To inform how we think about EU media law in the future, this chapter traces the understandings of harm evident in EU media laws, their proposal documents, and explanatory notes since the 1989 Television Without Frontiers Directive. It identifies a shift from concern with individual harm from exposure to content, to addressing a variety of sources of harm to individual consumers, collectives, and societal systems. It demonstrates that a link between assumptions about control over risk and responsibility remains persistent and shows how responsibility for preventing harm has been increasingly distributed among various actors as changes in the technology and design of services and in the harms being addressed have affected control over the risk. This chapter argues that future thinking in EU media law needs to focus on how the institutional architecture can support effective cooperative responsibility, including addressing imbalances of power and information asymmetries.

This chapter traces how contemporary media pass through different regulatory zones and examines the different rules that govern each zone and how the zones relate to each other. It briefly charts the recent and ongoing evolution of the media, from analogue roots to generative AI futures, and notes the fundamental rights and regulatory ramifications of technology-driven innovations. It draws an analytical line from these conceptualisations through to the contemporary threats to media freedom that regulation urgently needs to address.

This chapter examines the pervasive issue of media capture within the European Union (EU) and its detrimental effects on media freedom and democratic governance. Using a theoretical model of media capture consisting of four critical components (control over national media regulators, manipulation of public service media, misuse of state funds for media control, and the consolidation of private media ownership by government-aligned businesses), it maps past and ongoing EU interventions in those areas. Despite the EU’s legal frameworks such as the European Media Freedom Act and the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, significant gaps remain in enforcement and oversight, limiting the Union’s ability to address these challenges. The analysis highlights the EU’s struggles to effectively intervene in safeguarding media independence due to constrained competences, weak enforcement tools, and reliance on politicised national regulatory authorities. The chapter underscores the need for enhanced regulatory mechanisms and stricter monitoring to counteract media capture and uphold democratic principles in EU Member States.

The European Union’s (EU) media policy balances harmonising regulations across Member States with national autonomy. Traditional audiovisual media is heavily regulated, but digital media formats and user-generated content add complexity to policy frameworks. Public service broadcasters (PSBs), guided by the Amsterdam Protocol, have aimed to promote pluralism and public interest while grappling with market distortions due to public funding. Many PSBs have evolved into public service media (PSM), with websites and presence on third-party platforms. Member States face challenges defining PSB mandates amid technological changes and commercial competition, exacerbated by advertising revenue shifting to global platforms. Additionally, ‘information disorders’ such as disinformation and hate speech have pressured the EU to find ways to safeguard a healthy media environment. Media capture, where governments control propaganda outlets, further threatens democratic communication. The European Media Freedom Act recognises PSM as crucial to democracy, mandating editorial independence and proper funding. Yet implementation and governance lie with Member States, leading to varied outcomes. This chapter offers case studies from Finland and Hungary to illustrate how the lack of specific guidance for PSM challenges the information resilience of national media landscapes. The chapter argues for EU-wide guidelines to foster national and EU-wide resilience.