Governance and transparency in EU media markets as indicators of press freedom in the digital age

Abstract

The EU has just passed the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), the first press law in the region. This piece of legislation aims to address some risks that threaten press freedom in EU media markets in the digital environment through transparency and governance standards related to quality information, editorial integrity, and press freedom. These standards have been also developed by a number of private self-regulation initiatives.
This article provides an analysis of transparency and governance in six EU media markets considering seven standards that are common in these private self-regulation initiatives and have been incorporated into the EMFA: transparency in ownership, governance, funding transparency, labeling, corrections, verification processes, and editorial autonomy.
Specifically, we first analyze the Austrian, German, French, Italian, British, and Spanish markets using these indicators and then assess the results through the theoretical framework of Hallin and Mancini (2004). The article suggests, for example, that the German market, typical of the corporatist democratic model of Central and Northern Europe, poses a lower risk to media pluralism than the Spanish market, which is an example of the polarized Mediterranean model. We believe that this analysis is useful in the current regulatory context of the EMFA.