The Debate on Media Pluralism in the European Union: issues, actors, and emerging coalitions

The European Union policy agenda could be conceived as a two-step process through which issues are primarily listed onto the agenda, and then discussed to produce policy outcomes. The setting of the agenda is highly contested in both stages. The competences of the EU have dramatically expanded during the last decade. Member States have lost vast amounts of sovereignty on relevant policy areas such as competition, agriculture, environment, and issues related to the Single Market and the Monetary Union, but also on areas not already regulated by the EU such as social and cultural policies (Richardson, 2001). The expansion of the EU agenda is not a smooth one, and is rather characterised by intense inter-governmental negotiations between the EU and member states for the allocation of power and tasks. Policy selection is also controversial due to the multi-level character of a policy-making allowing the participation of multiple actors (Marks, 1992). In this stage EU institutions – the Commission, the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament, and the Council–start bargaining, sometimes concurring with non-governmental actors, such as lobbies and interest groups. In this search of support for its initiatives, the Commission has often tried to engage relevant stakeholders in the policy process. Several studies highlight how the Commission has frequently resorted to interest groups to overcome possible obstacles to integration across different policy areas (Coen 1998; Mazey and Richardson, 2001; Nesti, 2005). The “interested parties”–as the Commission usually labels such organisations–play a relevant role in European policy-making: they give political support and legitimacy in a context where traditional representative channels, such as the Parliament and political parties, are weak. Lobbies also provide technical information and expertise in order to formulate effective policies in complex areas like competition, research and development, etc. (Streeck and Schmitter, 1991; Mazey and Richardson, 2001). The debate on media pluralism at the EU level well represents these dynamics. EU regulation addressed broadcasting for the first time with the publication of the Television Without Frontiers directive in 1989. This directive did not tackle relevant democratic questions such as content diversity, media independence and media pluralism, mainly due to the limited competences the EU has on those issues. Political actors and civil society’s organisations often recalled cultural policy as a possible link to support a European action in the field of media. However, every legal act issued under this article requires the adoption of the co-decision procedure and the unanimity vote of the Council. As media pluralism is a sensitive issue, with diverging regulations in different member states according to their political and cultural traditions, reaching unanimity on a common legislation would be rather difficult. The chapter aims at investigating the underlying reasons for the emergence of the debate on pluralism at the EU level, main actors involved, their framing of the discussion, and its evolution over the years, evolution that lead to a substantial failure of any attempt to regulate media pluralism at a supranational level. The policy dynamics stemming from the debate on media pluralism could be interpreted through the lens of historical institutionalism. According to this approach, policy-making is conditioned by past legacies, and policies could be conceived as ‘path-dependent’ – i.e. influenced by their own history. Policy change emerges only in the case of critical junctures that open up the way for new possible courses of action (Bulmer, 1998; Hall and Taylor, 1996). The debate on media pluralism was highly influenced by conflicts among institutions and non-governmental actors allied in two ‘loose coalitions’–one favourable and one contrary to a EU regulatory intervention to protect pluralism– playing the Commission a gate-keeping role. The different roles performed by EU institutions and civil society actors in the debate could be explained by analyzing the structure of political opportunities in the supranational arena. While institutional constraints limited the intervention of the Commission, they also threatened the action of some non-governmental groups. Finally, the unsuccessful attempt to regulate media pluralism at the EU level could be explained as a result of the incisive pressure exerted by a coalition in order to maintain the status quo, combined with the inertial force exerted by the pervious agreed policy output. The case-study is described through a diachronic and in-depth analysis of the policy process aimed at outlining issues, actors and causal relations. This chapter does so by identifying opinions about the inter-institutional debate in the official documents issued by main European institutions. These materials include binding and not binding acts issued by the CoE, the ECJ, the EP and the Commission since the 1970s, and position papers submitted by non-governmental actors during the consultations. In addition, four key-events in the media pluralism debate were selected in order to grasp the positions of civil society: the consultation on the 1992 Green Paper on Pluralism and Concentration in media market (CEC, 1992); the consultation on the 2003 Green Paper on Services of General Interest (CEC, 2003a), and the two rounds of consultations for the revision of the TWF Directive carried on between 2003 and 2005, where a specific session was devoted to media pluralism.