CAMRI | Media Policy and Independent Journalism in Greece

Media Policy and Independent Journalism in Greece

A Policy Paper by Dimitris Boucas, published by Open Society Foundations

Today, Greece is the European Union member state where journalism and the media face their most acute crisis. This study identifies the urgent problems facing media policy in Greece and how they affect independent journalism.

Since the 1980s and ’90s, deregulation has increased the viewing choices for audiences in Greece. At the same time, the legal and regulatory framework has helped concentrate ownership of press, television, and radio outlets. Private channels operate with temporary licenses and independent regulatory authorities function superficially and ambivalently. As a result, the market has been dominated by a handful of powerful newspaper interests, which have  expanded into audiovisual and online media. Recent laws have further liberalized media ownership and cross-ownership.

Media Policy and Independent Journalism in Greece, based partly on in-depth interviews with key actors, explores these issues and more in this six-chapter report.

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Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

About Dimitris Boucas

Dr Dimitris Boucas is Lecturer at the Westminster School of Media and Communication.

He has a background in both information technology and social sciences, with a degree in informatics from the University of Patras in Greece, a degree in social sciences from the Open University, UK, a MSc in science and technology policy from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in information society and the role of the state (with the Greek information society as case study) from the LSE.

In 2016-2018 he was a Research Fellow at the University of Westminster working on the EU Horizon 2020 project “netCommons: Network Infrastructure as Commons”, which examined community networks as complementary or alternative to the standard Internet. In 2014-2015 he worked on a scoping study on the state of the media sector and implications for independent journalism in Greece, funded by the Open Society Foundations. In 2013-2014 he was funded by the LSE to conduct research into citizen networks and their deployment of new media for purposes of support and sustainability in austerity Greece.

Dimitris’s research interests are broadly the social, political and economic aspects of media, communication and the digital society: they include political economy of communication, information society theory and policy, critical studies of innovation in the digital economy, media policy and politics, public service broadcasting, alternative economies and media, work in the digital economy, media and communication theory, and social theory.

Dimitris has extensive teaching experience in information society, media and communication theory and policy, new media, innovation management and qualitative research methods. He has taught at various Universities, including the University of Westminster, the LSE, City University of London, the University of Paris (Dauphine) and the University of Piraeus.