A response to Anders Todal Jenssen’s, Sandra B. Hrvatin’s and Brankica Petković’s comments on Central and Eastern European media in a comparative perspective. Politics, economy and culture (original) (raw)

2015, Southeastern Europe

We are pleased to see that our edited collection has generated such interest in the wider scholarly community, and are grateful to all three reviewers for their comments. The decision of the editors of Southeastern Europe journal to host a forum on the topic confirms the timeliness of our intervention and the need for further work in this area. Let us note that the idea for this book was developed in the context of a EU-funded scholarly network 1 that was aimed at increasing the understanding of media landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe, examining the applicability of Western European and North American concepts and theories, and developing novel conceptualisations. Our book was directly tied to these aims-we took an established and increasingly popular 'Western' theory of media systems developed by Hallin and Mancini (2004) as our starting point, thought about whether and how it applied to Central and Eastern European media, how to develop it further to better account for the specificities of media systems in the region, and also how to think in a more sociologically informed way about how to explain media systems thereby broadening out the study of media systems beyond the relationship between media and political systems. From the very start it was clear that we would have to make do with existing resources and data sets, and work within the restraints of time available to our individual contributors. As a result, our main aim was to point out the key contours of a new, better framework for comparative media analysis, and asking our contributors to respond to this framework within the limits of time and data they had available at the time. Systematic new research was, unfortunately, out of question. Likewise, given the geographic focus of the network and expertise, the volume had to be focused on Central and Eastern European media, even though the broader arguments we are developing apply to comparative media research everywhere. With this in mind, let us now turn to the two reviews. We shall start with Anders Todal Jenssen's comments, and then proceed to those provided by Sandra B. Hrvatin and Brankica Petković. In both cases, we shall focus on observations regarding the book in general rather than those related to other individual contributions as the latter are often too specific to be addressed by the editors. Two themes in particular seemed recurrent in the comments-the relationships between different causal factors that affect media systems, and the usefulness of quantitative indicators in comparative media research. The arguments put forward in the comments indicate that we need to restate and clarify our position on each of these. Starting with Jenssen's review, we were of course very pleased to see all the complimentary comments, especially with regard to our argument about the necessity of involving not only political, but also economic, cultural, and more broadly historical and sociological factors