Media policy’s new challenges

The transformation of media markets, media products and organisations creates substantial challenges for policy-makers. Digitisation and globalisation are major drivers of this change, turning what used to be a relatively stable industry, into a moving target where the media producers, products and professions are evolving. Technological shifts have altered the business fundamentals for producing news, leaving legacy media in economic crisis. New digital distributors of news have emerged, crossing national borders, making media policy in the information society increasingly a transnational concern (Chakravartty & Sarikakis, 2006).

Van Cuilenberg and McQuail’s (2003) description of how media policy paradigms have evolved over a century predicts this change. The focus of media policy has shifted over the past two decades, from sociopolitical concerns (represented for instance by the Public Service Broadcasting institutions) to technological and economic concerns focusing on people’s access to infrastructure, markets and products. Policy and policy’s interpretation of “public interest” is in this sense relying more on market-based solutions than state intervention. One could, however, argue that this trend during the 2000s towards market liberalisation (Hallin & Mancini, 2004) and pragmatism, rather than ideology as basis for policy-making (van Cuilenburg & McQuail, 2003), has at the same time left national media policy-makers without a clear sense of direction (Ots, Krumsvik, Ala-Fossi, & Rendahl, 2016).

While the media policy objectives of (1) providing an infrastructure for democracy and (2) safeguarding national language and culture are relative stable, European policy-makers find an increasing gap between how legacy media argue for privileges and how they act in the markets. The convergence towards a liberal media model develops with various speed for different media policy areas (Krumsvik, 2013); however, argumentation for state interventions is often still rooted in the idea of media as social institutions rather than private industrial ventures.

Policy measures intended to prevent the development of local monopolies and ownership concentration have mostly failed, and public service institutions tend to be more focused on market reach to legitimate their financing privileges, rather than fulfilling the role of providing desired content not available due to market failure.

Whereas media policy historically has been embedded in and executed through the cultural policies package, this is now changing. Cultural policies, designed and executed on the national level, are decreasing in economic size and relative importance. Globalisation and the integration of markets and financial systems create the need for legislation to be shaped at a transnational level, increasing the influence of the supranational bodies, such as the EU. Areas such as global digital taxation, internet privacy and copyright are in practice of far greater concern for the investments and decisions of media companies than many of the national cultural policies (Ots et al., 2016).

Advancing the academic contribution to policy into the 2020s, there is a need to understand a range of questions regarding the new role of media policy both on national and supranational levels. What is the role and value of media in the welfare state? How can media policy regain a sense of direction and objective rather than being passive, or reactive in the face of market change? With what objectives should states intervene in markets and what can be done to promote future diversity, entrepreneurship and innovation in the media sector.

While the dominating idea for safeguarding freedom of expression in continental Europe traditionally has been for the state to play an active role in creating an infrastructure of public deliberation, the Anglo-American liberal media system has increasingly been based on the idea of a limited role of Government in order to achieve the same objective. This contradiction in ideas on how to enable freedom of expression needs to be addressed explicitly by both researchers and policy-makers as the media systems converge due to digitisation and globalisation.

Legacy news media struggles on both sides of the Atlantic, and in this issue, both McChesney (2016) and Kammer (2016) provides arguments for increased state intervention in order to finance news production as a public good, while Picard (2016) is asking if suggested measures will have the desired effect or rather provide obstacles for innovation.

While media policy traditionally tends to focus on unwanted developments (i.e. local monopolies, ownership concentration, damaging content for children, etc.) with the side effect of representing an obstacle for innovation (Storsul & Krumsvik, 2013), future media policies in a larger liberal system might need to focus more on innovation and entrepreneurship. The latter will probably not be celebrated by the incumbents; however, if the traditional giants stumble, alternative ways of providing a democratic infrastructure should be explored. This might lead to a situation where we need to discuss whether media policy measures gradually should migrate from the field of cultural policy to a more commercially oriented trade and innovation policy – without losing site of the same objectives; to provide an infrastructure for democracy, and safeguard national language and culture.

This special issue on media policy is based on key contributions at The 1st European Symposium on Media Policy in Oslo, Norway, November 2015, hosted by Centre for Interdisciplinary Media Research, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.