Mass Media in the Post-Soviet World E-Book

Marlene Laruelle

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 684

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

This collection covers the major trends of the media environment of the post-Communist world and their recent development, with special focus on Russia and the post-Soviet space. The term ‘media environment’ covers not just traditional print and electronic media, but new media as well, and ranges from the political to entertainment and various artistic spheres. What role do market forces play in the process of media democratization, and how do state structures regulate, suppress, or use capitalism toward their own gain? What degree of informational pluralism has been achieved in the newly independent republics? What are the prospects for transparency and the participation of civil society in Russian and Eurasian media? To what degree do trends in post-Communist media reflect global trends? Is there a worldwide convergence with regard to both media formats and political messaging? Western observers usually pay their keenest attention to the role of media in Russia and Eurasia during national elections. While this is a valid focus, the present volume, with contributions by Luca Anceschi, Jonathan Becker, Lee B. Becker, Michael Cecire, Marta Dyczok, Nicola Ying Fry, Navbahor Imamova, Azamat Junisbai, Barbara Junisbai, Kornely Kakachia, Maria Lipman, Oleg Manaev, Marintha Miles, Olena Nikolayenko, Sarah Oates, Tamara Pataraia, Elisabeth Schimpfossl, Abdulfattoh Shafiev, Jack Snyder, Tudor Vlad, and Ilya Yablokov, aims at understanding the deeper overall ‘media philosophies’ that characterize post-Soviet media systems and environments, and the type of identity formation that they are promoting.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Introduction: Mass Media in the Post-Soviet World

I. National Trends

Politics of International Media Rankings

1. Measurement of Media Freedom

2. Reliability and Validity of Measures

3. Conceptualization

4. Elite vs. Citizen Measures of Press Freedom

5. What Now We Know About Measures of Media Freedom

6. Mechanisms by which Media Freedom Affects Democracy

Russia’s Nongovernmental Media under Assault

1. Putin’s Kremlin and the Media Realm in 2000–2008

2. Tandem Rule: Societal Shifts and Media Developments

3. Putin’s Response to the Protests and the Contraction of the Mass Communications Realm

4. The Internet as a Public Realm

Russia and the New Authoritarians

1. Soviet (Post-Totalitarian) vs. Neo-Authoritarian Media Systems

2. Russian vs. Soviet Media

3. Implications of Neo-Authoritarianism and Conclusions

Ukraine’s Media in the Context of Global Cultural Convergence

1. Ukraine, Identity, Mass Media, Globalization, Cultural Convergence, and New Politics

2. The Imperfect Soviet Hegemon

3. Early Independence: What Kind of Ukraine? and Opening Up to the World

4. Competing Visions of Ukrainian Identity Become Clearly Visible

5. Unusual Convergence and Contradictions: The Worst of Both Worlds?

6. 2004: Collision, Explosion, Reframing

7. Aftermath: Change and Continuity

8. 2010: New Challenges, Old Threats

9. Conclusion

10. Epilogue

Media in Post-Soviet Belarus: Between Democratization and Reinforcing Authoritarianism

1. Belarus in the World Media Freedom Landscape

2. Peculiarities of the Belarusian Media

3. Peculiarities of Media Elections Coverage

4. Peculiarities of Belarusian Society

5. Trust as a "Lubricant for Cooperation"

6. Internal Media System Factors

7. The "Islands in the Stream" Model

Mass Media Consumption in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan: The View from Below

1. The Media as Political Intermediary: Potential and Constraints

2. Post-Soviet Media Landscapes: The Two Country Contexts Compared

3. Methodology

4. Results and Discussion

5. Convergence and Divergence in Patterns of Trust in Media

6. Conclusions

Networked Apathy: Georgian Party Politics and the Role of Social Media

1. Overview of Georgian Party Politics

2. Challenges to Media Freedom in Georgia

3. Internet and Social Media in Georgia

4. Political Parties on the Internet Prior to the 2012 Parliamentary Elections

5. Political Parties on Facebook

6. Online Feedback, Live Stream, Conferences, Ads, and Likes

7. Discussion and Conclusion

II. Television

Coercion or Conformism? Censorship and Self-Censorship among Russian Media Personalities and Reporters in the 2010s

1. Methodology and Empirical Data

2. Renowned Media Personalities: Career Trajectories, Political Views and Censorship

3. Rank-and-File Reporters on Censorship

4. Conclusion

The "Russian Idea" on the Small Screen: Staging National Identity on Russia’s TV

1. The Russian Idea and the Publitsistika Genre

2. The Russian Idea Becomes Visual

3. Rossiya-K: No Culture without National Identity, and Vice Versa

4. Reloading the Russian idea

5. Conclusion

Peter the Great, Statism, and Axiological Continuity in Contemporary Russian Television

1. What Is the "Correct Kind of Television"?

2. Miniseries as the Lead Genre in Russian Television

3. Peter the Great and the State Theme

4. Ideological Messages in Historical Disguise

5. Conclusions

In Search of Kazakhness: The Televisual Landscape and Screening of Nation in Kazakhstan

1. Profiling Kazakhstani Television Channels

2. Educating the Kazakhstani Public on Kazakh National History

3. Entertainment, Religiosity and Patriotism: The Series Signs: Legends of the Steppe

4. Conclusion

Small Screen Nation-Building: Astana—My Love

1. Astana—My Love: Popular Entertainment and Political Indoctrination

2. The Producers

3. The Rich and the Beautiful

4. A Future without Past

5. Destiny Replaces History

6. Conclusion

III. Social Media

Glasnost 2.0

1. The Democratizing Features of the Internet

2. Features of the Soviet and Post-Soviet Media Environment

3. Glasnost Then and Russia Now

4. The Internet in the Post-Soviet Information Ecosystem: Stability or Change?

5. The 2011–2012 Russian Protests: The Winter of Discontent

6. Glasnost 2.0 and the Acceleration of Dissent

The Persistence of Media Control under Consolidated Authoritarianism: Containing Kazakhstan’s Digital Media

