Monitoring media pluralism in Europe : testing and implementation of the media pluralism monitor 2014 : policy report

In September 2013, the European Commission assigned to the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom at the European University Institute, the task of updating, simplifying and conducting a pilot-test implementation of the Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM) developed in 2009 by a consortium led by the University of Leuven. The Centre, acting independently from the Commission and the Member States, after reducing the scope of application of the MPM to news and current affairs, fulfilled these tasks and pilot tested the Monitor in a sample of nine EU countries. This action was followed with the scope of enhancing the practical applicability of the MPM as a research instrument that would potentially be usable for future implementation, in a neutral and standard way, across all of the EU Member States, and to assess the risk to media pluralism in the selected countries. Based on scientific and neutral criteria, the CMPF has designed the MPM2014 by reducing the number of legal, economic and socio-political indicators that were included in the MPM2009, has set standard methodological strategies in order to improve the data collection's feasibility across the EU Member States. The MPM2014 has been constructed as a streamlined version of the MPM2009, but with an effort to maintain its holistic character and to reflect the growing importance of the internet. The simplified MPM2014 has been focused on news and current affairs aspects of the media due to their key importance for the civic and political awareness of citizens and for the democratic processes.