ABSTRACT
This chapters focuses on transparency in media and journalism from an interdisciplinary as well as an intercultural perspective. It provides an overview of key concepts in mass communication for the study of media transparency. Drawing on economic theory, information asymmetries between producers and consumers of news – which are at the core of transparency processes in journalism – are being analysed. The concept of transparency has different connotations in different political systems; this impacts the prevalence of media transparency instruments (e.g. ombudsmen, newsroom blogs, correction buttons, mission statements, and ownership information) across media systems and journalism cultures as well. This chapter provides an overview of research results on media transparency in Europe, the Americas, the MENA region, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. While the field is still under-researched in many regions, existing comparative analyses show that different attitudes towards transparency exist even between journalists from Northern/Western, Southern, and Central Eastern Europe. For example, journalists from countries with a longstanding tradition of professionalism, and a tradition of academic journalism education, have a significantly more positive attitude towards the impact of various transparency instruments in the media sector.
