Institutionalizing The Politically Independent Media Systems

23 Pages 5810 Words

degree to the comparative analysis of East European media. The situation in this aspect is paradoxical. There is a taciturn division of interest in the researchwork, that refers media to the technical or businessminded experts. While political scientists' remains exclusively focused on the new political institutions, like state power and money, and exclude media and their political influence as something secondary and non-essential to the political process. Therefore, Western European theory of democracy examines East European societies entirely in the political science background of institutional transformation - as, for example, in the works of Offe (7), Graessner (8), Juchler (9) - or of the democratic "change of system" concept (Von Beyme (10) and Merkel (11), without probing into the institutional content of political interaction as a kind of mass communication.

The comparative analysis in the present research is based on a preliminary selected number of East European countries, with a secondary analysis of statistical data and scientific literature. The selection was based on pragmatical considerations, i.e. countries for which a minimum of reliable scientific information exists to allow any form of comparison.

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1. Theory of democracy
The main point in the following comparative analysis is based on the assumption that the more independent the media from political actors, the stronger the democratic order. The autonomy of the media from politics derives from certain structural as well as content postulation. The institutional differentiation of the media systems from the political total of socialist society can be viewed as a parallel process to the very differentiation of the political system itself.

In the case of post-totalitarianism, publicity is not only diversified from politics, but diversifies concurrently with it. Thus, the democratization process is not defined by "more publicity - ...