Considering the changes in media and in society that have occurred since the heyday of the Democratic Corporatist Model, with its strong emphasis on institutionalized self-regulation of the press (Hallin & Mancini, 2004), this article examines changes in attitudes towards media accountability measures among policymakers. Attitudes prevalent in the peak years of political pressure on the media system in the Democratic Corporatist countries are compared with the attitudes existing today. The data studied are printed minutes of media debates in the Swedish Parliament in the 1960s and similar debates in recent years, Sweden being a typical country for the model. The comparison indicates that both the views on media defi ciencies and the views on remedies have changed over the last 40 years. Accountability measures are still in demand, although more through governance than from government.
This paper seeks to explain the potential impact of new forms of media accountability in the digital age (i.e. media blogs and media criticism via Twitter and Facebook), as well as the failure of many traditional instruments of media self-regulation (i.e. press councils and media journalism) from a theoretical perspective. North’s theory of institutions will be employed to analyze why traditional instruments of media self-regulation often cannot successfully monitor and sanction deviation from professional standards in journalism. Drawing on institutional economics, a media accountability model including the audience in the digital age will be developed as an alternative. Th is audienceinclusive model may prove more effective in the long term, as ‘costs of complaint’ sink, and the utility function of the new ‘digital media critics’ may result in a more effective media criticism. The paper concludes with implications for media policy.
The article is dedicated to the ever growing criticism of large IT corporations that are trying to take the full control over the global Internet. The author analyses the reasons of the setback in the reflexion regarding the capabilities of the social media, ranging from firm optimism to equally firm pessimism. The creativity offered by those media becomes the product made by the global corporations who started by offering the website searching services and ended up keeping their authors and users under surveillance. The article poses the questions about the education method for the young Internet users, for whom the technologies present in the web 2.0 (and 3.0 or mobile) became the element of their everyday life. In order to understand the nature of these technologies one needs to regard them as things, objects and tools, in other words to “switch them off” intellectually.
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