Page 98 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Hans J. Kleinsteuber

1989 case of the media directive “Television without Borders.” In the
green book with the same title, the commission researched the situation
in every country in the EU in order to make decisions about further
procedure (European Commission 1984).
As another result of intensified European research, cooperation
studies that follow one of the following three patterns have become
widespread:

The situation in member states is systematically presented, for

example in the handbooks of the Euromedia Research Group in
which national media systems are dealt with according to fixed cri-
teria and figures are provided for orientation (ERG 1997). The sys-
temization provided simplifies the comparison, which, however,
must be performed by the user.
Inatwo-step procedure, the national situation is first researched

using case studies, after that trends within Europe are presented. In
studies that originated in Catalonia/Barcelona for example, the fo-
cusisonlocal/regionaltelevision.Intheirevaluation,itispossibleto
identify various types of “decentralized TV.” Then, just to name two
poles, the situation in states with centralized authorities and power
structures (such as Greece and Portugal) falls into the category of
“regional delegated production centers,” while Germany, with its
large proportion of regionally produced broadcasting, comes un-
der the heading “federated television” (de Moragas Sp´ aet al. 1999,
9–12).
The varying situations in different parts of the EU form the basis

for cross-national studies, in order to locate Europe-wide trends or
contradictions. For example, commercialization and the introduc-
tion of the dual system happened relatively simultaneously in the
EU; the use of cable TV, pay TV, and the Internet, however, is quite
unevenly distributed (McQuail and Siune 1998).
Studies on the European subject matter underline that something ap-
proaching a “European Model” has not developed beyond its rudiments
(Corner et al. 1997, 5). Therefore it seems even more surprising that the
promotion of the process toward European unity for some time used a
media-centered strategy, where deregulation and privatization have al-
waysconstitutedapartoftheirrepeatedlyproclaimedgoals.Thisstrategy
with the aim of attaining unity based on common media and telecom-
munications politics was above all attempted in the 1980s and the early
1990s, albeit with little success (Burgelman 1997, 142–5).

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