The Greek Media Policy Revisited

Abstract

The development of the Greek media has been directly linked to the country’s political system and the various social and economic interests that are represented in it. Throughout the 20th century, the Greek press became a pre-eminent field of political antagonism, with newspapers tied to different political parties. The transition from a military regime to democracy in 1974 put an end to the censorship of political views that were critical of the government, and restored fundamental rights, including the freedom of expression. The international trend towards broadcasting liberalisation from the early 1980s onwards, and Greece’s membership in the then European Economic Community, undermined the state’s monopoly over broadcasting (Papathanassopoulos, 1990: 392). In the second half of the 1980s, deregulation was sustained by a domestic political and economic crisis that reinforced the calls for media independence from political partisanship and state tutelage (Panagiotopoulou, 2010: 11). The advent of commercial broad-casting paved the way for a fundamental reshaping of media ownership structures in the country. It did not, however, bring an end to the multiple dependencies and interconnections between the various media outlets on the one hand, and the government and the dominant political parties on the other, which have profoundly marked the Greek media policy and the state’s efforts to regulate the media.