Michał Głowacki

Dr. Michał Głowacki is an Associate Professor at the University of Warsaw, Poland. He has conducted research projects funded by the European Commission, the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation, the Swedish Institute, the Research Council of Norway, Poland’s National Science Center, the National Agency for Academic Exchange and the Polish-American Fulbright Commission. Michał was the Programme Advisor to the Advisory Group on Public Service Media Governance at the Council of Europe in 2010. He is Editor in Chief of the “Central European Journal of Communication”. His research interests are media policy, public service media and innovation culture.

Public Service Media in Europe: Systemic and Cultural Conditions of Media Capture in the Age of Platforms

We live in the times of misinformation, news gaps and rapid societal polarisation due to increasingly sophisticated methods for media and politics’ cultural and ideological symbiosis. On the surface, the traditional concepts of political parallelism or media and politics co-existence have been augmented by media capture, with regulatory, financial and ownership capture with weak transparency practices, and often media capture regarded as a part of a broader cultural capture by politics. Across nations and cultures, the systemic and cultural conditions for media capture are of particular concern for public service media (PSM), which are tasked to serve social cohesion, independence, trustworthy information and societal relevance in the age of platforms.

This paper builds on the values of the European PSMs to further address systemic and cultural conditions for media capture. The case study approach of selected public service media in Europe aims to inform a multilayered analytical prism to filter media regulation and self-regulation via cultural, societal, and organisational practices. Having mapped the PSM law and ethics foundations, it looks at comparative studies and findings. The discussion resonates towards a more holistic approach to political and systemic parallelism in light of legacy media and the high-tech political capture. To this end, it investigates potentially relevant PSMs checks and balances via the cultural conditions, for instance, organisational and management (leaders, communities, director generals) and the overall state-civil society relationships.

The analysis is informed via findings of several international research projects in which the author has been recently involved. The core data, methodologies and selection of the PSM case studies include the following research collaborations: 

Public Service Media in the Age of Platforms

The Euromedia Ownership Monitor

The Media Capture Monitoring Report