Background information report Media policies and regulatory practices in a selected set of European countries, the EU and the Council of Europe October 2010 Project profile MEDIADEM is a European research project which seeks to understand and explain the factors that promote or conversely prevent the development of policies supporting free and independent media. The project combines a country-based study in Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey and the UK with a comparative analysis across media sectors and various types of media services. It will investigate the configuration of media policies in the aforementioned countries and will examine the opportunities and challenges generated by new media services for media freedom and independence. Moreover, external pressures on the design and implementation of state media policies, stemming from the European Union and the Council of Europe, will be thoroughly discussed and analysed. Project title: European Media Policies Revisited: Valuing and Reclaiming Free and Independent Media in Contemporary Democratic Systems Project duration: April 2010 - March 2013 EU funding: approx. 2.65 million Euro Grant agreement: FP7-SSH-2009-A no. 244365 Copyright © 2010 All rights reserved Disclaimer The information expressed in this document is the sole responsibility of the Mediadem Consortium and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission. 2 Information about the authors Dia Anagnostou is Lecturer of Politics in the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies in Macedonia University of Thessaloniki, and senior research fellow at ELIAMEP. She has held research positions at Princeton University, the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence. Dia Anagnostou has been awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to work on a book project entitled ‘Civil Society and the Mobilisation of European Human Rights: Minorities and Immigrants in the Strasbourg Court’ (for 2010-2012). Her articles have appeared on West European Politics, Southeast European Politics, and International Journal of Human Rights and European Public Law, among others. Anagnostou has recently co-edited the book ‘The European Court of Human Rights and the Rights of Marginalised Individuals and Minorities in National Context’ (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2010). She is also editor and co-author of the book ‘Domesticating the European Court of Human Rights: Implementation, Legal Mobilisation and Policy Change’ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010, forthcoming). Paško Bilić holds an MA in Sociology and History from the University of Zagreb, where he also pursues doctoral studies at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy. He is currently employed as a research assistant at the Department of Culture and Communication at the Institute for International relations in Zagreb. His research interests include digital media, mass media, social and cultural development and consumer culture. Ivan Brada studied psychology. He has held positions in television and the press. He presently works as an investigative reporter for the Slovak public television. Federica Casarosa is currently Jean Monnet fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in Florence. She graduated in Private Comparative Law at the University of Pisa. She obtained a Master of Research in Law from the European University Institute (2003). In 2008, she successfully defended her PhD thesis on the role of information in online contracting, in particular analysing protection provided to consumers in the pre-contractual phase. Her research interests focus on children protection in the media sector. Rachael Craufurd Smith is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Before becoming an academic, she gained considerable experience working both in private legal practice and as an adviser on media law and policy for the BBC. She teaches media law at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and supervises a range of PhD research students working in the media field. Rachael Craufurd Smith has written widely on the impact of constitutional guarantees, fundamental rights, and international and domestic laws on media pluralism and diversity. More recently, her research has focused on the impact of convergence on established domestic regulatory regimes and the evolving relationship between individuals and the mass media. She is a member of the Europa Institute and Co-director of the AHRC Script Centre, based in the School of Law of the University of Edinburgh. She is also an editor of The Journal of Media Law, launched by Hart Publishing in 2009 to provide scholarly and critical analysis of media law developments. Susana de la Sierra is Professor of Administrative Law at the University of Castilla-La Mancha and Co-ordinator of the Master’s Programme on European Union Law. Her research interests include European and global administrative law, comparative law and media law. She has recently published a book on film law and has widely published on comparative law as a method of European legal integration. She has been Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford and the European University Institute in Florence, and Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Columbia University (New York). Esra Elmas is a teaching assistant at the Istanbul Bilgi University. She has majored in Media and Communication Systems and minored in Sociology at Istanbul Bilgi University. She holds a Master’s in Cultural Studies from Istanbul Bilgi University. She has published in the areas of internal migration and civil-military relations in contemporary Turkey. In 2006-2007, 3 she worked as a reporter in weekly political news magazine, Nokta. Esra Elmas is presently a PhD researcher at the department of Political Science in Galatasaray University. Ľubica Gállová is the Chair of the Supervisory Council and research assistant affiliated with the School of Communication and Media in Bratislava, Slovakia. She is well-experienced in project management and project proposal writing. Her experience includes intercultural and educational research projects and execution of various short-term and mid-term projects. Georgy Ganev holds a PhD in Economics from the Washington University of St. Louis. He is Programme Director of Economic Research at the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and Assistant Professor at Sofia University. He is also a member of the Ethics Commission for Print Media at the National Council for Journalistic Ethics. His areas of specialisation include monetary economics, new institutional economics and economic issues of transition. He has taken part in several comparative research projects dealing with issues of economic culture. In 1999-2001 he was an expert with the Economic Policy Committee of the Bulgarian National Assembly. Cristian Ghinea is the Director of the Romanian Center for European Policies. After eight years of writing for the Romanian media he studied EU Governance at the London School of Economics in 2007 – 2008. Upon his return to Romania he set out to combine academic approaches to shape a credible and influential public discourse on EU-related issues. He has been involved in civic projects with the Romanian Academic Society, the Center for Independent Journalism, the Helsinki Committee and the Freedom House - Romania. Mr. Ghinea has published in international reports such as the ‘Media Sustainability Index’ (IREX) and the ‘Nations in Transit’ (Freedom House). Emilio Guichot Reina is Professor of Administrative Law at the University of Seville. His main research interests are European administrative law; property, expropriation and non contractual liability; media law and access to information; and data protection law. He has widely published in these topics and has conducted research in various institutions, such as Paris I-La Sorbonne, Paris 8, Munich and Montreal, the European Court of Justice and the European University Institute. Christoph Gusy is Professor of Law at the University of Bielefeld with expertise in public and constitutional law, general theory of state and constitutional history. For the period 1998- 2005, he was Vice Rector of the University. He taught as Visiting Professor at the University of Paris I (Panthéon/Sorbonne, 2000) and the University of Strasbourg (Robert Schuman, 2002-2004). He has participated in many interdisciplinary research projects, focusing amongst others on political communication and the implementation of the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. He is the author of more than 20 books and about 200 essays. Halliki Harro-Loit is Associate Professor and the Head of the Institute of Journalism and Communication at the University of Tartu. She has taken administrative responsibilities for several projects, including a project about changes of organisation culture in Estonian media organisations and a project on the communication strategies of public authorities (including media strategies) before, during and after periods of crisis. She has numerous academic publications and has recently published about the diversity of media and online professional journalism in the Baltic States. Among other subjects, she has been teaching communication law and ethics since 1992. She is also a member of the (original) Estonian Press Council (since 1992). For the period 1997-2002, she was the Vice-Chairperson of the (original) Estonian Press Council. Rasmus Helles holds a PhD in