1. Internet Consumption Habits in Kazakhstan

2. Containing Kazakhstan’s Digital Media

3. Conclusion

Friends, Foes, and Facebook: Blocking the Internet in Tajikistan

1. Internet Penetration and Accessibility

2. The Regime’s Crackdown on the Opposition

3. Building a "Networked Authoritarianism" in Tajikistan

4. Tajnet as an Object of Struggle: Civil Society, "Volunteers," Media Outlets, and the ICT Industry

5. Conclusion

Youth Media Consumption and Perceptions of Electoral Integrity in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

1. Media Environment in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

2. Methodology

3. Findings

4. Conclusion

Social Media and Online Public Debate in Central Asia: A Journalist’s Perspective

1. Access to the Internet

2. Internet as a Tool for Empowerment

3. Social Media is a Separate Platform

4. Social Media and the Search for Identity

5. What Draws the Most Followers on Social Media?

6. Conclusion

Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society SPPS

Copyright

Introduction: Mass Media in the Post-Soviet World

Peter Rollberg and Marlene Laruelle, The George Washington University

For the past two decades, global mass media have been in the middle of a radical transformative process. To a certain degree, this transformation is spontaneous, a side effect of revolutionary technical innovation. However, it is also guided by specific power structures and interest groups. While social media have led to an unprecedented communicative empowerment of the individual, the concentration of traditional media in fewer and fewer hands caused global information monopolization that presents a severe threat to democracy everywhere. The media environments in formerly Communist societies, which a mere three decades ago were integral elements of totalitarian systems, are no exception: innovations in electronic media spread in Russia or Ukraine almost as fast as in the West, while the commercialization and monopolization of traditional media have reached an unprecedented, dangerous level, as has the collusion between private and state interests. The issue of insufficient media freedom is particularly precarious in Central Asia, although it is problematic in all post-Soviet nations. The present volume aims at highlighting major trends in the media environment of the post-Communist world, with special focus on Russia and the post-Soviet space. The term "media environment" is applied in a rather broad manner, implying not just traditional print and electronic media, but new media as well, and ranges from the political to the entertainment and artistic spheres.

Scholarly research on post-Communist and specifically post-Soviet media was in high demand in the late 1990s and in the first years of the new millennium. The large number of media-focused academic publications indicates that this field was seen as one with a strong potential for the future. However, in recent years, a noticeable disillusionment in the emancipative potential of mass media has taken place—the expected progress has rarely materialized. Media in post-Soviet societies in particular present a moving target, influenced by complex geopolitical and cultural factors. That makes it hard, if not impossible, to arrive at a lasting analytical consensus about the post-Soviet media sphere, whether in regards to Russia, which keeps dominating its "near abroad" through media, or Ukraine and Belarus—one in turmoil, the other frozen, in the Republic of Georgia, or in the five Central Asian states. And yet, the complicated and often contradictory process of democratization in Russia and the post-Soviet space is both dependent on and reflected by the transformation of these countries’ mass media. As print and electronic media are essential factors in a functioning civil society, they often represent embattled territory. The violent deaths of over 30 journalists in the past decade—the cases of Georgy Gongadze in Ukraine in 2000 and of Anna Politkovskaya in Russia in 2006 made worldwide headlines—drastically demonstrate the significance attributed to media in post-Soviet societies.

Despite the absence of universally acknowledged concepts of media democratization, there is broad consensus that post-Soviet media—particularly the dominant medium, television—have "helped to re-consolidate elite power rather than empower citizens."1 What is subject to debate is the question of which societal elements facilitate and constrain the independence and freedom of media, especially television. What role do market forces play in the process of media democratization, and how do state structures regulate, suppress, or use capitalism toward their own gain? What degree of informational pluralism has been achieved in the newly independent republics? What are the prospects for transparency and the participation of civil society in Russian and Eurasian media? And to what degree to trends in post-Communist media reflect global trends? In other words, is there a worldwide convergence both in regards to media formats and political messaging?

Using the classical four fundamental models proposed by Siebert et al.,2 it can be assumed that the majority of post-Soviet media underwent an evolution from a Social Responsibility model that had emerged in the last years of perestroika and glasnost and matured in the first post-communist phase, to an Authoritarian model that was forcefully implemented in the early 2000s. However, the classification requires some fine-tuning: even in the most liberal years of glasnost, the Soviet media environment retained essential features of what Siebert called "the Soviet model," and even in the most intrusive years of the Putin presidency (2002–2003, after 2012), the Authoritarian model contains prominent libertarian and consumer-driven features. Moreover, it is obvious that the post-Soviet republics, while sharing certain features, do not form a homogenous space—far from it. Take, for example, Central Asia: the media in Kyrgyzstan, with all their imperfections, are closer to the Social Responsibility model, whereas those in Turkmenistan are the closest to the Authoritarian model of which Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan represent variations. Of course, even the most authoritarian systems strive to present themselves as socially responsible, protecting civil society and discouraging anti-social behavior while facilitating a sense of common values and strengthening nationhood.

However, the real ownership and decision-making structures—often carefully hidden from society—demonstrate that the majority of post-Soviet media are, above all, geared toward reinforcing the authoritarian status quo. Economic and political power structures are so closely intertwined that serious media challenges to the ruling establishments are the exception. For this reason, both journalists and artists working in the post-Soviet media systems look at media as patron-guided political players in themselves, promoting the values of the owners, not the common good, and audiences have come to accept this reality, using digital media as an individual corrective. Indeed, at the dawn of the Internet, many observers assumed that the rise of the Internet and, subsequently, of social media would progressively reduce the stranglehold of the state authorities. However, the Internet/social media revolution should not be exaggerated. Authoritarian post-Soviet regimes have learned that their stability and legitimacy can be challenged by "connected" movements, but these regimes have other tools to influence public opinion in their countries. More and more efficiently, the local elites manage to limit and control the socio-cultural influence of Western media, non-governmental organizations, and individual activists. Audiences are thirsty for news, but even more for entertainment, a combination that the two main media, television and the Internet, offer in parallel. The demand for screen content has contributed to the marginalization of newspapers and radio, which provide news but less entertainment.

