A historical turn in the study of media governance. A research agenda for Europe in times of democratic crisis

Abstract

The liberalization of the media stands very much at the forefront in public, policy and academic concerns on how our current model of media governance affects democracy. But the discussion on the effects of media liberalization has obscured the vital question why liberalization was able to become the dominant media governance paradigm in the first place. This research note makes the case for a historical turn to answer this question. It argues that it is essential to contextualize media liberalization in the history of contemporary democracy in Europe rather than see it primarily through the perspective of technological innovation or top-down promotion of neo-liberal policies. It explores how three insights in historiography might form the core of a research agenda for media governance that takes history seriously. These include (a) the study of actors from below that pushed for reform outside the realm of government; (b) the influence of ideas on shaping institutional reform and (c) reading history forward rather than project today’s assumptions and outcomes into the past. Jointly, this historical turn will not only provide an enhanced understanding of how past reforms shaped the present, but also enlighten prospects for future changes of media governance paradigms.

Introduction: media liberalization and the crisis of democracy

How should we regulate the media so that they can (once again) serve to buttress democracy? How much government control over the media, old and new, is necessary to ensure that the media serve democratic values? And what conditions enable the ‘paradigm shift’ in media governance that many today advocate?

According to many voices in policy, academic and public debates, finding answers to these questions has become of pivotal importance to solve the crisis of democracy in the West. As that crisis deepens, the regulation of the media, or rather, the supposed lack thereof, has come to surface as the key concern. Leading academic voices warn that media nowadays increase inequality and polarization (Prior, 2007) and contribute to ‘violent extremism’ and ‘terrible politics’ (Sunstein, 2017: 9). More starkly, others warn us that technological changes in the media landscape ‘are profound and frightening’ (Susskind, 2018: 1) as we enter ‘democracy in the age of lies’ (Rosenfeld, 2018: 137). Some go even so far to state that ‘the media have become a significant anti-democratic force in the United States, and, to varying degrees, world-wide’ (McChesney, 1999: 2; see also McChesney, 2013). The key question seems no longer if the current media governance system in the West is harmful for democracy, but how to regulate it so the tide can be turned (Van Dijck et al., 2013; Hind, 2012).

These concerns make it more than ever important to understand not only how, by whom and under what historical conditions, media governance paradigms can change, but also what were the specific historical conditions and normative assumptions which enabled the rise of the liberalization ‘governance paradigm’ which is now under scrutiny (Van Cuilenborg and McQuail, 2003). However, despite all the attention for the effects of media deregulation on democracy, the vital question how and why media deregulation and liberalization came to surface as dominant media governance paradigm has remained obscured. Of course, scholarship in media studies and political science sketches the historical context of the rise of the liberalization governance paradigm. But it does so usually without situating media liberalization within the broader historical developments of democracy’s contemporary history, linking it primarily to economic trends (neo-liberalization) or technological innovation instead. Most problematically, the history of media governance is often studied ‘backwards’ rather than forward (Møller, 2021), which means we see the current regulatory framework as a necessary outcome of historical developments and we project current-day institutions and their normative assumptions into the past, leading of a distorted view of the causal mechanisms which brought us to the situation in which we are today.

This research note, by contrast, makes the case for a ‘historical turn’ in the study of media governance. It does by no means claim to provide a comprehensive or exhaustive overview of the historical dimension of media governance reform. Rather, the aim of this article is to explore what ingredients a historical study to media governance could have and what kind of insights and understandings it might provide. It draws on a few revealing empirical examples from Western European experiences with media liberalization, because the continent’s quick change from a public media model to liberalization allows us to bring into sharp relief the dynamics of changing media paradigms better than traditionally already more liberalized ‘North Atlantic’ systems such as in the US (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). Focusing on the period since the late 1970s, this research note consequently aims to, first, show why a historical perspective is essential to understand not only the past but also the present-day media governance dynamics, and, second, what such a historical perspective entails in terms of methods, concepts and empirical material. It argues that this perspective not only provides new insights for to the field of media studies but also could form a novel area of research within the historiography of democracy, which has developed very much as a focal point in the study of the twentieth century (Conway, 2020; Corduwener, 2023). In this way, historical insights could not only benefit media studies, but insights on the relationship between media governance and democracy could also inspire historians. I understand ‘media governance’ here as the institutions that govern media systems as the resolution of media policy debates, such as ownership rights, speech rights, subsidies, licensing powers, tax systems, etc. (Freedman, 2008), and a ‘media governance paradigm’ as the overarching and coherent goal that media governance institutions collectively serve (Van Cuilenborg and McQuail, 2003).

