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	Research shows strong public service media contributes to healthier democracy by European Broadcasting Union, agencies   Nov 2016   EU Colloquium on Fundamental Rights focused on ‘Media Pluralism and Democracy’   In November 2016, the second annual EU Colloquium on Fundamental Rights was held in Brussels. The 2016 Colloquium on Fundamental Rights focused on "Media Pluralism and Democracy''. The Colloquium brought together, in an interactive roundtable discussion, EU institutions and Member States, NGOs, journalists, media representatives, companies and key academics and international organisations to reflect on a wide range of topics. These include, among others: how to protect and promote media freedom and independence from state intervention and from undue political or commercial pressures; how to empower journalists and protect them from threats of physical violence or hate speech; the role of media and ethical journalism in promoting fundamental rights; how can a pluralistic media environment foster political debate on crucial issues for democratic societies.   * Access the link below for more details.   August 2016   Countries that have popular, well-funded public service broadcasters encounter less rightwing extremism and corruption and have more press freedom, a report from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has found. For the first time, an analysis has been done of the contribution of public service media, such as the BBC, to democracy and society.   Following Brexit and the rise in rightwing extremism across Europe, the report shows the impact strong publicly funded television and radio has had on voter turnout, control of corruption and press freedom. The EBU, which founded Eurovision, carried out the study across 25 countries after noticing that the more well-funded a country’s public service outlets were, the less likely the nation was to endure extremism.   The report says that in “countries where public service media funding.. is higher there tends to be more press freedom” and where they have a higher market share “there also tends to be a higher voter turnout”.   It also says there is a strong correlation between how much of a country’s market its public service broadcaster has and the “demand for rightwing extremism” and “control of corruption”.   “These correlations are especially interesting given the current public debates about low participation in elections, corruption and the rise of far right politics across Europe,” said EBU head of media intelligence service Roberto Suárez Candel, who conducted the research.   “A strong and well funded public service media is not only about providing people with news, documentaries and entertainment – it’s also about contributing to democracy. While we can’t say that strong public TV and radio directly leads to greater democracy and less corruption, we have been able to show, for the first time, how these factors are connected.”   He told The Guardian news agency: “One of the core functions of public service media is to deliver news, which is supposed to be independent. If they have appropriate resources they can invest in journalism and provide more quality news and the audience will trust them more.”   Other research carried out by the EBU’s media intelligence service also revealed that radio is the most trusted medium in the UK and across most of Europe. Analysing data across 33 countries, 55% of European citizens trust radio the most, 48% trust TV, with the internet and social media less trusted in most countries, including Britain, than other sources.   “It doesn’t surprise us that TV and radio are the most trusted media sources”, said Suárez Candel. “People maintain a strong relationship with radio and TV, which are still their primary sources of information and entertainment.   It is also not surprising that in countries with a high level of funding for public service TV and radio there tends to be more trust in the media in general – they produce good quality content and provide valuable information for society.”   * The European Broadcasting Union is an alliance of 73 European broadcasters, access the report via the link below: http://bit.ly/2aWXirl Media Ethics: http://europeanjournalists.org/mediaagainsthate/ http://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/resources/publications/ethical-journalism Visit the related web page
	Russian search engine will only list top news stories from State-Registered Media by Global Voices Online, Moscow Times   Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine and a major news aggregator, will stop featuring articles from media companies that have not registered with the Russian government by January 1, 2017, on its “top news” lists, RBC reported on Thursday.   As has been widely covered in Russian media, at the beginning of October, Yandex sent a letter to the media companies it partners with outlining changes to its information sharing policy. The letter warned that if media companies do not submit proof of their registration with Roskomnadzor (the agency that regulates Russian media) by the New Year, their material will not be published among the “top five” news stories on Yandex’s homepage, Yandex.News, or on region- and topic-specific sites. Unregistered companies’ content will continue to appear in Yandex searches, however.   Yandex is being forced to change the terms of its information sharing policy and agreements with its 7,000 partner media companies as the result of a June 2016 law that introduced new regulations on aggregators whose daily traffic exceeds 1 million viewers. The law mandates, inter alia, that news aggregators determine the veracity of important information published on other sites before they republish it. Yandex initially pushed back against the law, saying that it would be physically impossible to check the thousands of sources it publishes.   The final version of the law allows aggregators to bypass this regulation if material comes from a media company that has registered with Roskomnadzor.   Yandex.News has a significant audience, leaving news organizations that do not want to register with Roskomnadzor in a difficult position: according to TNS Russia, 25 million people between the ages of 12 and 64 visited the website in September—not counting those who used the website from mobile devices. As of Thursday, 81,220 media organizations had registered with Roskomnadzor, according to the agency’s website. Still, RBC quoted Vadim Ampelonsky, Roskomnadzor press secretary, as saying that the agency had not yet received a “surge of filings for registration.”   Forbes.ru published an article this summer noting that media giants Channel 1, Vesti.ru, NewsRU.com, and a host of others websites had not registered with Roskomnadzor. A large number of major media players remain unregistered, including TJournal, one of Russia’s most popular aggregators. Some outlets, including batenka.ru, don’t plan to register at all, believing that because they aren’t news organizations—and most of their traffic comes from social media—their bottom line won’t suffer significantly from the change.   Still, media companies aren''t happy about the new regulation. As Dmitry Navosha, the director of the portal sports.ru, told RBC:   No one needs this law… The authorities want to support the domination of state- and pro-state resources on networks so that Meduza, Deutsche Welle, and Russian language BBC can''t be at the top of Yandex and affect the picture of the day that Russians receive.   30/12/2016   Russian Justice Ministry Blacklists Prominent Anti-Racism Research Center. (The Moscow Times)   Russia’s Justice Ministry has added another prominent NGO to the federal government’s list of “foreign agents.” According to an official announcement on the ministry’s website, the SOVA Center, a think tank that conducts sociological research primarily on nationalism, xenophobia, and racism in Russia, is the latest organization to be blacklisted. Federal officials have said only that the SOVA Center was declared a “foreign agent” after an unscheduled inspection of its offices, without offering any further details.   Russia’s 2012 law on foreign agents requires NGOs that receive funding from abroad and engage in loosely defined political activity to register as “foreign agents,” incurring additional, often crippling police scrutiny. Earlier this year, the Justice Ministry also blacklisted the Levada Center, one of Russia''s three largest national polling agencies, and the only pollster widely viewed as independent. The Levada Center is currently contesting this decision in Russian courts. The SOVA Center was first established in 2002 by human rights activists from the Moscow Helsinki Group and “Panorama” Center.   http://www.sova-center.ru/en/ http://www.hrw.org/russia-government-against-rights-groups-battle-chronicle http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia Visit the related web page
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