New Digital Threats to Media Pluralism in the Information Age

Abstract

The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, created in 1992 and currently directed by Professor Brigid Laffan, aims to develop inter-disciplinary and comparative research on the major issues facing the process of European integration, European societies and Europe's place in 21 st century global politics. The Centre is home to a large post-doctoral programme and hosts major research programmes, projects and data sets, in addition to a range of working groups and ad hoc initiatives. The research agenda is organised around a set of core themes and is continuously evolving, reflecting the changing agenda of European integration, the expanding membership of the European Union, developments in Europe's neighbourhood and the wider world.

Policy changes to strengthen the protection of media freedom and media pluralism in the EU

“…Journalists play a decisive middleman role in bridging supply and demand of news: they allow news consumers to save on the costs of gathering and processing information by filtering original events (Gentzkow et al, 2016) and, to the extent they seek to perform a neutral role, they preserve quality, especially by keeping a distance between immediate and partisan interests and the news (Parcu, 2019). This role is now at risk both directly, because the number of professional journalists is shrinking in some countries due to the difficulties of finding alternatives to the traditional means of media financing, and indirectly because the presence of economics difficulties raises the likelihood that employed journalists enjoy less freedom within their media outlets than it was previously the case.…”

Policy Changes to Strengthen the Protection of Media Freedom and Media Pluralism in the EU

“…Journalists play a decisive middleman role in bridging supply and demand of news: they allow news consumers to save on the costs of gathering and processing information by filtering original events (Gentzkow et al, 2016) and, to the extent they seek to perform a neutral role, they preserve quality, especially by keeping a distance between immediate and partisan interests and the news (Parcu, 2019).…”

“…One possible solution is to foresee that, in the EU legal framework, when market power endangers fundamental values, dominance, and not its abuse, should be forbidden (Parcu, 2019). For the reasons explained in section 2, media distribution can be identified as a typical case where fundamental values are at stake and the importance of the value to be preserved is so high that exceptional measures may be justified.…”