The problems of an a-historical view on the liberalization of media governance

The liberalization and deregulation of the Western European broadcast media started in the 1970s. Until that time, radio and television were considered a public service. The contours of this public broadcasting paradigm, which rose tentatively in the 1920s and was boldly confirmed after the War, are well established in scholarship (Dyson and Humphreys, 1986; Humphreys, 1996). While exact regulation differed according to national traditions (Hallin and Mancini, 2004), its most important features showed similarity across borders. The broadcast media were subject to a government monopoly which was used to promote social consensus, cultural cohesion and democratic values. Governments had a large say in broadcast content, while infringers of the monopoly faced persecution (McChesney, 1999; McQuail and Siune, 1998). Yet from the mid-1970s, this public media model was across Europe replaced by the paradigm of liberalization and deregulation so that much of the broadcast media became what has been called a ‘government-free zone’ (Sunstein, 2017). The features of this liberalization are also well-known: local, community and commercial channels and stations were allowed to broadcast, public channels were privatized or expected to follow market logics, governments loosened their direct control over content while new regulatory agencies oversaw the functioning of the ‘media market’ (McChesney, 1999; McQuail and Siune, 1998; Tracey, 1998).

Within the time frame of about a dozen years, media governance thus witnessed a sudden, radical and far-reaching shift. The ensuing liberalization had a broad scope (both geographical and in terms of the broad range of media types affected); reflected changing normative assumptions about the relationship between media and democracy; and occurred after decades of institutional status. Explaining this change would merit an in-depth study of the historical conditions, actors, ideas, power dynamics and networks which made them possible. Strikingly, however, the liberalization is often considered to have happened almost inevitably. On the one hand, technological developments seemed to make liberalization inevitable. Governments liberalized the broadcast media as technological developments (FM-radio, cable and satellite tv) outdated frequency scarcity and enabled media to transcend national borders and left governments allegedly no other option than to loosen their control (Humphreys, 1996; Rolland and Ostbye, 1986). This fits a narrative in which technology, rather than the institutions which regulate it, determined the effect of media on democracy (McQuail et al., 1992; Prior, 2007; Susskind, 2018, 2022).

However, while technological developments are of course important in explaining changes in media governance, they do not alone determine the outcome of reform. Whatever its scope or nature, technological innovation is in the eyes of contemporaries always seen as ‘revolutionary’, giving rise of ‘media panics’ (Drotner, 1999). The big question therefore is how policy makers responded to new technologies: the institutional design of the media landscape is ultimately at least as important in deciding how media developments affect democracy (Freedman, 2008), and, following this logic, deregulation is the consequence of technological effects on democracy, not the other way around.

On the other hand, also perspectives that take the context beyond technology seriously often tend to see liberalization as almost inevitable, because as it was driven by a supposedly ‘post-ideological’ top-down neo-liberal-led search for efficiency . The neo-liberal perspective on media governance was allegedly uncontested as, there were no alternatives to the re-organization, privatization and deregulation of the broadcasting sector (Hibberd, 2001; Michalis, 2014). However, even if neo-liberal ideas and practices doubtlessly played a role, neoliberalism was not ‘post-ideological’ nor was its hegemony in policy making inevitable or uncontested. Much historical research over the past few years has revealed how neo-liberalism was itself deeply ideological and the result of conflicting and contested notions and practices (Slobodian, 2020; Stedman Jones, 2014; Ther, 2014). These insights are of particular importance for studies of the liberalization of the media landscape, which touched, more than other public sectors, such as infrastructure or public housing, directly on public understandings, experiences and practices of democracy.

If the perspectives of technology and neoliberalism alone are insufficient to explain the liberalization of the broadcast media, they do, paradoxically, rightly point to the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s as a key moment. This period has surfaced in recent historiography as a watershed where both political and economic institutions, but also normative assumptions underpinning them, were fundamentally revised (Therborn et al., 2011). These years marked the end of Western Europe’s ‘democratic age’ of postwar social and political consensus buttressed by economic growth and saw the birth of an age marked by growing polarization, distrust in political institutions and austerity (Conway, 2020). But if they indeed constituted a ‘critical juncture’ that opened opportunities for a new paradigm in media governance, we should look beyond ‘inevitable’ factors as ‘technology’ or ‘neo-liberalism’ to explain the specific outcome of liberalization and the path towards it. Instead, a genuine historical turn is needed, informed by recent insights in the historical study of institutional change to help us better understand the changes in media governance at the time – and its impact on the present. These insights might provide three ingredients of such a historical turn.

