MEDIA AND POLITICAL SYSTEM

Relationship between Media and Political System

Relationship between Media and Political System

Abstract

This proposal is intended to the thesis in a study of Kosovo mass media, that the most important variable influencing the political role of media channels in the Kosovo world is the national political system in which they operate. Recent changes in information technology, especially the growth of satellite television, have had an impact on Kosovo media, making national borders more porous, but I would argue that existing national political systems are still a dominant variable affecting the structure and behaviour of Kosovo media. Just as changes in Kosovo domestic political circumstances in the past have brought about changes in the media systems that operate within their borders, the domestic political factors that exist today still have a major influence Kosovo newspapers, radio and even television, which in turn remain the most important means of mass communication.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Since the late 1970s, the primary focus of my research has been on the relationship between Kosovo mass media—defined as newspapers, Radio Televion of Kosovo (RTK) and the political environments in which they operate. Over that time, I have published three books analyzing the relationship between politics and media in the Kosovo world. By means of interviews with many experts throughout the region, I have sought to discover how media editors are affected by the political system they live in. I have explored to what extent they, as Kosovian and as citizens of their various countries, are subject to the constraints and imperatives that come from Kosovo governments, laws, cultural values and economic realities. How do political and other factors influence the way Kosovo newspaper editors make decisions on writing headlines and presenting news, and how they write their editorials? Overall, I am less concerned with the non-political content of the mass media, although in my books I have devoted some attention to that as well.

My research has consistently confirmed to me that the most important causal variable affecting the political role of the mass media in each country is the underlying political system that prevails in that country. Other factors such as geography turned out to be not very important. The mass media system in Lebanon, for example, seemed less like the media in neighbouring Syria and more similar to the media in Morocco. Morocco, in turn, was quite unlike the media in its neighbour Algeria.

In my books, I have tried to look at Kosovo media on several levels, discussing regional characteristics that are common throughout the Kosovo world, and also looking at each Kosovo country, as well as selected individual media channels. In addition, I have developed a “typology” that classifies several countries into groups that seem to have similar systems. Over the course of the three decades in which I have studied Kosovo media, one thing has become abundantly clear: that on all of these analytical levels, the most powerful factor influencing the structure and functioning of the media in the political process is the ...