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From multinationals to business tycoons: media ownership and journalistic autonomy in Central and Eastern Europe
This article presents a comparative analysis of the changing patterns of media ownership in ten new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and discusses the implications of these processes for media freedom and autonomy. Briefly outlining the history of internationalization of CEE media markets, it argues that the presence of Western-based multinational companies on the CEE media markets has been recently diminishing rather than further growing. In addition, a different type of actor has been gaining prominence on the CEE media map, unspotted or largely overlooked in most previous analyses, namely, local business elites acquiring stakes in news media. Combining secondary sources and field interviews with media experts and practitioners, this study explores the various practices of business and political instrumentalization of media by their local owners, often resulting in a constrained editorial independence and increasing intertwinement of the systems of media, politics, and economy in the region.
Funding
European Research Council (project Nr. 230113).
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
International Journal of Press/PoliticsVolume
17Issue
4Pages
433 - 456Citation
STETKA, V., 2012. From multinationals to business tycoons: media ownership and journalistic autonomy in Central and Eastern Europe. International Journal of Press/Politics, 17 (4), pp. 433 - 456Publisher
SAGE © The AuthorVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
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/Publication date
2012Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal The International Journal of Press/Politics and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1940161212452449.ISSN
1940-1612Publisher version
Language
- en