit definition of Eastern progress as being oriented towards the Western model.

In this perspective, Peter Gross distinguishes between three different stages: the transition or the restructuring after the fall of Communist regimes; the consolidation or the empowerment of media professionals, actors, and outlets; and finally, the integration or the adhesion to Western European standards (Gross, 2004, pp. 127–128). The same distinction between transition towards Western rules and consolidation of democratic media has been proposed by Bajomi-Lázár (2008, p. 78), with attention appropriately paid to the non-irreversible nature of the process, by which press and information freedom can decline even upon stable structural conditions. This is the same trajectory as that described by Eva Polońska while analyzing the “reversal of democratic transition” and the failure of the public service project in the specific case of Poland (2019, pp. 230, 248–249) and in such a way to remind us that history does not follow a linear path—like a transition—and is rather characterized by endless accidents and unpredictable twists. To which degree systemic analysis can apply to such irregular historical trends, needless to say, is the main issue for both theoretical and methodological investigations.

What systemic analysis of transition risk to overlook in all cases—them being based on the symmetric breakdown of Hallin and Mancini’s structural indicators—is the imbalance between Eastern and Western media sectors, which might be heightened by the integration process itself. An example of that is provided by a comparative analysis of daily coverage in Eastern and Western European newspapers, with the former cluster showing a lot of “references to Western European countries” and the latter no less than a “neglect of Eastern Europe” (Wessler et al., 2008, p. 183). In other words, the global system is set in motion so that bringing national markets closer to each other always implies a hierarchization of geographical spaces (Wallerstein, 1983, 30). Technological innovation would spillover from the core and spread into the semi- peripheries, and influential media industries would produce contents for the less advanced—something that the conventional comparative method, as it relies on the search for common trends, can hardly account for. As we know, Hallin and Mancini’s model is all about the organization of media markets, with a little attention paid to media contents. How to combine the two dimensions is therefore a priority task for historical research, in the years to come, as it is expected to account for the unequal relation among media systems and the way geographical and economic convergence can foster it.

According to Gross, so, Eastern media systems “should not pursue” their consolidation “in the name of integration” but rather follow a trajectory of their own (2004, p. 131). To some extent, his work is an attempt of considering both divergence and convergence as potential factors driving innovation, resulting in a synoptic confrontation between Western and Eastern European media systems, as shown in Table 10.

Table 10 Eastern and Western European media systems
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As ambitious as it may be, though, Gross’ model is far from perfect. Firstly, as to variability in media laws application, it is not always clear whether we are talking about the implementation of the EU framework—which, by definition, would show a delay in countries not being part of the Union or recently admitted—or rather about the existence of an advanced regulation as such. In the latter case, we know that a transnational regulation has been in place in Socialist Europe since the 1980s, partially due to the consultation of Western agencies and governmental organizations (Harcourt, 2012) but also based on the traditional “transnational entanglement” of Eastern media systems (Mihelj & Huxtable, 2018, pp. 59–61). Secondly, other points of his seem to be oversimplified—namely, the absence of a strong market dimension and the weak level of “consolidation” in the various fields of public service, media ownership, and pluralism. The rough attribution of an extreme level of partisanship to all Eastern media systems, in particular, does not pass the test of empirical verification, which rather shows a continuum between high and low levels of politicization, even based on such common indicators as the free press index (Dobek-Ostrowska, 2019, pp. 264–265) (Table 11).

Table 11 Level of politicization in Eastern media systems
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According to some scholars, again, there would be significant exceptions to the growth of foreign language outlets foreseen by Gross, with Poland being the most cited case of country not colonized by global media (i.e., Kostadinova, 2015). Some other conclusions, which are related to media partisanship, parallelism, and polarization, would rather confirm the already considered similarity between Eastern and Mediterranean systems, and the same can be told about the lack of analytical journalism, or what Brüggemann et al. (2014) have already codified in terms of confusion between “news” and “commentary.”

Regarding the overall utility of Gross’ scheme, one might make are just a few considerations. For sure, it is deeply inspired by the original media systems model, as it mostly deals with the state of journalism and public service. What is more interesting, it reveals two main difficulties we would need to keep in mind. Firstly, any binary comparison runs the risk of reproducing the dichotomic opposition that after Said (1978, p.184) we know as orientalism—with Eastern Europe sometimes being framed in a negative, generalized idea of “otherness” (low/high level of journalism education; advanced/backward state of the media market; and so forth). Secondly, once again the dialogue lacks between two analytical levels: the institutional and structural dimensions of media markets and the media contents. As Franco Moretti once pointed out, no bridge exists between economics of culture and the humanities: so that book history and the history of forms not only “seem very distant; they are very distant”—and well, “that’s why the bridge is useful” (1997, p. 143).