The familiar low rankings of media freedom in most-post-Soviet nations issued by Western agencies capture only a small part of these countries’ media environments. Such rankings focus mostly on legal issues and limitations orchestrated by authoritarian regimes, as well as journalists’ rights, but do not take into consideration the other side of the coin, that of the audiences. The rankings, therefore, are only able to capture a partial picture of the more involved set of roles played by the media in post-Soviet societies. Moreover, these indexes come with some conceptual limitations, including the assumption that freer media automatically create new support for democratization—in reality, freer media can also give rise to illiberal ideologies and to more vocal nationalisms.

Determining the ratio between different elements in a certain media environment presents serious challenges and demands consistent monitoring and ongoing analysis. Even when a common terminology is applied, it requires adjustment depending on each case within a certain time frame—thus, the exact meaning of notions such as "censorship" or "self-censorship" can no longer be taken for granted since the terms originated from totalitarian society models. Equally problematic is the undifferentiated usage of the notion of "transition" from authoritarianism toward democracy, which has dominated the academic discourse on media for many years. As Tina Burrett has observed, the

continued application of the transition paradigm creates a false dichotomy. (…) The frustration that analysts express over the democratic deficit in the Russian media system must be replaced with realistic, empirically grounded expectations about the trajectory of political development in contemporary Russia.3

Still, to completely avoid normative statements regarding the realization of democratic values in mass media would be just as unproductive. Without denying national specifics for individual media systems, it seems fair to juxtapose the predominant western media models to the authoritarian/corporate media of post-Soviet nations. John Dunn aptly noted that

a modern western-type democracy is polycentric, with competing centers of power and influence, all of which have clearly defined functions and clearly delineated boundaries established by laws, constitutions or, failing that, long-established custom and practice; the corporate state does not allow for competing or alternative centers of power and influence, but instead the sole function of all structures is to serve the overall aims and priorities of the corporate centre.4

A sore point for all post-Soviet media environments is the role of the Russian media. A large number of people in formerly Soviet republics are still bilingual; the older generation was brought up with the constant presence of Russian television, a factor which certainly yielded lasting effects on the following generations as well. Russian has maintained its position as the lingua franca in many places, regardless of efforts to promote the respective native languages as the official means of communication. This, together with the high production value of Russian television, with which no other post-Soviet nation can compete, has secured the Russian elites an enormous advantage over the hearts and minds of people in the majority of post-Soviet republics, in addition to their dependence on the remissions sent by millions of migrant workers from the powerful neighbor. Thus, the symbiotic relationship between the Russian and non-Russian media environments, who not only share a common past but also close economic ties in the present, will likely remain a factor that must be taken into consideration when analyzing mass media in the post-Soviet world. And indeed, what would be the alternative? Conspicuously, the authoritarian values masked as democratic that form the ideological foundation of contemporary Russian media are in many ways similar to those of the other post-Soviet elites who often prefer a variation of "mild authoritarianism" to full-fledged emulation of western-style democracies. The safest consensus everywhere is the commercial one—in all post-Soviet countries, profit-making is considered a fundamental value, whether admitted or not. Indeed, what post-Soviet media environments share with the West is their high degree of commercialization. However, its impact on political opinion-formation is much more direct and visible than in parliamentary, free market-based democracies.

Western observers usually pay the keenest attention to the role of media in Russia and Eurasia during national elections. While this is certainly a valid focus, the present volume aims at understanding the deeper overall media philosophies that characterize post-Soviet media systems and environments, and the type of identity formation that they are promoting. This includes information outlets and entertainment on all levels, from news programs to talk shows and serious artistic production.

As several chapters in the present volume demonstrate, growing segments of the population in the post-Soviet world, and the young generation in particular, make increasing use of digital media that are harder to control than television and print media. The heightened attention to the national media environment is in part a reaction to experiences of the 1990s, including experiments with Western media models. Under these conditions, the "import model" which is based on the expectation that Western values can be introduced through the formation of western-educated media elites whose work will successively promote liberal values, has largely failed because the ruling elites in post-Soviet societies are unwilling to passively permit such processes to unfold since they will eventually undermine their position. Still, despite authoritarian regulations and multifaceted repression, the electronic, print, and social media in the post-Soviet world are both forum and battlefield of political agendas, economic interests, activist idealism, and pragmatic cynicism. Through their respective mass media, the ruling establishments engage with their civil societies in a wide variety of communicative processes, ranging from genuine dialogue to unabashed censorship and from subtle manipulation to brutal pressure. The ongoing minor and major scuffles over access to digital media demonstrate the significance attributed to media in these societies beyond doubt. It seems safe to say that, the more illiberal a society, the more the control of its media is viewed as a condition for maintaining the power status quo overall.

What, then, are the real prospects for freedom and transparency in post-Soviet media? The interest of Western engagement is no longer as strong and idealistic as it was in the 1990s, while the local elites have learned to limit and control the socio-cultural influence of Western media representative, NGOs, and individual activists. Social media are harder to manage, as the cat-and-mouse games that government officials and young activists engage amply demonstrate. On the one hand, the developments in post-Soviet mass media environments will to a large extent be determined by geopolitical developments, depending on the degree of success that China, Russia, the United States, and Europe can achieve in pursuing their agendas. On the other hand, each individual will likely have more and more choices in selecting his sources of information, and the higher the number of sources, the greater the individual’s relative independence from each source will be. Thus, much as post-Soviet establishments may try, and much as large segments of the population may be willing to accept it, the state control over media can never fully eliminate the emancipatory potential of the growing and diversifying global media.5

*****************

We would like to express our deep gratitude to a number of people who helped us make this project happen. First and foremost, our thanks go to the anonymous donor of two SOAR grants at GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs, which allowed us to organize two workshops on post-Communist media in 2013 and 2014. We would also like to thank Robert Orttung, editor of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, for granting us permission to reprint articles from two special media issues. Bryan Rosenthal, Evan Alterman, and Marya Rozanova were extremely helpful with preparing the manuscript. Our thanks go to Andreas Umland for accepting this volume as part of the ‘Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society’ series.

1 Sarah Oates, "The Neo-Soviet Model of the Media," Europe-Asia Studies 59:8 (2007): 1280.

2 Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Urbana-Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1963).

3 Tina Burrett, "The end of independent television? Elite conflict and the reconstruction of the Russian television landscape," in Birgit Beumers, Stephen Hutchings, and Natalia Ryulova, eds., The Post-Soviet Russian Media: Conflicting Signals (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 72–73.

