Oligarchization, de-westernization and vulnerability: media between democracy and authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe (a roundtable discussion)
posted on 2016-09-09, 11:26authored byAukse Balcytiene, Peter Bajomi-Lazar, Vaclav StetkaVaclav Stetka, Miklos Sukosd
What are the major trends of media change in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? How do these media transformations relate to economic, political, social and cultural currents in the region? After a decade of democratic optimism from the early 1990s to the 2000s, why did democratic media regimes in the region become recently so vulnerable? Why would the level of media freedom and pluralism in the CEE region remain significantly more limited than in Western Europe, despite supposedly shared European values and policies, and EU membership of the countries in the region? What explains variation in the level of media freedom within and across the former communist countries? What are the direct and indirect effects of the global financial crisis on the trends of democratization vs. authoritarianism in CEE? How could eminent newly democratized countries in CEE backslide dramatically to semi-authoritarian hybrid regimes that we usually find in former Soviet Eurasia? How do semi-authoritarian regimes control media in different CEE countries? Also, how could media studies of the region be reinvented to reflect on the shifting geopolitical balance of power, especially the emergence of BRICS, the growing influence of Russia, and the war in Ukraine? What could comparative post-communist media studies add to our analysis and understanding of the new CEE realities?
These were some of the questions tackled by a recent public roundtable discussion entitled "Media, Democracy and Authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe", held at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen on April 24, 2015.
Funding
We are grateful to the Research Priority Area “Media and Communications in Transition Countries” at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, and the Journal of Media, Cognition and Communication, for co-sponsoring the roundtable.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Journal of Media, Cognition and Communication
Volume
3
Issue
1
Pages
119 - 141 (23)
Citation
BALCYTIENE, A. ... et al., 2015. Oligarchization, de-westernization and vulnerability: media between democracy and authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe (a roundtable discussion). Tidsskrift for Medier, Erkendelse og Formidling [Journal of Media, Cognition and Communication], 3 (1), pp.119-141.
Publisher
University of Copenhagen
Version
VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/