From the methodological standpoint, the most advanced attempt of dealing with the transitional nature of Eastern media system is probably that of Peruško et al. (2021). Even though their research is limited to six former countries of the Yugoslav Republic, they break down the generic definition of transition into a complex set of indicators, by taking into account both recent events and long dureé process, among which the establishment of the press. A synthesis of the indicators is provided below (Table 12).

Table 12 Indicators for former Yugoslavian countries transitions
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Against this backdrop, the authors perform a multi-factorial analysis, to detect the emerging patterns. As it is always the case, the nature and weight of some indicators could be discussed: for instance, the idea of “dominance of right-wing parties” threatening press freedom seems to be based on precise historical accidents, rather than on well-rounded theoretical hypotheses. In any case, results of their analysis—which is only partially inspired by the original Hallin and Mancini’s model—are synthetized in Table 13, as they identify the “sufficient conditions” necessary to the development of media markets of various types.

Table 13 State of media systems in former Yugoslavian countries
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Peruško, Vozab, and Čuvalo also look for a further break-down of the analytical dimensions, by trying to weight the relative influence of long durée and more recent historical processes and to tell apart the role of agency and structure in the shaping of media systems (2021, pp. 194–200)—an intriguing task, the latter, that would probably require a more specific investigation (see Fu, 2003, pp. 275–277). The main result of their work, in any case, is in the identification of very irregular patterns in historical evolution, which comes as an antidote to all normative implications of the media systems model. Not only does political parallelism not correlate with institutional democratization, for instance, but broader questions may arise regarding the connection between media freedom and journalistic professionalism; between overall liberalization and the level of “media capture” on the part of political power; and between the degree of literacy and the expansion of cultural markets (2021, p. 243). The presence of three advanced media and journalism markets back in the Socialist era—in Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia—actually contradicts many beliefs about the consubstantiality between open societies and information development while also reminding us what systemic analysis, counter-intuitively enough, should be about—variants.

4 Discussion and Concluding Remarks

As it might have been already observed, a risk embedded in the media system model is that of taking on a normative value: looking for the way the world should be, rather than for the world as it is, and the more so when it comes to such topics as institutional communication, role of the state, or deliberative public sphere (Mihelj & Downey, 2012), rather than with the ideological aspect, though we are concerned with the methodological facet of the discourse and, namely, with the ability of an abstract model to predict its own results—that is to say, with its self-fulfilling effects. Here the empirical issue is one with the epistemological one, as any ideal-typical model risks to favor a normative interpretation of the real. For Max Weber—whose seminal work lies at the heart of Hallin and Mancini’s typology—this was notoriously due to the role of values in shaping scientific knowledge. To what extent the ideal-type as such would imply a normative evaluation is not easy to tell: in one way, Weber’s separation between the choice of the research topic and the moment of the analysis can prove otherwise; in the other way, the abstraction of an ideal model can easily reflect personal preferences, as in Weber’s “glorification” of German Nation-State and his attentions for social configurations “able to live up” to that model (Portis, 1983, p. 33). The most energic use of Weber’s lesson—that of Perry Anderson—would stick to the same problem, not surprisingly, with the ideal-type of socialist hegemony becoming a political horizon for British left and not only a theoretical path to its understanding (1965, pp. 241–243). Suffice is to say that some characteristics proper to media systems—professionalization of journalism or political pluralism—run the risk, in their turn, of implying a specific set of values, certainly grounded in the Western view of mass communication.

For the purposes of grounded research, this poses the problem of how well-established categories—in the case, three paradigms of media and politics—can reliably pick out different empirical materials in variable contexts. With this respect, one might even question whether system is the right category for comparative analysis (Rantanen, 2013, pp. 257–60)—something which, to be totally honest, should not be taken for given, as we have done so far. As Hans Kleinsteuber noted, the comparative method based on concordance, when opposed to that inspired by difference, usually looks for the same “common characteristics” in different regional media and therefore implies assuming that all “societies pass through similar stages of development,” as in the case of the transition from the industrial to the information era (Kleinsteuber, 2004, pp. 70–71). Not accidentally, even in Weber’s work, a certain discontinuity can be detected, with this respect, between his epistemological lesson and his comparative-historical research, with the latter being framed by the concept of “type,” rather than by that of ideal-type (see Kuckartz, 1991, among others).

