A PUBLIC LECTURE BY PROFESSOR PAOLO MANCINI (UNIVERSITY OF PERUGIA), AS PART OF THE MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY CONFERENCE.

The inaugural conference of the EU Centre at RMIT, held from 31 August till 2 September 2011, focussed on media, communication and democracy in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, the Asia Pacific region, Latin America or Africa, as well as the established areas of Europe and Australia. In a world of regular, unforeseen crises and growing power of media owners, online and otherwise, various questions about the implications for democratic processes were explored.

Part of the conference was a free lecture by Professor Paolo Mancini, a visiting Fellow with the ERC-funded project on Media and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, who was the opening keynote speaker. The issues surrounding media fragmentation impact both party systems, and forms of democracy. The first consequence is the so-called “crisis of
journalism”. The situation is felt keenly in Western democracies, and particularly in the USA.

A more segmented, less centralized, more advocacy oriented media system is taking the place of the previous dominant professional model based on the ideology of neutrality and objectivity. There are rather different stories of media
institutions and growth in China, India and SE Asia, but the themes of diversification and new media are nonetheless shared worldwide.