ECREA16-Abstract

156

Friday, November 11

1 4 : 3 0 – 1 6 : 0 0

CLP PS

Poster session

PS 029

Right to Information and Communication Between Government and Citizens: Identifying Continuities and Discontinuities at the 10

Anniversary of the Law on Right to Information in Turkey

T. Asrak Hasdemir

Gazi University, Public Relations, Ankara, Turkey

The nature and features of government-citizen communication in the modern state structure have been subjects of many studies.The right to information as

a form of right to petititon is one of the cornerstones in the formation of the modern constitutional state and has important ties with the freedom of thought

and expression. On the other hand, it is closely related with the accountability of administration and citizens’right to ask their administration to be account‑

able. The right to information comes to the fore with the aim to serve publicity of acts and actions of government as a public body and to make available

the transformation of these acts and actions by the governed. In Turkey, the practices related with the right to information, as the instrument of making

the acts and actions of the government“public”, came to the agenda on the eve of 2000s, became part of the national legislation, and was enforced in 2004,

and as of 2015, we commemorated its 10

anniversary. In the presentation, the right to information practices will be analyzed by considering the first

ten-year period of the practices, and also regarding the worldwide experiences and discussions around the issue. The main aim of the study is to elaborate

certain practices of the right to information, regulated in the Law on Right to Information in Turkey, and problems encountered in the application process.

The presentation will focus on the applications to the Council of Cassation of Right to Information in Turkey since this Council, like European Ombudsman,

is the final authority to review the decisions related with partial or full refusal of the access to the information and documents because of the limitations

specified in the legislation. The decisions of this Council will be analyzed especially in accordance with the main aim to elaborate how the practices of right

to information contributes to the interaction between citizens and the government and to revive public sphere in the case of Turkey.

PS 030

Trade, Culture and Diversity: The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement

M.T. García Leiva

University Carlos III of Madrid, Journalism & Audiovisual Communication, Getafe, Spain

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), between Canada and the European Union (EU), was made public in September 2014. It is

a treaty that pursues further economic liberalization since its emphasis is not on eliminating tariffs on trade (already low between rich countries as a result

of theWTO) but on reducing non-tariff barriers such as standards, procedures and regulations. Some of the issues the CETA presents refer to public procure‑

ment or investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms. Nevertheless, the CETA is about much more than trade: it includes an explicit reference to the com‑

mitments of both parties to the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, and underlies their

right to preserve, develop and implement their cultural policies as well as to support their cultural industries. The treaty lacks a general exception clause

protecting culture though, because some chapters contain articles exempting it.The thing is that while for the EU this exemption applies only to audiovisual

services, for Canada it covers all cultural industries.Within the context of the long lasting so called trade and culture quandary, the poster will aim to explain

the role assigned to culture and its diversity by the CETA text from the perspective of critical political economy. In terms of method, a documentary analysis

is to be conducted taking the CETA text as a point of departure to put it in relation to existing studies about its development and aims as well as the UNESCO

Convention. After providing contextual and historical information about the agreement, references to the Convention and to cultural exemptions will be

explained to clarify the CETA’s true potential to actually protect and promote the diversity of culture, both in analogue and digital scenarios.

PS 031

Media Concentration in Lithuania and Latvia (2000–2014)

D. Jastramskis

, A. Rožukalne

Vilnius University, Institute of Journalism, Vilnius, Lithuania

Riga Stradins University, Department of Communication Studies, Ryga, Latvia

Keywords: media concentration, daily, radio, television, internet, Herfindahl-Hirschman Index The growing Baltic media industries experienced shake-out

several years later after they started to develop in the end of the 1980s (press) and the beginning of 1990s (radio, television). Media companies that could

not manage the changes withdrew from the competition field: mergers and acquisitions of the companies took place and this caused increase of the media

concentration in the Baltic media markets. The growth of the Internet and rising media fragmentation gave some hopes for the diminishing of the con‑

centration in the media markets. The effects of horizontal concentration “may have been modified by continuing intermedia choice and the rise of new

media”(McQuail, 2005, 229) but according to Van Dijk (2012, 232), the overwhelming majority of small internet media outlets reach the attention of only

few people and the remaining minority of internet media draws more and more of audience attention. It means that the fragmentation of the contem‑

porary media does not necessarily guarantee the reduction of media concentration. Also, some strong players in the press or TV markets took advantages

of technological convergence and gained more power in the new media field. Potential economic and social threats of high media concentration could be

prevented by legal regulation of the market shares of economic entities. There are no special legal acts in Lithuania that would restrict the concentration

of the media market. The dominant position in the media market as well as other area of economy is defined when the market share of an economic entity

is no less than 40 percent. Slightly different situation regarding the regulation of the media concentration is in Latvia. When the market share of an elec‑

tronic media in Latvia in a particular market exceeds 35 percent (or 40 percent for other media sectors) this shall be considered to be a dominant position.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the volatility of the horizontal concentration in the television, radio, daily newspaper and internet media markets in