An interesting methodological alternative can be derived from a contiguous field, namely, from Gehring and Oberthür’s comparative analysis of institutional interactions in EU countries, related to environmental issues. By means of a sort of “iterative approach,” they sort out 163 empirical cases of institutional practices into three main groups. According to them, ideal-typical models show two main flaws. On the one hand, data analysis can easily group real cases in disparate ways and give shape to endless possible clusters: as a matter of fact, though, not all these clusters reveal a “consistent, underlying logics” (the disjuncture between Hallin and Mancini’s pattern and Brüggemann et al., 2014 empirical clusters can easily come to mind, here). Βesides, Humprecht et al. (2022) suggest in quantitative approaches such as cluster analysis, the selection of indicators and countries “strongly affects the cluster solution.”

On the other hand, ideal-types are by definition mutually exclusive, while field research will always detect many spurious or “mixed cases.” According to Gehring and Oberthür, the solution seems to be in an extended preliminary data examination, able to reveal which patterns are properly vested with some scientific meaning—or which data reveal a significant level of effectiveness of public policies, in their case (2006, pp. 325–334). If we generalize these insights to the broader field of comparative studies, it seems that a grounded methodology is the only way to break the vicious circle of systems’ self-referentiality—collecting enough data to put the hypothesis to the test and update the hypothesis itself since such data (and so on). But still, how much data is enough data is obviously an open question, and after which point data assume scientific meaning, and start to tell something, is even a more complicated one. In effect, there is no universal answer to that, to the point that after the turn of digital archives we still happen to grope in the dark—trying to accumulate as much data as possible and waiting for some patterns to appear. Systems and ideal-types are hardly compatible with historical change; but once you gave up these paradigms, you will face the opposite problem, with “large quantities” of data showing “average (and) loss of distinction”—to quote again Franco Moretti—and even “boredom,” as if we were in front of “the Scylla and Charybdis” of scientific research (Moretti, 2013, pp. 180–181).

While it is difficult to come out with a conclusive answer, here, some clues can be found, which all lead to the importance of asymmetries and imperfections—in spite of the neo-Kantian inspiration of Weber’s ideal-types (1904). As already observed, Mancini and Hallin aptly noticed that the different dimensions do not always vary at the same time and together (2017, p. 158). To our knowledge, the best theory for framing this irregularity as a constitutive requisite is that of David Harvey, according to which global capitalism is made of seven “activity spheres”—technologies and organizational forms; social relations; institutional/administrative arrangements; production and labor; relations to nature; daily life; and mental conceptions of the world (2011; 2015). We cannot say if Harvey is totally right, here: why there should be precisely seven spheres—rather than, say, six or nine—and why exactly those seven. In his broader methodological stance, though, Harvey’s brilliant idea is that any sphere evolves according to its own internal rules, whereas the crisis of any of them can impact all the others and even lead to a re-structuring of the systems as a whole.

Some media systems, it follows, would appear to be marked by the complex equilibrium between “conflicting practices” or by what can be called an “asymmetric parallelism” between social instances and media coverage (Peruško, 2021; for the concept of “asymmetric parallelism,” see also Faris et al., 2017). Or, to put it in Harvey’s words, the state and advancement of media technologies can proceed at a different speed and even be based on a different temporal scale, when compared to cultural representations of the world. The mediated construction of reality, Couldry and Hepp note, is “characterized by a pluralization of temporalities” (2017, p. 107)—and perhaps, we may add, the methodological gaze has to shift to the very same direction. As the case of media in Eastern Europe reveals even in countries with a share social political past, there is still ground for specificities to be flourished that eventually will lead to different paths of media market development. Even if we witness the triumph of certain general tendencies of what is described as the consolidation of media market globalization, this process could not be understood in its full potentials, without taking into consideration how the political, cultural, and economic “legacy” of each European member state affect the final outcome of this process, as manifested in the different shape and dynamics of the national media markets. This is the reason why comparative media analysis is still of value today, even if classic modes of analysis need to be refined to best captivate the contemporary media landscape.