The importance of studying actors from below

The first ingredient of a historical research agenda of media governance concerns the kind of actors that shaped the liberalization of the broadcast media. Other than often assumed, this process was not only driven by lawmakers and high-state officials. Rather, research into institutional change has revealed how social movements, special agencies and professional organizations played a central role in a wide range of policy areas (Bua and Bussu, 2023; Irye, 2002; Saurugger, 2008). Sub-state players such as social movements, interest organizations and media regulators can be expected to have been of central importance in the shaping of media policies on the national and European level and should take a key position in historical study to this topic.

A few examples might illustrate what type of actors are of particular importance in a historical study to the era. Among the first advocates of media liberalization in the 1970s were not big technology firms nor neo-liberal minded government officials, but movements of the so-called New Left. Emerging from the 1968 movements they launched various initiatives to start local radio stations that challenged the state’s broadcasting monopoly both rhetorically and in practice (Downing, 2010; Lefebvre, 2008). If we look at France, these movements often pushed a political agenda for, for instance, environmental protection (such as Radio Verte) or workers’ rights. But beyond these agendas they also challenged the public media model principally, accusing the public media of undermining public values and democracy by providing biased information and forming an obstacle to popular participation in media. The broadcasting model that they envisioned was more participatory and horizontal (Bénetière and Soncin, 1989). Not seldom, they allied to fight for their cause, such as in the Association pour la liberation des ondes (Franquet et al., 2010: 259–260). Their allies could also include political parties which could back the case for broadcast reform in parliament: French community stations, most notably the left-wing Radio Riposte, found support within the Socialist Party (Kuhn, 1995: 165–166), which meant that it was ironically a left-wing administration of Socialists and Communists under leadership of François Mitterrand which broke up the public media model (Missika, 1987). As his government did so with the purpose to give community channels a chance, this also serves to underline that not all institutional outcomes were as intended.

A second type of actor that contradicts the notion that media liberalization resulted from top-down government intentions to deregulate in search for profit were courts. The importance of courts in shaping the history of democracy is increasingly acknowledged (Rosanvallon, 2008). Their importance certainly also counts for the liberalization of media governance, for instance in what was arguably the pioneer of liberalization in Europe: Italy. In the early 1970s, so-called free radio stations were joined by various community stations that experimented with local cable television in their defiance of the public RAI’s broadcast monopoly (Sangiovanni, 2013). While the government intended to shut down these stations and parliament initiated a reform of the RAI to make it more inclusive and pluralist, the country’s powerful constitutional court vindicated the local stations instead. With two landmark rulings in 1974 and 1976 it decided that the government’s broadcast monopoly did not count locally and paved the way for local stations to continue and extend their broadcasting initiatives (Doro, 2017). In the legal vacuum that ensued (the question what was ‘local’ gave quickly rise to controversies) community stations were soon outnumbered (or bought up) by commercial ones, most notably the growing media empire of Silvio Berlusconi (Monteleone, 2009: 387–389). It would take until 1990 until parliament enacted a new encompassing media law which largely legalized the status quo that had by then taken the shape of a RAI-Berlusconi duopoly (Balbi and Prario, 2010). As such, rather than deliberately initiating deregulation and liberalization with a neo-liberal agenda from above, the Italian case illustrates first and foremost the absence of government or ‘high politics’ in media liberalization.

