Nel loro nuovo libro due studiosi americani di giornalismo affrontano le differenti crisi del giornalismo in vari stati, e sotto il profilo dell’invadenza della politica mettono l’Italia nelle condizioni dei paesi di più recente accesso all’Unione Europea.

It is true that public media are under some pressure in several European countries, including Italy and to some extent the UK, and that the development of the online aspects of public service have been subject to increased regulatory restraint in Germany and elsewhere, with an eye to giving private companies opportunities to build their own business without too much competition from publicly funded players. It is important to maintain a sense of perspective, however. Most Western European media systems remain much more “mixed” than the market-dominated American one, and perhaps this is one reason they generally seem to have been more resilient in the face of the global recession—even if this expose them to other, more political, forces, as we’ve seen in Italy and in many of the new European Union member states. While license fees have not always kept pace with inflation and certainly not with revenue growth in some sectors of the private media industries, current developments have not changed the relative role of public media in Western Europe to nearly the same extent as widespread deregulation and the opening up of television broadcasting markets to commercial operators did in the 1980s. In most of the European countries studied here public media are still attracting 30 percent or more of the TV audience—more than 10 times the levels of the US.