21.02.2023

New guest researcher at CMC – Marius Dragomir explores the state of Public Service Media in the context of media capture across Europe

Marius Dragomir, director of the Media and Journalism Research Center, an international think tank focused on the study of media, and researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) in Spain, stays as visiting researcher with the CMC to conduct research about the future of the public service media in the post-platform era.


Dragomir, who also teaches journalism courses at the Vienna-based Central European University (CEU), has designed a framework for the study of public service media in the platformised media ecosystem, which analyses the performance of public service media in five key areas: funding, governance and management, audience engagement, editorial independence, and professional development. During his stay in Vienna, Dragomir is conducting research about the Austrian public media as part of his study. The goal is to map the strengths and weaknesses of the public service media in Europe to anticipate how its role will change under economic and political pressures in the future. The study is conducted as part of  Valcomm, a research project carried out by USC.
 

The work on public service media is part of a larger line of research, focused on media capture, that Dragomir is leading at the Media and Journalism Research Center. During his stay in Vienna, Dragomir held a lecture at the CMC’s Talk series where he spoke about media capture, which he believes is the most disruptive phenomenon affecting editorial independence today. As Dragomir wrote in a 2019  study, media capture is an extreme form of control whereby “most or all of the news media institutions are operating as part of a government-business cartel that controls and manipulates the flow of information with the aim of protecting their unrestricted and exclusive access to public resources.”