A final type of actor that merits consideration are transnational interest organizations. Scholarship has long emphasized that political actors, both state and non-state, do not act in a vacuum but are part of (trans)national networks where institutional reforms are discussed and pressed for (Clavin, 2013; Della Porta et al., 2006). This seems to be of particular importance in reference to media reform because parallel to, and feeding, the national initiatives to liberalize the broadcast media ran similar European initiatives. Over the course of the 1980s, European institutions increasingly viewed media governance as its area of competence and pushed for liberalization and competition, culminating in the European Commission’s ‘Television without Frontiers’ directive (Donders, 2012; Pauwels, 2014). Again, such initiatives did not emerge in a vacuum, but were fed by, among others, transnational broadcasting and advertising organizations. Some of these emerged out of the social movements and their radio stations of the time, such as the Association of Free Radios in Europe which united community stations from across the continent to advocate policy reform. Other notable players were the European Broadcasting Union (representing public media), the European Association of Free Radios (representing local and social movement radio stations), the Association for Commercial Television, and the European Advertising Agency. These organizations were actively involved in shaping the EU’s emerging media policies in the 1980s and 1990s, which did not emerge from a vacuum in EU offices in Brussels, but through active exchange between these institutions and transnational interest groups (Michalis, 2007). While media policy emerged as a field of competence of European institutions, such organizations seized the opportunities that the absence of a legal framework offered to influence the shape of future legislation. They are therefore of essential importance to understand why liberalization surfaced as a prime objective of European media policies at the end of the 1980s.

The importance of ideas in driving institutional reform

Historical research has long emphasized the importance of ideas in explaining institutional change (Capoccia and Ziblatt, 2010; Ziblatt, 2006). Ideas are not the by-product of institutional reform but serve as ‘independent variables’ (Berman, 1998) that drive the content and direction of reform – and can serve to explain why some reform proposals prevailed over others. This emphasis on political ideas carries special relevance in the debate on media reforms, when one model – the public media model – that claimed to serve democratic values, was challenged by another – liberalization – that claimed to serve the purpose of democracy (better). While normative political science would evaluate both claims, historians tend to see democracy not as a fixed normative standard but as a contested and historically evolving collection of contentious ideas and norms (Corduwener, 2016; Müller, 2011).

Such a historical perspective on the debate on the relationship between media reform and democracy would enable us to see how and why not only defendants of the public media model but also those advocating liberalization did so in the name of democratic values. Sometimes this meant that they claimed to defend other values branded as democratic: other than social cohesion and popular education, advocates of community stations claimed to promote democratic values like participation from below, individual freedom, and the plurality of views (Olivesi, 1998). If they criticized the public media monopoly they did so because this monopoly allegedly impeded people from using their constitutional rights to free expression: ‘The Italian constitution in article 21 sanctions the freedom of expression and opinion of all citizens. . .in reality we have no possibility whatsoever to express our opinions, our experiences, our needs’ (Faenza, 1973: 13). But thanks to the community stations, they claimed, people could now finally speak ‘without asking permission’ for instance by videotapes on local television or becoming involved on local radio stations, which in this way did not only ‘send’ information but set up a dialogue.

Commercial media associations, advertising companies and affiliate organizations were not ‘post-ideological’ but also played an active part in this ideological struggle that preceded and accompanied the liberalization of the media. Indeed, it is only through studying their contribution to this semantic struggle over democracy’s meaning that we can see how they were able to steer policy debates on a national and European level in the name of ‘antenna freedom’, as they called it (Downing, 2010: 207). This will also reveal that these commercial initiatives were not necessarily the antithesis of local community initiatives that emerged on the left with an anti-capitalist agenda. Indeed, they both cleverly played upon the meaning of democracy to grant their attempts for reform with a halo of political legitimacy. As such, precisely in their critique on the public media model lies the connection between the vocabulary of the New Left and commercial actors, for instance in their promise of participation of all in mass communication on radio and television (rather than the spreading of information ‘from above’); in their rejection of the politicization of radio and television broadcasting by party politicians; and in their promise of individual liberty and authenticity rather than the message of cultural cohesion (Ortoleva, 1995).

Reading history forward

A final ingredient of a historical research agenda for media governance would be concerned with the direction in which we read history. The misgivings and nostalgia implicit in much current-day understandings of the decline of the public media model seem based on precisely on this issue of direction because it reads history backwards rather than forward. Reading history backwards means that we look for possible roots for today’s institutional outcomes by starting from the present, rather than starting from past moments of institutional reforms and tracing their consequences. Reading history backwards tends to obscure important explanatory factors, downplays the role of contingency, and creates biases in the selection of historical evidence (Møller, 2021). Moreover, it tends to favour teleological understandings of history in which there was only one possible outcome: the present situation. But what we need is what scholars have called ‘reading history forward’ (Ahmed, 2010; Capoccia and Ziblatt, 2010; Møller, 2021). In this perspective, historians reconstruct the past by taking seriously key moments of institutional openness or ‘critical junctures’ evaluating empirically all options on the table, taking seriously options that fell by the wayside, and, not in the least, valuing the importance of contingent factors in shaping the course of history.

