ABSTRACT

The purpose of this chapter is to explore at the level of individual firms the nature and extent of transnational media investment in Central and Eastern Europe and to consider the impact of such investment on media systems in the region. Subscribing to a neo-institutional line of reasoning, the central argument will be that transnational media firms export business models successful elsewhere, notably in North America and in other parts of Europe, to Central and Eastern European countries. This is mimetic institutional isomorphism based primarily on the know-how of transnational media companies operating in an uncertain environment and the possibility of transnational synergies across distinct national markets. The extent of such investment is dependent upon a number of factors, namely, relative affluence and expanding advertising markets in Central and Eastern Europe, relatively permissive media regulatory regimes and stable political regimes, and relative paucity of domestic and international competitors. Such transnational media investments tend to have a moderating effect, for a variety of reasons, on the development of media systems in the region and help to explain why media systems there have not developed straightforwardly into politically polarized systems as we might have expected given comparative analysis of post-authoritarian media systems, especially Hallin and Mancini (2004). Neither, however, do these markets exhibit a ‘triumph of liberalism’ if we mean by this the development of highly competitive media markets.