4 John Dunn, "Where did it all go wrong? Russian television in the Putin era," in Beumers, Hutchings, and Rulyova, eds., The Post-Soviet Russian Media, 50.

5In the interest of consistency, the Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition) was used for Russian transliteration throughout the volume.

I. National Trends

1Politics of International Media Rankings

Tudor Vlad, University of Georgia; Lee B. Becker, University of Georgia; and Jack Snyder, Columbia University

Governmental and nongovernmental organizations have heavily invested in media assistance projects in developing countries each year, with the assumption that, ultimately, these programs will contribute to fostering democracy and stability. Spending has been distributed around the world, with eastern and central Europe, the former Soviet space, and African countries having been major recipients since the early 1990s. The U.S. and other western assistance programs have been created on the theory that development of free media performed by well-trained journalists leads to the development of democratic regimes. The evidence to support that assumption, however, is not robust. Relatively little work has been done to empirically evaluate the media assistance programs.

More than 100 organizations throughout the world have been engaged in some form of local, national or regional media system and press freedom assessment. Three of them (Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders, and International Research & Exchanges Board) have a global approach and have developed specific measures of media freedom or media sustainability. Their methodologies have evolved across the time to capture the changes in the media and in communication technologies and the new challenges brought to the press in post-totalitarian regimes. These indices and reports have been often used by governments and NGOs. They also have been repeatedly questioned and contested. As an example, the Freedom House ranking has been criticized that it reflected U.S. perspectives on political and economic pressures on the media in different countries and on their judicial regulations related to the press. Some argue that the Reporters Without Borders index has been created as an alternative tool to the FH ranking.

The Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders methodologies are different, while IREX assesses the sustainability of media systems (not press freedom). The conclusions of all three annual reports, however, on the state of the media in most of the countries that belong to the former Soviet space have many common points.

Analyzing the year-by-year rankings, ratings and reports after 1989, there is evidence that a short period of diversification in terms of media content and ownership occurred after the fall of communism in the region. This trend was encouraged and supported by U.S. and Western investments in media independence and professionalization through a variety of assistance programs.

This era was followed by a consolidation of ownership or a partial re-monopolization in the media landscape, the effect of which has been a decline of press independence. In some cases, this increased control has been imposed directly by authoritarian regimes in the region. In other cases, media groups were created or purchased by business or political groups or by oligarchs (many of them with ties to the government), who wanted and were allowed to use the media as attack dogs.

The economic crisis, which brought a significant decline in the advertising budgets in the former Soviet space, accelerated this process and aggravated its consequences on media freedom.

Another important characteristic in this region is the existence of Russian-speaking minorities in every country and the penetration of programs and publications in Russian, either produced in Russia or locally. Kremlin-friendly media have become more and more sophisticated in manipulating the news content and flow in Central Asian and the Baltic States, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova.

The assessment of media freedom is a complex endeavor: variation exists from one type of media to another and from national to local outlets. The Internet and the new media it has generated are not always captured in these measurements.

What the reports of Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders and IREX suggest is that currently, with the notable exception of the Baltic countries, in most of the former Soviet states media are under political, economic or judicial pressure, and many journalists face major risks when they are trying to do their job. As a consequence, these countries’ rankings in the press freedom indexes are low, with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Belarus and—more recently, Crimea—being constantly listed in the group of states or regions where media are oppressed.

The Freedom House indicators are more consistent across time for countries in the regionn, in part because the scale (0 to 100) has been unchanged. The higher variability in the Reporters Without Borders ratings can be explained in part by the weight that attacks on journalists has in their assessment and by the fact that the organization has used scales varying between 0 to 85 and 0 to 140. IREX measures different characteristics of media systems to evaluate sustainability, on a scale from 0 to 4, where 4 indicates fully sustainable media.

This chapter begins with a survey of how media freedom has been measured, discusses the reliability of those measures, and examines their validity in the narrow sense of media freedom as an end in itself. We close with a discussion—relevant to challenges that media and journalists are facing in the former soviet space—of what would be needed to examine the causal relationship between media freedom and democracy, including mechanisms that would be relevant to democracy promotion efforts.

Researchers began creating measures of press freedom and linking those measures to both antecedents and consequences of that freedom in the early 1960s. Freedom House, a media advocacy group, began its rankings of press freedom in 1980, and today, competing rankings are being produced by other organizations with similar goals. These public ratings have become the dominant indicators of media freedom used by academics and non-academics alike.

The existing rankings have both methodological and conceptual limitations, exacerbated by the dramatic changes taking place in the media landscape around the world. We find that existing rating systems perform reasonably well by the criterion of reliability. That is, the measures used by media rating organizations are generally applied in internally consistent ways across countries and over time, and different rating organizations tend to agree on variations in press freedom across countries and over time. To the extent that ratings diverge somewhat across rating systems, this can largely be explained by conceptual differences in the weight assigned to different criteria, such as physical attacks on journalists, government control over media, and public availability of information, which may vary somewhat independently even though all are valid considerations in an overall assessment of media freedom.

More problematic is the validity of these measures as a guide to improving media freedom and stabilizing democracy in transitional countries. Media freedom is an end in itself, a right enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which propounds the freedom "to receive and impart information and ideas through any media." Existing measures for the most part reflect fairly casual conceptualizations of this right. At the same time, media freedom is also thought to be causally or functionally related to the success of democratic governance. Efforts to promote media freedom are normally justified in part as contributing to the larger agenda of democracy promotion. It is not accidental that Freedom House is a leader in rating both democracy and media freedom.

Despite the presumed link of media freedom to democratic governance, very little attention so far has been paid to demonstrating empirically whether or how improvements in media freedom lead to improvements in democracy. At the grossest level over the long run, it is not disputed that greater media freedom tends to be associated with more democracy. At a more fine-grained level, however, measures of media freedom are not chosen with a view toward assessing specific mechanisms by which improvements in the media environment might lead to better democratic outcomes. Very little hypothesis testing of this kind has been attempted. To the extent that it has, it turns out that increased media openness sometimes leads to worse outcomes for democracy and human rights, for example, because newly freed media may be hijacked by populist demagogues and scapegoaters.

