Abstract
Over the last few years, European public broadcasters have promoted the concept of public service media as one of their main values. To this end, transparency policies have been implemented as a mechanism of corporate projection by strengthening their role as an essential service. The objective of this article is to ascertain the existence of this type of policies among European public broadcasters. To this end, a nominal group was made with 24 experts who were surveyed, thus generating new indicators of transparency and accountability strategies around sustainability and digitalization. The contents of the websites of RTVE (Spain), RTP (Portugal), France TV (France), RAI (Italy), BBC (UK), RTÉ (Ireland), ZDF (Germany), VRT (Belgium), and SVT (Sweden) were also analyzed, paying attention to such indicators and strategies. The main results include the identification of differences on the basis of the ideal models described by Hallin and Mancini; a commitment to credibility (fact-checking) to the detriment of diversity of opinions; and a connection between the political system and the media system, which, preliminarily, determines the level of transparency of these public entities.
Highlights
IntroductionEuropean public broadcasters have made considerable efforts over the last decade to improve their transparency policies and their management systems in order to recover their legitimacy, which, in some cases, was lost, while strengthening their commitment to society and their democratic nature (Hoynes 1999; Balkin 1999; Thomass 2016)
This article is a continuation of the line opened by previous studies on the transparency and access to public information as a theoretical and epistemological construction (LópezLópez et al 2021), as well as those works seeking to analyze the public information on the websites of broadcasting corporations
Most of the scholars selected for the nominal group were researchers in the field of journalism, audio-visual communication, political science, and sociology, to a lower extent, they included professionals from public television networks or companies and managers of news companies working in a variety of departments
Summary
European public broadcasters have made considerable efforts over the last decade to improve their transparency policies and their management systems in order to recover their legitimacy, which, in some cases, was lost, while strengthening their commitment to society and their democratic nature (Hoynes 1999; Balkin 1999; Thomass 2016) These policies have been determined by their relation to the political and institutional system through the normative dimension, and through the influence of the state on their structure as a definer of what makes news. Digital society has not substantially changed the frameworks that render a public broadcaster more or less transparent, the first and most important factor being the willingness to be transparent What it has certainly brought about, has been a media convergency that has led to major changes in internal organization with an increasingly competitive market and laws and regulations that must adapt to the digital revolution, resulting in more complex models of governance (Iosifidis 2011; Arriaza Ibarra 2012). Transparency has become a central factor in political and social life, generating a “culture of transparency” (Owetschkin et al 2021) on which new ethical criteria derived from artificial intelligence are impacting (Barceló-Ugarte et al 2021)
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