An impressive work of media and communication scholarship, this meticulously researched book provides comprehensive and authoritative treatment to the development of European Union media policy, in all its complexity and competing rationales; it offers a study of EU enlargement and conditionality; and it examines in detail the EU’s impact on the new member states in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), insightfully exploring themes such as content regulation and the promotion of European works, media ownership and media pluralism, the independence of regulatory agencies, and public service media. Building on a state of the art review of existing scholarship on media and communications policy, and offering its own perspective on comparative approaches to the subject, it makes an original and informed contribution both to theory building and to empirical research. It should be a standard point of reference for the academic, stakeholder and policy communities in this field.
Peter Humphreys, Professor of Politics, The University of Manchester, UK