1. Measurement of Media Freedom

The indicators of three different organizations are most prominent in the discussion of media freedom. The best-known and most widely used measure of the press freedom is that of Freedom House. A non-governmental organization based in Washington, D.C., Freedom House was founded in 1941 to promote democracy globally. In 1980, it began conducting its media freedom survey—"Freedom of the Press: A Global Survey of Media Independence"—which in 2015 covered 199 countries and territories.1

To measure the press freedom concept, Freedom House attempts to assess the political, legal, and economic environments of each country and evaluate whether the countries promote and do not restrict the free flow of information. The ratings are reviewed individually and on a comparative basis in a series of six regional meeting with the analysts, ratings advisers with expertise in each region, other invited participants and Freedom House staff. Freedom House then compares the ratings with the previous year’s findings. These reviews are followed by cross-regional assessments in which efforts are made to ensure comparability and consistency in the findings. Freedom House asks the raters to use questions divided into three broad categories covering the legal environment, the political environment and the economic environment.

In 2011, Freedom House added a new instrument, "Freedom on the Net," to assess a broad range of elements that comprise digital media freedom, and 65 countries were included in the survey.2

Freedom House has its main office in Washington, and the organization’s operation there is often associated with conservative elements of U.S. foreign policy. Freedom House conducts the research for its Freedom in the World and Press Freedom indices out of its office in New York, and it states that these surveys are funded separately from other Freedom House activities and not funded by the United States Government.

Reporters Without Borders (RWB) has released annually since 2002 a Worldwide Press Freedom report and ranking of individual nations. Based in Paris, RWB defends journalists and media outlets by condemning attacks on press freedom worldwide, by publishing a variety of annual and special reports on media freedom, and by appealing to governments and international organizations on behalf of journalists and media organizations. The RWB index has been seen as a French and European counterpoint to the Freedom House measures.3

RWB bases the score for each of the 180 countries on responses of its selected panelists to a questionnaire that was revised in 2013 to reflect changes in the media challenges and challenges faced by the media. The questionnaire includes questions about the number of journalists, media assistants and netizens who were jailed or killed in the connection with their activities, the number of journalists abducted, the number that fled into exile, the number of physical attacks and arrests, and the number of media censored. In addition, the questionnaire focuses on issues that are hard to quantify such as the degree to which news providers censor themselves, government interference in editorial content, or the transparency of government decision-making. Legislation is the subject of some questions. Questions have been added or expanded, to address issues such as concentration of media ownership, allocation of subsidies or state advertising, discrimination in access to journalism and journalism training.4 The questionnaire is sent to freedom of expression groups, to a network of correspondents around the world, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists.

Funding for Reporters Without Borders has come from organizations such as the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights of the European Commission, the French Development Agency, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, UNESCO, the Organisation internationale de la francophonie, and the National Endowment for Democracy, a branch of the U.S. State Department.

A third organization, International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), also conducts evaluations of media systems. IREX is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that was founded in 1968 by U.S. universities to promote exchanges with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. IREX focuses on higher education, independent media, Internet development, and civil society in the United States and internationally. In 2001, IREX, in cooperation with USAID, prepared its first Media Sustainability Index (MSI) to evaluate the global development of independent media. IREX began with the idea of doing something more than and different from what Freedom House was doing. IREX said its MSI measures five criteria of a successful, independent media system. First, IREX measures the extent to which legal and social norms protect and promote free speech and access to public information. Second, IREX measures whether the journalism in the media system meets professional standards of quality. Third, the MSI determines whether the system has multiple news sources that provide citizens with reliable and objective news. The fourth criterion is whether the media are well-managed businesses, allowing editorial independence. Finally, MSI examines the supporting institutions in society to determine if they function in the professional interests of independent media.5

Media systems are scored in two steps. First, IREX assembles a panel of experts in each country, drawn from representatives of local media, NGOs, professional associations and media-development implementers. The panelists’ scores are reviewed by IREX, in-country staff and/or Washington, DC, media staff, which then score the countries independently of the MSI panel. IREX says that the final scores are a combination of these two scores.

2. Reliability and Validity of Measures

In their early work on media freedom assessment, researchers at the University of Georgia focused on the internal and across-time reliability of the Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders and IREX measures, on the internal consistency of the measured dimensions of the Freedom House and IREX measures, on the relationships among those three measures, and on the ability of the Freedom House measures to identify dramatic changes across time.6 They found that the measures were reliable across time, that they were internally consistent, that they largely measured the same concept or at least highly correlated concepts, and that the Freedom House measures reflected the major changes in the media environment associated with the collapse of communism in eastern and central Europe in the last decade of the last century.

Those analyses were later extended to data collected and reported to the end of 2008.7 They focused again on reliability across time and on the interrelationships among the Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders and IREX measures. The Freedom House measures of Press Freedom to that point stretched across 28 years. The average correlation year-to-year for the Freedom House measures was .96 (Pearson r). By tracking the ratings across time, however, it is possible to see that the Freedom House measures are not static. The correlation, for example, between the measure of Press Freedom in 1980, when the scores were first used, with 1981, was .92. The correlation between the 1981 measure and the 2008 measure, however, was .57. This is true across time.

The Reporters Without Borders measures of Press Freedom also were found to be consistent year-to-year. The average correlation was .94. The Reporters Without Borders measures were available only across seven years, but they, too, show evidence of decreasing correlations across time. The 2002 measure of press freedom correlated .94 with the 2003 measure but only .83 with the 2008 measure.

It was possible to examine the correlations between the Freedom House and MSI index across seven years. The actual countries measured changed significantly across time, making comparisons a little difficult to evaluate. The correlations did vary, but overall they were high. The average across the seven years was 0.87. Across the five years in which the countries evaluated were roughly the same, that correlation was 0.90.

3. Conceptualization

Both the Freedom House and the Reporters Without Borders measures of press freedom come from the world of media advocacy. Freedom House was founded to promote democracy globally. Reporters Without Borders defends journalists and media outlets by condemning attacks on press freedom worldwide, by publishing a variety of annual and special reports on media freedom, and by appealing to governments and international organizations on behalf of journalists and media organizations.

