Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-2021

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Communication and Information

Major Professor

Dr. Norman Sam Swan

Committee Members

Amber Roessner, Michael Fitzgerald, Sally McMillan

Abstract

Global media system literature is still by and large heavily dominated by the idealistic comparative western-centered normative tradition, focusing on what media ought to be and how it should act across different cultural and political settings, instead of what it actually is. How is it changing, where, and why? This work suggests a shift away from the long tradition of overgeneralization, towards a more historically and culturally grounded analytical approach, that delves with the emergence of new media structures, institutions, and conventions, and evaluates their impact on media performance and public behavior. This study looks at the dynamics happening within a specific media system, trying to explain and predict the factors contributing to the phenomenon of interest- the experienced deterioration of press freedom and quality journalism. This inside perspective focusing on indigenous qualitative exploration of local journalistic and societal social cultures is a much-needed change of optics, and one global media theory has been calling for over the last decades.

The study introduces and tests the Regressive Media Model in a way of explaining media systems that have been certified to have a freer, more independent, more professional media system, engraved in the Western ideal of the Fourth Estate, but have over the recent years begun to regress- collapsing or backsliding or decaying, according to the literature, into different types of non-democratic, neo-authoritarian, politicized and overall – more repressed media systems. How is this decline happening? Why? And can it be bettered?

The proposed theoretical model is developed and tested here using the grounded theory approach and drawing on qualitative data from Bulgaria. The country notoriously stands as the European democracy with the lowest press freedom ranking, dubbed “the black sheep of Europe” and also “the worst place for press freedom, where it can prove dangerous to be a journalist”, according to the annual press freedom index developed by Reporters Without Borders. Though constitutional democracy, the post-communist Eastern European state as the only EU member, categorized in the “red zone” in terms of press freedom, alongside dictatorships such as Turkey, Russia, and Belarus.

The proposed dissertation develops a theoretical model that helps understand the decaying media system in Bulgaria- once fast-tracking towards democratization and media independence in the early 2000s and currently experiencing an abrupt regression. The regressive media model as applied in this work could be used to draw a better understanding of the broader regional press freedom decline experienced in Eastern and Central Europe circa 2020. Simply said, the suggested exploration of Bulgaria and its press freedom disintegration is a pilot study with potentially greater implications for our broader understating of theories of press freedom and its experienced global decline.

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