What are the ethical concerns behind 'recommendations'?
REPORT
What are the ethics behind ‘recommendations’?
Elliot Jones | Ada Lovelace Institute
2022
As public service media organisations now match other media platforms and content providers in offering personalised recommendations on their apps and websites, what are the ethical concerns they need to consider when building these systems? This report from the Ada Lovelace Institute examines this question. The objectives of public service media are completely different to those of private entities – where the latter use personalisation as a tool of increasing engagement and monetisation, the former must use it to serve their principles of openness, accountability, and public service. They also need to be more transparent in how the recommendation systems themselves work.
Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries
REPORT
Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries
The International Journal of Press/Politics | Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard
Published: 2021
Neff and Pickard’s new report provides further evidence that where public media is better funded, with secure funding and regulatory frameworks, they are “consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies”, and that citizens are more likely to engage in democratic processes. The study is based on a framework by Hallin and Mancini of North American and European media systems, and in correlation with the rankings of the 33 countries in the top two tiers of The 2019 Democracy Index (“full” and “flawed” democracies), developed by The Economist’s Intelligence Unit (EIU).
The Contribution of NRK to Norwegian Media Diversity
REPORT
The Contribution of NRK to Norwegian Media Diversity
A review from The Norwegian Media Authority to the Ministry of Culture
Medietilsynet
Published: November 2021
“In a report published on 29 November 2021, the Norwegian Media Authority (NMA) concludes that the public service media provider NRK contributes positively to media diversity and to the overall offer to the public by fulfilling its public service broadcasting remit and by working with other actors in the Norwegian media market. A detailed summary of the report is now available in English.
The objective of the report, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, was to identify how NRK contributes to diversity of content and exposure, whether it fulfils its duty to cover thematic and geographic blind spots and how the competitive effects of its activities impact on the media market. on online news and current affairs.
The review is based on the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data and studies from a wide range of sources including NRK, public authorities, consultants and academic researchers and takes into consideration input from the media industry.”
[Text sourced from the European platform of regulatory authorities]
A Framework for Assessing the Role of Public Service Media Organizations in Countering Disinformation
JOURNAL
A Framework for Assessing the Role of Public Service Media Organizations in Countering Disinformation
University of Helsinki, Finland; Cardiff University, UK; Central European University, Austria; Complutense University of Madrid, Spain | Minna Horowitz , Stephen Cushion , Marius Dragomir, Sergio Gutiérrez Manjón, and Mervi Panti
Published: 2021
Public service media (PSM) are widely acknowledged as part of the variety of solutions to disinformation. The remit of PSM, formed around values of universality, equality, diversity, accuracy and quality, implies a responsibility to fight disinformation by producing fact-based news content and finding anti-disinformation solutions. In this article, we introduce a framework for assessing how PSM organizations are able to counter disinformation in different contexts. Our normative framework provides a triangulation of contextual factors that determine the role of the PSM organization in the national environment, the activities carried out to fight disinformation and expert assessments of the potential of PSM to reduce the impact of disinformation. The framework is illustrated with analyses of PSM from the Czech Republic (CZE), Finland, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK).
[Text sourced from the Taylor and France Online]
The State of State Media
REPORT
The State of State Media
A Global Analysis of the Editorial Independence of State Media and an Introduction of a New State Media Typology
Center for Media, Data and Society, CEU Democracy Institute | Marius Dragomir and Astrid Söderström
Published: 2021
CMDS Director Marius Dragomir introduces a new tool to assess the editorial independence of the world’s state media and finds that nearly 80% of 546 state-administered media companies in 151 countries lack editorial independence.
[Text sourced from CMDS]
Are public service media distinctive from the market?
JOURNAL
Are public service media distinctive from the market?