Neither organization provides much by way of a conceptualization of the concept of press freedom. Freedom House says the concept is linked to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 holds that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, including freedom to hold opinions and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media. Freedom House says it seeks to provide a picture of the entire "enabling environment" in which the media in each country operate and to assess the degree of news and information diversity available to the public in any given country, from either local or transnational sources. Reporters Without Borders says its measure reflects the degree of freedom that journalists and news organizations enjoy in each country and the efforts made by the authorities to respect and ensure respect for this freedom.

IREX says its Sustainability Index assesses the development of independent media systems, that is, the hoped-for outcome of media assistance. Sustainability is defined as the extent to which political, legal, social, and economic circumstances and institutions, as well as professional standards within independent media, promote and/or permit independent media to survive over time.

When Freedom House began its work on press freedom, the concept already was in use in the political science and mass communication literature. Freedoms of association, information, and communication were listed as essential components of democracy.8 Mass media were called the "connective tissue of democracy."9

In the literature of mass communication, Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm10 were particularly influential. They identified four models or theoretical types of media. The first, historically, was the authoritarian type, where the government controlled the press through prior censorship and through punishment after publication. They labeled a more current variant of the authoritarian model the Soviet Communist type. The libertarian model was seen as the counterpoint to the authoritarian model. The primary feature is the absence of government control. The fourth model, social responsibility, holds that the media have obligations to society that accompany their freedom. The work of Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm is normative, though it did make reference to historical change. Hallin and Mancini provided a rare empirical test of these models and found them wanting.11 They focused exclusively on 18 nations in Europe and North America and found that they best clustered into three models, based on their media systems. One was called the Mediterranean or "Polarized Pluralist" model. The second was called the North/Central European or "Democratic Corporatist" Model. The third was the North Atlantic or "Liberal Model." Subsequently, they edited a volume that included contributions from scholars examining a wider range of countries.12

Perhaps because of this early formulation by Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm, definitions of press freedom in the mass communication literature focus primarily on freedom from government control. Weaver distinguished three components of press freedom: the relative absence of government restraints on the media, the relative absence of nongovernmental restraints, and the existence of conditions to insure the dissemination of diverse ideas and opinions to large audiences.13 Others distinguished between negative press freedom (the absence of legal controls, such as censorship) and positive press freedom (the ability of individuals to use the media).14

Some have argued that definitions of media freedom should include other concepts, such as the role of media in nation building, economic development, overcoming illiteracy and poverty, and building political consciousness.15

In another view, press freedom was called one type of freedom of communication.16 Others have distinguished between the classic liberal perspective on media freedom and the radical democratic perspective.17 The classic liberal perspective focuses on the freedom of the media to publish or broadcast. The radical democratic perspective focuses on how mass communications can equitably mediate conflict and competition between social groups in society. According to McQuail, the concept of media freedom should include both the degree of freedom enjoyed by the media and the degree of freedom and access of citizens to media content.18 One view is that for a media system to be free there must be a diffusion of control and access supported by a nation’s legal, institutional, economic and social-cultural systems. Thus, free and independent media "exist within a structure which is effectively demonopolized of the control of any concentrated social groups or forces and in which access is both equally and effectively guaranteed."19 While there is not consensus in the academic literature on the proper conceptualization of media freedom, there does seem to be agreement that it should not be restricted to government constraints, or even to constraints from the marketplace. And media freedom should include some notion of the needs of citizens. McQuail’s position that media freedom should include freedom of the media and freedom and rights for the citizen captures this sentiment. In this regard, the measures of press freedom of Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders are too limited, focusing most heavily on government constraints and attacks on the media, mostly from official channels. The Media Sustainability Index also has a bias toward media needs and rights, rather than towards those of the citizens.

4. Elite vs. Citizen Measures of Press Freedom

The Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders, IREX (and African Media Barometer) measures are all based on evaluations of media systems by elite evaluators. We also now have examined the relationship between the measures of media systems prepared by these three organizations and the measures reflected in public opinion surveys of the BBC World Service Poll, the Gallup World Poll, and WorldPublicOpinion.Org also have been examined.20 In 2007, The BBC World Service Poll included a question that asked respondents in 14 countries to use a 5-point scale to indicate how free they thought the media in their country were to report the news accurately, truthfully and without bias. In 2008, WorldPublicOpinion.Org, based at the University of Maryland, asked respondents to surveys conducted in 20 countries how much freedom the media in their country have.

The relationship between the measure of public perceptions of press freedom and the Freedom House measure of press freedom for the 14 countries included in the 2007 BBC World Service Poll was only .23 (Spearman rho). The correlation between the BBC World Service Poll measures and the Reporters Without Borders was .25 (Spearman). The relationship between the WorldPublicOpinion.Org measure of press freedom from the point of view of the citizens and the Freedom House measure was a much stronger .76, while the relationship between the WPO measure and the Reporters Without Borders measure was .71. The discrepancy between the findings from the two surveys was surprising. The surveys did use two different measures, and the BBC World Service Poll item was more complex and reverse scored. The more straightforward WorldPublicOpinion.org measure did produce the stronger relationship.

Additional analyses of the relationship between public opinion measures and the elite evaluations of media systems were undertaken using Gallup data. The Gallup World Poll included a measure of confidence in the media in its core battery of items from 2005 to 2010. Respondents were asked if they had confidence in the quality and integrity of the media. The Gallup measure of confidence was unrelated to Press Freedom as measured by Freedom House and by Reporters Without Borders. The correlations for the IREX measures were slightly positive. The IREX measure of Media Sustainability contains as one of its five components a measure of Journalistic Performance. The correlations increased slightly when this measure was used alone, suggesting that there is at least some slight link between Press Performance as measured by IREX and confidence in the press as measured by Gallup. The media systems with more professionally solid performance garner more confidence from their citizens.

