Conference on threaths, challenges and opportunities of media systems in Central and Eastern Europe

Tjaša Turnšek attended the international conference Threats, Challenges and Opportunities in the Changing Central and Eastern European Media Environments, which took place in Brno, Czech Republic, from 29 to 30 of June, organised by the Department of Media Studies and Journalism at Masaryk University and the ECREA network.

She presented a paper titled Varieties of information control in populist and authoritarian political regimes and conjunctures: A cross-country analysis of journalists’ perception of political, economic and technological limitations in national journalistic fields, which was co-authored on the basis of the results of the POPBACK project’s meso-analysis of interviews with professional journalists in four countries: Austria, Hungary, Slovenia and Turkey.

Combining theoretical premises developed in Shoemakers and Reese’s (2014; 2016) “hierarchy of influence model” with critical research on authoritarian right-wing populism, the paper explores numerous political, economic and technological forms of information control in various authoritarian-populist contexts. Using the data collected through in-depth interviews conducted with 82 professional journalists in 4 countries, we show how control mechanisms experienced by the professional journalists expand broadly and encompass a large sphere of journalistic work. Control in authoritarian populist contexts is, as paper shows, disseminated at the individual, organisational as well as institutional level of journalistic practice.

More about the conference here.