"Martin Marinos applies a critical political economy approach to place Bulgarian right-wing populism within the structural transformation of the country’s media institutions. As
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Marinos shows, media concentration under Western giants like Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and News Corporation have led to a neoliberal turn of commercialization, concentration, and tabloidization across media. The Right have used the anticommunism and racism bred by this environment to not only undermine traditional media but position their own outlets to boost new political entities like the nationalist party Ataka. Marinos’s ethnographic observations and interviews with local journalists, politicians, and media experts add on-the-ground detail to his account. He also examines several related issues, including the performative appeal of populist media and the money behind it." (Publisher description)
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"The book depicts and reflects the media change by concentrating on five main topics: the development of the media market, the relationship between media and politics, the establishment of public broadcasters, the status of the journalistic profession and the role of digitalisation and the internet.
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The publication provides a chronological background and outlines the characteristics of the media landscape in each of the ten countries monitored by the KAS Media Programme: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Republic of Moldova, Romania and Serbia. Furthermore, the authors - media experts from the respective countries - address the following key questions, considering the fact that some countries have already joined the European Union: What is the state of the media today? What is their contribution to democracy, how viable are they, what has been achieved? - Important questions for all media experts in the region, but also for everyone who is interested in the media change in South East Europe. “The result is a broad historical overview that impressively documents how differentiated and how fast the change has taken place. It is closely linked to the social transformation process as a whole, which has not yet been completed in any of the countries”, says Hendrik Sittig, Head of the Media Programme South East Europe of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. "Moreover, it must unfortunately be said that the hope that accession to the European Union would be accompanied by rapid alignment with the other EU countries has not been fulfilled." (https://www.kas.de)
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