Centre for Media Pluralism & Media Freedom | Florence – 30.Sept.2014

UPDATE AND PILOT IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MEDIA PLURALISM MONITOR (MPM2014): CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE IMPLEMENTATIONS

Principles of simplification

Elda Brogi

Structure of the MPM (Ver. 2009)

Media Pluralism MonitorPilot test implementation 2013-2014

• 166 indicators• 6 risk domains• 43 different sub-risks• three different types: legal, economic and socio-demographic• Supply, distribution, use.• Holistic approach. Quantitative and qualitative indicators and analysis

Challenges of the MPM (Ver. 2009)

• the MPM is a very challenging instrument that collects and elaborates in a systematic way the most important aspects covered by renowned international and European studies on media pluralism, and even builds up beyond them.

• Need to give effective implementation in the pilot project limited time-framework.

• the instrument was preliminary simplified and streamlined.

Update and enhancement

• Applicability: some indicators were particularly complex, time and money consuming, especially taking into account timeframe and budgetary limitations of the pilot experimental project;

• Relevance: the scope of the initially projected application of the MPM was considered to be too wide. Number of indicators addressed issues that may not be part of a truly operational definition of media pluralism. Other indicators tackled information that is only indirectly related to the goal of media freedom and pluralism to guarantee and facilitate the presence of well- informed citizens in relevant current and political affairs and public debates;

• Measurability of indicators: several indicators appeared too difficult as effective instruments to sample or evaluate media pluralism;

• Cross-country validity: avoiding indicators too idiosyncratic, i.e. measuring aspects of the functioning of a media system that are either not applicable to all Member States, or have different meanings and impacts on the level of media pluralism, depending on the country context and their different political and social structures;

• Update: following up on the need of a constant updating of the MPM (also recognised by the original creators), the CMPF aimed at including new technologies and media developments that were not taken into full consideration.

Simplification

Media Pluralism MonitorPilot test implementation 2013-2014

1) Narrowing the scope of application of the MPM: in line with recent policies and academic trends, current MPM maintains only indicators that fall under the general definition of “news” and “current affairs”

2) Clustering the indicators according to more general principles: due to the shared risk domain and overall similarity of number of indicators, they were clustered where appropriate, in order to improve the level of usability, especially of the results of the MPM;

3) Simplifying the procedures to collect data: this principle is applied in order to assure the applicability of the measurement within the time and budget constraints of this project

Simplification

According to the three mentioned principles, the main simplifications applied are:• All the risk domains were simplified.• The cultural risk domain is heavily reduced;• Some sub-risks are not evaluated (es: Insufficient media representation

of European cultures, Insufficient media representation of national culture, Insufficient proportion of independent production, Insufficient proportion of in-house production, Insufficient representation of world cultures, Insufficient representation of the various cultural and social groups in mainstream media content and services,Insufficient representation of different cultural and social groups in HR in the media sector)

Simplification• Many of the indicators, relating to the same sub-domain risk,but referring to different

media platforms were merged in one indicator (see, for instance the political communication indicators);

• New internet-related assessments were introduced as criteria to score the level of a given risk;

• New internet-related indicators were introduced ex novo (see, for instance, indicator n. 20 - Regulatory safeguards for the impartial transmission of information in Internet, without regard to content, destination or source);

• Different types of media were grouped according to the logic of media convergence (i.e. e-version of a newspaper is considered part of the general definition of newspaper itself);

• The use of content analysis,as an instrument to collect data,has been heavily reduced.• As a result of this simplification the MPM indicators were reduced from 166 indicators

to 34.

Risks• B1-Freedom of speech and related rights and freedoms are not sufficiently protected• B2-Insufficiently independent supervision in media sector • B3-Insufficient media (including digital) literacy• C1-Insufficient representation of the various cultural and social groups in PSM• C2-Insufficient system of minority and community media• C3-Limited accessibility by disabled people• G1-Insufficient system of regional and local media• G2-Insufficient representation of regional and local communities in news • G3-Insufficient access to media and distribution systems due to geographic factors • G4-High centralisation of the national media system • O1-High ownership concentration in media • O2-High concentration of cross-media ownership• O3-Lack of transparency in ownership structures• P1-Political bias in the media• P2-Excessive politicisation of media functioning• P3-Insufficient independence of PSM• P4-Excessive politicisation and political control of media and media distribution networks • P3-Insufficient independence of PSM• P5-Insufficient pluralism of news agencies • T1-Lack of/under-representation of/dominance of media types• T2-Lack of sufficient resources to support public service media

• D1-Low accessibility and quality of the digital infrastructure

Scores• Revision of the score grids.• Scores have been adapted according to and in parallel

with the simplification and/or merging operations.• Re-balancing of the weight of “yes” and “no” in

scoring each legal indicators when necessary• Assigning 1 as the value of each merged indicator and

defining three thresholds for high/medium and low risk.

Results MPM 2014: Simplification

Media Pluralism MonitorPilot test implementation 2013-2014

- Narrowed MPM focus- Tested the methodology of each

indicator- Tested their feasibility - Tested their comparability across EU-

MS- Identified accountable national data

sources

Thanks !

Media Pluralism MonitorPilot test implementation 2013-2014