By applying this perspective to the study of media governance we are compelled to ask new and different questions about our current system of media regulation that do not take liberalization as a historical necessity: why was the internet, when it emerged for the public in the early 1990s, regulated as a market rather than a public service in the first place? Until what extent and how did practices and ideas that had only just reformed the broadcast media inform this conception of internet regulation? Which alternatives fell by the wayside and why? A historical perspective will show that the institutional design of the emerging internet was something of a rupture with how governments had over the course of the preceding century decided to react to major media innovations such as radio and television, which was by asserting government control and ownership (Fickers et al., 2019; Lommers, 2012; Tworek, 2015). Yet the world wide web in the 1990s was not subject to the same kind of scrutiny. There was more than just technology that determined this outcome: the way the internet was regulated was a child of its own time and was likely predicated on the deregulation and liberalization of the broadcast media. Timing was crucial, in other words, and by reading history forward we can untangle the web of institutions, norms and practices that constituted the regulatory framework of the early internet – and thus trace how these have fed into the concerns about the effects of this particular framework on our democracies today.

Reading history forward also means we will have a different understanding of today’s debates on media governance, with a less instrumentalist use of the past. This counts, for instance, for the very term ‘liberalization’ itself: as I have highlighted above, the connotation of that term today is not the same as it was in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was contested among its various users in the debate who pursued with ‘liberalization’ different objectives. We should therefore be careful projecting current-day understandings of ‘liberalization’ into the past and try to understand why some conceptions of ‘liberalization’ were able to become hegemonic. But reading history forward will also change our understanding today of causal mechanisms highlighted to explain media liberalization (or, in other words, the question ‘who is to blame’). Today, for instance, the economic might of big (new) media companies is often held responsible for liberalization of media regulation (McChesney, 2013). However, a perspective which reads history forward, reveals that liberalization is not, or certainly not primarily, the result of the power of these firms and their lobbying initiatives, but rather its cause: it enabled these players to become powerful and extend their lobbying capacities.

Conclusion

The liberalization of the broadcast media was once hailed for ‘liberating’ citizens from a public media model allegedly too little pluralistic and participatory, but is now held responsible for wrecking increasingly feeble democracies in the United States and Europe. By taking seriously the role of actors from below and ideas in driving institutional reform and tracing the effects of past reforms into the present (rather than the other way around) we can contextualize media liberalization in the contemporary history of democracy. This is not only of importance to media scholars, but of relevance for historians too. Media governance is strikingly absent from much historical scholarship on contemporary democracy, in which changes in the media landscape contributed to changing practices of political representation, but the changing rules of the media game which facilitated this remain under the radar (Berman, 2019; Conway, 2020; Corduwener, 2023; Manin, 1997).

But also in media studies and political science, a historical turn in the study of media governance can provide us with new insights. First, a historical perspective is needed to nuance historical misgivings implicit in much criticism on the current model of media governance. This counts first for the often-invoked understanding that the liberalization of the broadcast media was somehow ‘inevitable’ because of technological developments and ‘a-political’ because of the ascent of neoliberal ideas. But it also counts for the nostalgia for the model that preceded the liberalization of the media and is now still often invoked as its potential solution for the future: the public media model (McChesney, 2003). Only historical research can explain why this media governance declined and assess how the historical conditions facilitated its rise cannot simply be replaced. Second, much of the debate on media reform has been highly divisive between ‘celebrants’ and ‘sceptics’ of the effect of new media technologies on democracy (McChesney, 2013: 5). A historical turn would, conversely, start from a non-normative approach to questions of democratic legitimacy. Rather than assessing the democratic quality of proposals for media reform, it departs from the premise that democracy is a ‘contested concept’ and that all political forces try to define its meaning (Gallie, 1955; Müller, 2011). It would explain how conceptions of democracy change over time and shape media governance institutions – and debates – today. And finally, a historical turn would serve as a new inspiration for the many voices today who advocate the need for a ‘paradigm shift’ in the way our media are governed, but who are unsure how to bring this about. The only laboratory that we have here is the past. Past instances of institutional paradigm shifts provide insights in what the conditions are for institutional change to occur (Van Bavel, 2015). Only by studying such past paradigm shifts of media governance in depth we can be sure about the prospects of how and under what conditions they come about in the future.