Radio evolution - ICS - Universidade do Minho

Euranet: a Case of Study of Pan-European Radioactivities of the European Union’s nascent institutions. There was a greater move towards transparency during the1970s following the establishment of the European Council; for example, the EC actively sought broad coverage ofthe first direct elections of representatives to the European Parliament in 1979. At the end of the 1980s, under thepresidency of Jacques Delors, a new Directorate of Information, Communication and Culture was created toinform average European citizens about the European project. This new office issued two documents known as theDe Clerq and Oostlander reports, which purported to spell out the EU’s institutional strategy for publiccommunication for the final years of the twentieth century. However, the model they proposed was vertical andunidirectional, designed to carry out a top-down, bureaucratic style of communication principally devoted toconveying the achievements of European institutions to the public—an erroneous approach that whenimplemented only served to dampen citizens’ enthusiasm for European convergence and leave them further in thedark about the processes underway.The 2001 White Paper on European Governance, which invoked the principles of proportionality andsubsidiarity, brought about a turning point in the communication strategies of European institutions. The whitepaper clearly called upon leaders of member states to orient the rhetoric of their public communications on thesubject of the European Union to the real necessities and interests of their citizens. This initiative to decentralisethe flow of information gave communication policy an essential role in social dialogue.The Commission made a commitment to promote communication at both national and local levelsthrough established communication networks, civil society organisations and local authorities. The ProdiCommission vigorously promoted this strategy in a number of publically released documents. (Pérez, 2008: 87-89).Despite these improvements in the EC’s media and audiovisual strategies, radio had not yet been assigneda definitive role in EU communication policy as Europe entered the twenty-first century, (Lax, 2010: 80) althoughthe EC did undertake two important programs designed to promote an integrated European audiovisual market:TV Without Frontiers and Media, both of which were focused on television, film and audiovisual production.Nevertheless, as recently as 2007, the Media project excluded radio on the basis of its strictly audiovisual mandate.The European Commission had promoted a European-wide radio project in 1993 under the name of‘European Digital Radio’ (also known as ‘Radio-E’), which can in many ways be considered the predecessor oftoday’s Euranet radio network. European Digital Radio was conceived as a mid-term public broadcasting schemeintended to catch the wave of the rapidly developing digital audio broadcasting technology referred to as DAB orEureka 147. The network, which comprised Radio France International, Deutsche Welle, the BBC World Service andRadio Vlandern International, was to broadcast news and information about the European Union in German,English, French and Italian. All the partners of this group were public broadcasting corporations with provenexperience in serving an international listener base. Dissatisfied with the shortcomings of DAB technology, theEuropean Union finally cut off funding for this project in the late 1990s, and the initiative subsequently founderedfor lack of high-level support. Although the BBC pulled out of the group, RFI and Deutsche Welle briefly continuedto maintain a working relationship, an experience that would later prove useful when the two formed the core ofthe Euranet management team during its first phase of development between 2007 and 2009.The failure of European Digital Radio left serious voids in both EU communication policy and mediacoverage of European events and issues. The marginal role that was subsequently given to radio in ECcommunication policy did not correspond to the levels of radio penetration throughout Europe. It is estimatedthat the total number of radio listeners in the European Union stands at about 200 million out of a totalpopulation base of 500 million. Furthermore, an analysis of data obtained through various Eurobarometer surveyscarried out during 2010 shows that 58% of Europeans rank radio as the medium with the highest levels ofcredibility and user confidence, compared with 49% who cite television, 42% who place their trust mainly innewspapers with a national distribution and 37% who rank Internet as the most reliable source of information. TheEU countries in which radio enjoys the highest levels of credibility are Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Estonia. TheECREA: ‘Radio Evolution: technology, contents, audiences – conference 2011 | 209