Another analysis of confidence in the media as measured by the Gallup core item and press freedom as measured by Freedom House was conducted later with a much richer data set, namely data gathered as part of the World Poll in years 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.21 In the last three of these years, we had more than 100 countries surveyed. The data showed that the relationship between the confidence measures and the elite evaluations was masked. In those countries in which repression of freedom of expression was low, free media was associated with low levels of confidence in the media relative to confidence in other institutions in society. When repression of freedom of expression was high, however, press freedom was associated with high levels of confidence in the media. In free societies, it seems, the media suffer from their critical stance relative to other institutions in society. In restricted societies, the media benefit from a more independent and critical stance. That finding replicated across the three years for which data were available for this analysis, namely 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Subsequently we analyzed the relationship between the Gallup measure of press freedom and the Gallup measure of confidence in the media was analyzed.22 Across the sample of countries, the belief that the media have a lot of freedom was correlated only mildly with confidence in the media. The correlation coefficient was .21. The belief that the media are free is correlated slightly more strongly with confidence in other institutions, but in no case is the correlation strong. The belief that the media are free is unrelated to a measure of approval of the national leadership. Confidence in the media, in contrast, is more strongly correlated with confidence in the national government, financial institutions and religious organizations. As in the past, the elite evaluations of media freedom were only slightly correlated with confidence in the media in 2010. The relationship was negative rather than positive. The correlation between confidence in the media and the Freedom House measure of press freedom was -.18, while the correlation between confidence in the media and the Reporters Without Borders measure of press freedom was -0.17.

5. What Now We Know About Measures of Media Freedom

The questions are simple: Could these indicators be used as a way of monitoring changes in the media systems of countries? Is there a way to test the impact of media assistance efforts?

In recent years, Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders and IREX have become more transparent in their methodologies. They also have become more rigorous. They are competing for media attention and for support, and the competition has been a stimulant to innovation and improvement. The indicators are consistent across time, but not so consistent as to miss change. We know that Freedom House and IREX, which use subindices, produce internally consistent measures, but the subindices do report meaningful variability. All three organizations produce quite similar results, indicating that variability due to the particular rater’s political orientation or advocacy goals is minimal.

The differences that do exist can be understood in terms of meaningful differences in the raters’ approach. The Reporters Without Borders and Freedom House measures purport to measure the same concept. On closer examination, however it is clear that the former places much more emphasis on attacks on journalists than does the later. Some analyses of discrepancies in the two measures confirm this difference.23 So the concept of press freedom is narrower from the RWB perspective. Media Sustainability, as measured by IREX, is highly correlated with Press Freedom, as measured both by Reporters Without Borders and Freedom House. But it does not appear to be the same thing. The finding that the IREX measure is more highly correlated with the Freedom House measure than with the Reporters Without Borders measure again suggests the narrower focus of the latter.

A somewhat related question is whether the high correlations between the Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders measures are the result of extreme cases. To put it another way, the question is whether the extreme cases mask higher variability in the middle range of measures. There is no evidence that variability is greater in the middle range than on the extremes. In sum, the two measures by and large produce similar results, the similarity is the same whether the countries are low, moderate or high in terms of press freedom, and the variability seems to be explained by differences in the conceptual bases of the measures rather than anything else.

The indices largely satisfy the criterion of reliability. The evidence is that random error is not a serious problem. We also feel that the three measures have some distinctiveness, with the Freedom House being the broader measure of press freedom than Reporters Without Borders measure. And we feel that media sustainability is a related but separate concept.

The question of validity is more complex. Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders and IREX are not conceptually well developed, as we have noted. The measures and procedures used certainly are consistent in a very general sense with the term press or media freedom. It is hard to argue, however, that the measures on their face reflect the full range of the concept. The most obvious limitation is that all of the measures focus most heavily on constraints to press freedom that result from government action. They are less sensitive to limitations from the market or from other factors, such as journalistic or organizational incompetence. None of the measures reflects the concern of McQuail and others that a robust media freedom measure must incorporate audience needs and the rights of audience members to a free and complete flow of information. In this sense, the existing measures cover only half of the meaning of media freedom, namely the half represented by the freedoms of the media operatives.

All three measures are limited in other important ways. The first results from technological change in the media environment and its impact on media structure and journalistic behavior. All of the indices reflect some of these concerns. Freedom House has even gone so far as to create a separate index of Net Freedom. The challenge to the indices on this front is great, however, and it is likely to require modification of procedures in the future. The very definition of journalism and of journalists is changing rapidly. What affects the traditional media and what affects citizens acting as journalists may be quite different. Media freedom or some broader concept of journalistic freedom must incorporate both in today’s world.

A broader issue is how to incorporate into the measure of media freedom in a single country the activities of media outside that country. Nation-state borders have come to mean less in the age of satellite broadcasting. And while countries have demonstrated some success in controlling what comes in through the Internet, the techniques are not perfect, and many work hard to overcome them. This is a fundamental challenge to the idea that the nation-state is the proper unit of analysis for the study of media freedom.

Another challenge is that the degree of media freedom within a nation-state may vary from one regional media market to another. The market in the capital, for example, might be more or less free than the markets outside the governmental center. Yet the existing measures ignore these differences by creating a single measure that attempts to incorporate the internal variability. The existing measures also do not differentiate between freedoms enjoyed by one form of the media but not by others. In many countries, the printed media differ from the visual and oral media in terms of the freedoms they enjoy. The existing measures are not explicit in how they handle these disparities.

The indicators also give less attention to the matter of content than would seem to be ideal. The IREX index does contain a subindex of press performance, and all of the indicators give some attention to this matter. But the quality of media content is not their primary concern.

The analyses have shown that the public largely agrees with the elite evaluators in their assessments of media freedom. We found that the public has the broader perspective of media freedom as measured by Freedom House, rather than the narrower perspective of Reporters Without Borders with its focus on attacks on the media and on journalists. The public’s notion of confidence in the media is more highly correlated with the IREX measure of Sustainability than with the Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders measures of press freedom. This is consistent with the idea that sustainability is a related but distinguishable concept from press freedom.

These analyses raise the question as to whether a more robust measure of media freedom would include both elite evaluations and those of individual citizens. Should the elite evaluators and the public have to agree that the media are free for the country to score highly on a media freedom index? What weight might be given to public assessments of media freedom in such an index? Consistent with this view, some have Bajomi-Lazar (2008) has argued that the consolidation of media freedom in a society occurs only when there is institutional support for that freedom, the media behave in a free fashion, and the public is supportive of media freedom.24

An alternative strategy is to view the elite evaluations and the public evaluations as separate concepts. Such a strategy suggests that media freedom might have different effects in conditions in which the public was less convinced that the media were, in fact, free than when the public agreed with elite assessments. While no empirical work has examined this question, related work is consistent with it.

