An impressive work of media and communication scholarship, this meticulously researched book provides comprehensive and authoritative treatment to the development of European Union media policy, in all its complexity and competing rationales; it offers a study of EU enlargement and conditionality; and it examines in detail the EU’s impact on the new member states in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), insightfully exploring themes such as content regulation and the promotion of European works, media ownership and media pluralism, the independence of regulatory agencies, and public service media. Building on a state of the art review of existing scholarship on media and communications policy, and offering its own perspective on comparative approaches to the subject, it makes an original and informed contribution both to theory building and to empirical research. It should be a standard point of reference for the academic, stakeholder and policy communities in this field.
Peter Humphreys, Professor of Politics, The University of Manchester, UK
This book may be read in many ways. For sure it makes quite an outstanding, well composed compendium on the process of European media policy formed during last decades. In its other dimension, it is an efficient demonstration of the way the media should be examined nowadays: multidimensionally and progressively, as an elemental force intermingled with social, political, financial and cultural systems. Being aware of these complexities, and presenting a high level of competence, Beata Klimkiewicz takes the floor in the discussion on media policies in contemporary Europe. Her voice is eloquent and convincing.
Jacek H. Kołodziej, Associate Professor at the Institute of European Studies,
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
This book explores media policymaking in an environment of regional governance and globalized communications. It explores how varying competences and capabilities to address issues involving different media and forms of communication have led European policymakers to seek novel ways to align policy to the rapidly changing communication ecosystem. Klimkiewicz shows how the EU attempts to balance social, political, technological, and economic demands in creating media policy, whilst making it applicable to a broad range of media systems and media cultures in member states and why its struggles to do so have produced uneven results.
Professor Robert G. Picard, Reuters Institute,
University of Oxford