Survey: Opposition parties and media coverage in the EU
Journalists at work at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. © European Union - European Parliament.
By Dimitris Rapidis and Roxanne Gobet
Media pluralism has always been a debatable and controversial issue globally. Especially in the EU, where we find different and competing media landscapes, there is an additional interest to explore this issue. When it comes to comparing figures and unveil statistics, it is always interesting to realise that the EU, despite being a "Union" itself, shows no elements that justify any sort of cohesion strategies and harmonisation policies, whether those might be referred to the political features of the Union, the fiscal policies or even some fundamental social policies.
Such discrepancies also occur in the media landscape and the way political parties are represented and heard via traditional and established news media. In our survey we have focused on a very specific aspect of this topic. We explore how opposition parties' news and positions on current domestic affairs of each member-state are covered by major media. We have scaled the survey up to 100 new topics mentions overall, which is the amount of newsfeed provided spontaneously in a period of four months, i.e. between January 10 and April 10, 2020, using major news sources from each EU member-state.
Such discrepancies also occur in the media landscape and the way political parties are represented and heard via traditional and established news media. In our survey we have focused on a very specific aspect of this topic. We explore how opposition parties' news and positions on current domestic affairs of each member-state are covered by major media. We have scaled the survey up to 100 new topics mentions overall, which is the amount of newsfeed provided spontaneously in a period of four months, i.e. between January 10 and April 10, 2020, using major news sources from each EU member-state.
Based on the above figures, we have categorised all member-states into seven (7) different groups depending on their score. In the first group we have the six countries with the best score, meaning that opposition parties' news and positions on current domestic affairs are fairly represented by the media at a percentage between 35%(Luxembourg) to 47% (Denmark). To the contrary, the last group includes the five countries with the worst ratio, meaning that opposition parties' news and positions on current domestic affairs are not at all fairly represented. In this last group, which includes Bulgaria, Greece, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, we witness an extremely poor coverage, ranged between 2% and 12%, that is also related with the media freedom scores, as presented by the RSF Index recently. In other words, if we take into account the rankings of RSF and those of our survey we can certainly find strong correlations when it comes to examining the media landscape in each member-states, the level of pluralism and media freedom scores.
These results also demonstrate another key issue that the European institutions should address: The role political intervention plays in dealing with media freedom and pluralism and how influence networks affect the role of media themselves, turning them from literally news sources to channels of political influence. As of the top scorers on that list, it goes without saying that the Scandinavian group - i.e. Denmark, Finland, Sweden - along with Netherlands, Austria and Luxembourg present the best case scenario and set the pace for the other country groups to try improving media pluralism and fight against any kind of censorship or dependence from certain interest groups.
These results also demonstrate another key issue that the European institutions should address: The role political intervention plays in dealing with media freedom and pluralism and how influence networks affect the role of media themselves, turning them from literally news sources to channels of political influence. As of the top scorers on that list, it goes without saying that the Scandinavian group - i.e. Denmark, Finland, Sweden - along with Netherlands, Austria and Luxembourg present the best case scenario and set the pace for the other country groups to try improving media pluralism and fight against any kind of censorship or dependence from certain interest groups.
* Dimitris Rapidis is founder of Bridging Europe and Roxanne Gobet is political analyst at Bridging Europe.
23.4.2020
23.4.2020