The existing indices, in sum, suffer from their limited conceptualization. And the conceptual weakness is a reflection of the limited theoretical development on the role of the media in the functioning of a society. The presumption here is that we should not only be concerned with media freedom as something of importance on its own, but rather we should be concerned with media freedom because we believe such freedom determines important society outcomes, such as creation of a functioning democracy and economy. The basic question, in the end, is what kinds of content are needed for democratic and economic development.

6. Mechanisms by which Media Freedom Affects Democracy

The starting point of this discussion of media freedom has been that freedom of news and of communications media is one of the central pillars of political life in stable democracies. Without media freedom, citizens would lack the information to evaluate public issues, organize political groups, choose prudently among candidates for office, and hold officials accountable. Consequently, democrats typically take it for granted that increases in media freedom in countries that lack it will contribute to democratization, the enhancement of rights, the rule of law, and social stability.

On average, and over the long run, they are certainly correct. In the short run, however, the impact of increased media freedom on these desirable outcomes is much more complex and varied. Media openings in dictatorships or culturally divided countries sometimes exacerbate power struggles between regimes and their subjects, or between ethnic and religious groups.25 Media freedom may stir up opposition to abuses, which is countered by repression, or it may open channels for hate speech by opportunists who play the ethnic card.26 Satellite TV and new communications media have contributed to a dramatic increase in the opportunities for political expression in the Middle East, but the consequences for democracy, rights, law, and stability are mixed in the short run and indeterminate in the longer run.

Divisive voices may hijack debate in a newly freed marketplace of ideas, because opportunists can exploit "market imperfections" in a situation where media resources are unequally distributed, audiences are divided by language and culture, journalists lack professionalism, and corruption and intimidation are rampant. In such settings, no invisible hand guarantees that the free contestation of ideas will cause the truth to triumph. In this setting, more speech can sometimes ironically lead to a detour away from the institutionalization of media and information freedom.

Although financial support for media freedom projects has been growing and diversifying, the knowledge base needed to design such programs has major gaps. Precisely because media freedom is so crucial to the progress of democracy, rights, law, and social peace, efforts to enhance media freedom should be based on a finer-grained understanding of the mechanisms by which media openness affects political outcomes, and how different circumstances affect the working of these mechanisms.

In liberal theory, media freedom is thought to affect political processes and outcomes through two general routes: by increasing the freedom of political contestation, and by providing improved information. Both contestation and information are needed to make democracy work. One without the other sets up potentially perilous contradictions. If media contributes to contestation without improving information, coercive struggle rather than stable democracy may result. Conversely, if increased media openness improves public information without simultaneously institutionalizing mass political contestation, a volatile social science experiment is set in motion. The post-Jazeera Arab World, China in the Internet era, and Singapore are running that experiment now, just as Britain did in 1704 when it ended press censorship, and as South Africa did under apartheid.

Although the world has been running such experiments for some time now, social scientists have just begun to study their results. The barrier has not been the lack of systematic, global measures of media freedom, which have been available for a couple of decades. Rather, the lag has been in examining the impact of changes in media freedom on the specific causal mechanisms that are believed to affect the quality of democracy, rights, law, and social peace.

Liberal theory expects that greater media freedom will lead to these good results through five mechanisms: increased media freedom is expected to improve media quality, lead to a better informed public that can choose wisely and hold leaders accountable, create a common political discourse within the nation, make political discourse more reasonable, and have a moderating effect on political attitudes. Do these five mechanisms operate as expected in transitional societies?

a) How does an increase in media freedom affect media quality?

Starting with John Milton and continuing through John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, it has been axiomatic for liberals that a more open media will contain better ideas and information than a closed one. They acknowledge that false or destructive ideas may be voiced in open media, just as they may be when media are controlled, but bad ideas in a free marketplace can be scrutinized, confronted in debate, and discredited.

Are free media, especially newly free media, in fact better in the quality of the ideas and information that they convey? Do quality media flourish under free competition, or does intense market competition lead to pandering to mass tastes and prejudices? Are poorly professionalized, partially free media in transitional societies especially susceptible to manipulation that undercuts the expected benefits of increased media freedom?

Answering these questions requires first that we be able to measure media quality. A good, but limited attempt to do this is IREX’s rating of media quality, first in 20 post-communist states, then in the Middle East and North Africa, and now also in Sub-Saharan Africa. IREX asked expert panels to rate objectivity, fairness, and sourcing of reporting; ethical standards of journalists; self-censorship; corruption and adequacy of pay; ratio of news to entertainment content; quality of technical equipment; and existence of investigative and other specialized reporting. A cross-national statistical comparison using this data has shown that quality was low when competition was absent, better when competition was moderate, but also low when commercial pressure to compete induced a race to the lowest common denominator of media content. This is just a start at answering a hard question.

b) How does an increase in media freedom affect political knowledge?

Some experts argue that the public needs only a little political knowledge to pick up on the cues it needs to effectively play its role in monitoring its elected representatives.27 If so, free media need only vet opinions and monitor gross outcomes. Normally, however, proponents of a free press insist on a higher standard: quality media must help attentive elites and publics evaluate opinions against facts.

Scholars are just beginning to study whether media freedom actually does improve political knowledge. A study showed that the public gains more political knowledge in the less competitive, more elite-controlled Finnish media setting than in the more mass-competitive US media environment, and that the mixed British system produces intermediate knowledge results.28 An analysis tried to assess the impact on political knowledge in Spain of reading higher quality print media, compared to consuming lower quality news sources—and to tease apart these effects from the influence of other factors, such as education and motivation.29 Though a good start, these studies highlight the need to find factual questions that are relevant to real political issues, allow comparison across countries or over time, and take into account confounding factors other than media freedom and quality that may affect political knowledge. None of them examines the impact of change over time in media freedom on political knowledge, nor do they extend beyond the global North.

c) Does an increase in media freedom lead to more integrated or more segmented media markets?

The advent of print capitalism created a sense of an "imagined community" among those who shared a common reading experience in their vernacular language, and thus established a prerequisite for national self-determination.30