This book provides the most recent overview of media systems in Europe. It explores new political, economic and technological environments and the challenges they pose to democracies and informed citizens. It also examines the new illiberal environment that has quickly embraced certain European states and its impact on media systems, considering the sources and possible consequences of these challenges for media industries and media professionals. Part I examines the evolving role of public service media in a comparative study of Western, Southern and Central Europe, whilst Part II ventures into Europe’s periphery, where media continues to be utilised by the state in its quest for power. The book also provides an insight into the role of the European Union in preserving the independence and neutrality of public service media. It will be useful to students and researchers of political communication and international and comparative media, as well as democracy and populism.

Addresses a critical analysis of major media policies in the European Union and Council of Europe at the period of profound changes affecting both media environments and use, as well as the logic of media policy-making and reconfiguration of traditional regulatory models. The analytical problem-related approach seems to better reflect a media policy process as an interrelated part of European integration, formation of European citizenship, and exercise of communication rights within the European communicative space. The question of normative expectations is to be compared in this case with media policy rationales, mechanisms of implementation (transposing rules from EU to national levels), and outcomes.

The core challenge facing public service broadcasting today is the transition to public service media. This understanding characterised discourse among participants in the RIPE@2006 conference in the Netherlands, the theme of which was Public Service Broadcasting in the Multimedia Environment: Programmes and Platforms. The contributors in this volume focus attention on issues of strategic concern and tactical importance in addressing the core challenge. A defining ... Etc.

This book investigates public service broadcasting (PSB) models in post-authoritarian regimes, and offers a critical inspection of the development of a Western European-originated PSB system in Asian transitional societies, in particular in Indonesia since the 1990's. Placing the case of Indonesia's PSB within the context of global media liberalization, this book traces the development of public service broadcasting in post-authoritarian societies, including the arrival of neoliberal policy and the growth of media oligarchs that favour free market media systems over public interest media systems. The book argues that Western European PSB models or 'BBC-like' models have travelled to new democracies, and that autocratic legacies embedded in former state-owned radio and television broadcasters have resisted pro-democratic media pressures. As such, similar to new PSBs in other post-colonial, transitional and global south regimes, such as in Arab states or Bangladesh, this book demonstrates that the adoption of PSB in Indonesia has not reflected the ideal PSB project initially envisaged by media advocates but was flawed in both media policy and governance. It explores the history of broadcast governance in authoritarian Indonesia, and considers how Western European PSB or 'British Broadcasting Corporation/BBC-like' models have travelled – somewhat uneasily – to new democracies, but also how autocratic legacies embedded in former state-owned radio and television channels have resisted external parties of pro-democratic media systems.

The digital media environment is characterized by an abundance and diversity of content, a multiplicity of platforms, new modes of content production, distribution and access, and changed patterns of consumer and business behaviour. This has challenged the traditional model of public service broadcasting (PSB) in diverse ways. This book explores whether and how PSB should adapt to reflect the conditions of the digital media space so that it can effectively and efficiently continue to serve its public mandate. Drawing on literature on media governance in media and communication science, public international law as well as discussions on cyberlaw, Mira Burri maps and critically analyses existing policy and scholarly debates on PSB transformation. She challenges some of conventional rationales for reform, identifies new ones, as well as exposes the limitations placed upon existing and future policy solutions by global media governance arrangements, especially in the fields of trade, copyright and Internet governance. The book goes on to advance a future-oriented model of Public Service Media, which is capable of matching an environment of technological and of governance complexity. As a work that explores how public interest objectives can be pursued efficiently and sustainably in the digital media ecology, this book will be of great interest and use to students and researchers in media law, information technology law, and broadcast media studies, as well as to policy-makers.

These essays address one of the most challenging debates in contemporary European media studies: the transition of the traditional Public Service Broadcasters into Public Service Media, as they widen their remit to produce and distribute public service content across more delivery platforms to meet the requirements of the digital age.

The central issue of Michael Tracey's study is that public service broadcasting sadly has a limited future and that this is an indication of a real and deep-seated crisis within liberal democratic systems.