Interpreting the political information environments of BBC and commercial news in the United Kingdom
Cardiff University | Stephen Cushion
Published: 2021
Public service media face an existential crisis. Many governments are cutting their budgets, while questioning the role and value of public service broadcasting because many citizens now have access to a wide range of media. This raises the question – do public service media supply a distinctive and informative news service compared to market-led media? Drawing on the concept of political information environment, this study makes an intervention into debates by carrying out a comparative content analysis of news produced by UK public service broadcasters and market-driven media across television, radio and online outlets (N = 1065) and interviewing senior editors about the routine selection of news. It found that almost all BBC news and commercial public service media platforms reported more news about politics, public affairs and international issues than entirely market-driven outlets. Online BBC news reported more informative topics than market-based media, which featured more entertainment and celebrity stories. The value of public service media was demonstrated on the United Kingdom’s nightly television news bulletins, which shone a light on the world not often reported, especially BBC News at Ten. Most market-driven media reported through a UK prism, excluding many countries and international issues. Overall, it is argued that the influence of public service media in the United Kingdom helps shape an information environment with informative news. The focus of the study is on UK media, but the conceptual application of interpreting a political information environment is designed to be relevant for scholars internationally. While communication studies have sought to advance more cross-national studies in recent years, this can limit how relevant studies are for debates in national political information environments. This study concludes by recommending more scholarly attention should be paid to theorising national policy dynamics that shape the political information environments of media systems within nations.
[Text sourced from the SAGE]
Shining a Spotlight on Media Freedom?
REPORT
Shining a Spotlight on Media Freedom?
Media Coverage of the Global Campaign for Media Freedom
City, University of London; University of East Anglia | Martin Scott, Mel Bunce, Mary Myers
Published: 2020
In our first project report, we analyse English-language, online news coverage and Twitter commentary about media freedom. Specifically, we ask whether the Global Campaign for Media Freedom (GCMF) has succeeded in ‘shining a spotlight’ on media freedom in its first year of activities, from July 2019- July 2020.
Funding Journalism in Israel: Secrecy and Political Influence
WEBSITE
Funding Journalism in Israel: Secrecy and Political Influence
Center for Media, Data and Society | Central European University
Published: June 2020
Unusual opacity is the most salient characteristic of the media system in Israel, where the involvement of political figures in media operation raises serious concerns.
At first glance, the Israeli media market seems a diverse mix of old and new, public and commercial, cable and satellite, and increasingly dominant, if not ubiquitous, digital media. But beneath the appearance of this growing diversity, there is little pluralism…
Text sourced from CMDS | CEU
Soft Power, Hard News: How Journalists at State-Funded Transnational Media Legitimize Their Work
JOURNAL
Soft Power, Hard News: How Journalists at State-Funded Transnational Media Legitimize Their Work
Kate Wright, Martin Scott, Mel Bunce | Sage Journals
Published: May 2020
How do journalists working for different state-funded international news organizations legitimize their relationship to the governments which support them? In what circumstances might such journalists resist the diplomatic strategies of their funding states?
We address these questions through a comparative study of journalists working for international news organizations funded by the Chinese, US, UK and Qatari governments. Using 52 interviews with journalists covering humanitarian issues, we explain how they minimized tensions between their diplomatic role and dominant norms of journalistic autonomy by drawing on three – broadly shared – legitimizing narratives, involving different kinds of boundary-work. In the first ‘exclusionary’ narrative, journalists differentiated their ‘truthful’ news reporting from the ‘false’ state ‘propaganda’ of a common Other, the Russian-funded network, RT. In the second ‘fuzzifying’ narrative, journalists deployed the ambiguous notion of ‘soft power’ as an ambivalent ‘boundary concept’, to defuse conflicts between journalistic and diplomatic agendas. In the final ‘inversion’ narrative, journalists argued that, paradoxically, their dependence on funding states gave them greater ‘operational autonomy’. Even when journalists did resist their funding states, this was hidden or partial, and prompted less by journalists’ concerns about the political effects of their work, than by serious threats to their personal cultural capital.
Small Screen: Big Debate
WEBSITE
Small Screen: Big Debate
Ofcom
2020
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