Getting close to key actors
As part of ReMeD, we carried out mini-ethnographies with 17 professional journalists, 15 alternative & community media content producers (alt/com producers from now onwards), and 16 citizens involved in the production, distribution and/or consumption of media across eight European countries (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Spain and United Kingdom).
We took inspiration from ethnography, which is the core method of anthropology, but also used in sociology, geography, and other disciplines. Ethnography involves the study of a specific group of people over an extended period of time (usually several months, sometimes years). For ReMeD, we adapted this into a more flexible design that can be delivered in a shorter period of time, and is thus better suited for timely policy interventions – this is what we mean by “mini-ethnographies”. Adopting an ethnographic orientation, we got close to participants, interacted with them in their everyday work settings, observed how they produce, distribute and consume media, and engaged in open-ended unstructured interviews that were led by participants’ concerns. Our interviews and participant observations were carried out between April and December 2024.
While our data cannot be considered as statistically representative of the actor categories and countries covered, our participatory methodology enabled us to get important fine-grained insights at the micro-level on how key human actors are interacting with digital platforms in the European media sector, and what they think about key issues related democracy, democratic media and regulation.
Developing a conceptual policy-relevant framework
Reflecting on the data from the mini-ethnographies, we are developing an actor-oriented conceptual framework that can help scholars and European policy-makers and media advocacy and professional organisations understand and address the complex social and political dynamics that characterise the European media sector today, and its relationship to democracy and democratic media.
DEMOCRACY: Protecting and nurturing democratic institutions, principles and practices in the media sector is a key overarching concern of societal actors and policy-makers. However, our data show that many of the actors interviewed do not share the same assumptions as legislators and academics around what these democratic dimensions actually are, and how they can be protected or enhanced.
While several participants were concerned about threats to democracy in the media system, they presented differing and sometimes conflicting views on what these threats were, including for instance, issues of private business interests’ influence on the media, an inappropriate level of closeness of journalists to political representations, and the potential for state funding to be abused to unduly interfere with media freedom and independence. Views also differed on whether the current audience engagement practices fostered by social media platforms and search engines are a positive or negative trend, with participants positioned at either end of the spectrum.
But a deeper disagreement that emerged throughout was on what these concepts and practices actually mean. One example of meaning significantly different things by referring to what on the surface might appear in the same phenomenon is the issue of media bias. For instance, one journalist from Ireland expressed concerns about what she saw as a “centre-right” bias of mainstream media – while an alt/com producer in the same country referred to media bias as mainstream media favouring “left-wing” views, and suppressing others that did not align with this bias. These kinds of differences emerged across the European sample.
This variety, fragmentation and sometimes clash of views and practices around democracy and democratic media call for new forms of engagement with the key human actors in the media sector. Some scholars are calling for an agonistic approach that enables these differences, and even conflicts to unfold in the media arena (and in society and political debate more broadly), so that the current levels of polarisation that is turning disagreeing actors into relationships of enmity can be transformed into adversarial relationships that are managed within the democratic space. This is an important point, but at the same time there is a balance that needs to be stricken with more deliberative and procedural understandings of democracy: it remains unclear how, without clear norms that sets limits and restraints on freedom of expression, the rights of all individuals and groups to be protected from hate speech and other harmful forms of speech can be guaranteed. Such limits usually entail a mix of legally enforceable mechanisms and promotion and consolidation of social norms through various non-legal means – at the European level, the developments around the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) are particularly important in this respect.
SOCIETY: Our data shows that differences and conflicts in views and practices of democracy and democratic media are closely entangled with emergence, formation, and crystallisation of social and political identities. Several participants have highlighted the need for mainstream media to be more representative of the broader society in terms of the make-up of professional journalists in relation to ethnicity/race, gender, sexuality, religion and other dimensions. According to these participants, issues of representation translate in the marginalisation of perspectives from these social groups. While some journalists are concerned with expanding representation and including these marginalised perspectives in mainstream media, other alt/com producers see their media as addressing this bias. Some in the latter category see their media work as a form of activism.
As debates and contestations over what constitutes democratic media and how to support it increase, the link between social and political identities needs to be considered seriously in the quest for ensuring pluralism while protecting marginalised groups from harm in the media sector.
TECHNOLOGY: On the technology side, the relationships between key human actors in the media sector and technology are a key area of focus to ensure that democratic values and pluralism are fostered and protected. Here the practices of these actors in interacting and using platforms and search engines are of particular importance, also to understand how bottom up approaches to self-regulation and changing norms of behaviour can complement sophisticated EU-level regulatory efforts such as the DSA and the EMFA vis-a-vis the work of algorithms and other platform features.
ReMeD’s mini-ethnographies show that, as expected, there are variable levels of awareness of algorithms’ work and visible and hidden platform features. Even where actors are aware of the potential negative effects of algorithms – from addictive behaviour to producing biases in journalism and other media production due to journalists (or their newsrooms) and alt/com producers chasing algorithms and data analytics to shape content – such awareness does not seem necessarily translate in different practices.
In terms of behavioural responses to the negative effects of algorithms and platform features, some of the interviews show that there are participants across the three actor categories that are responding to the increasing presence on social media platforms of media content that they perceive as “toxic” or otherwise harmful with reduced social media use. This is not necessarily something negative, but could have negative implications if it means that such actors are reducing engagement with news more generally and the public sphere. Here understanding the media sector as what Andrew Chadwick calls a “hybrid media system”, where legacy media and alternative & community media are operating in the same ecosystem, is an important conceptual move – which is in many ways already underpinning the rationale for EU-level regulation such as the DSA.
A more worrying finding is that some participants seem to consider the presence of hate speech as something “normal”, which they do not agree with but are somewhat resigned to accept as part of the online media landscape. This is an issue that should be addressed if the emphasis on countering hate speech is to be translated into effective uptake by society.
Next steps
We are now in the process of finalizing a policy brief that delves in more detail into the issue of what participants think and know about the DSA and regulation of social media platforms and search engines more generally. The brief (already circulated to key stakeholders in draft form) will contain practical policy recommendations for increasing the social legitimacy of the DSA.
The findings from Phase 2 are being developed in an edited book collection provisionally titled Democracy, Technology and Regulation in the Hybrid Media System: Grassroots Perspectives from Key Actors. We are now preparing the book proposal for academic publishers.
The pan-European research initiated with the mini-ethnographies has led to a second round of qualitative data collection, which is currently ongoing. We are conducting semistructured in-depth interviews with 30 journalists and 30 alt/com producers across six countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Norway, Spain and United Kingdom). More interviews with citizens are also being carried out in Belgium and Ireland. Other important actors such as fact-checkers and media managers are being interviewed on related issues across several European countries. This round of data collection will provide us with even more focused data on the European media sector, and key issues around democracy and democratic media in the current platform-driven environment.