Evaluating the Validity of the EMFA in Supporting Media Freedom and Pluralism on Platforms
Welcome!
This website provides an overview of a master's thesis project being completed by Natalie Jenkins as part of an MSc in Digital Policy at the School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin. Here you will find information about the study's purpose and how to get involved.
The thesis, Evaluating the Validity of the EMFA in Supporting Media Freedom and Pluralism on Platforms, examines the European Union’s (EU) recent media regulation known as the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which aims to support media freedom and pluralism. While the EMFA is a broad piece of regulation, this study focuses specifically on its relevance in the digital environment, where digital platforms such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, and X play a significant role in how news is produced, distributed, and consumed.
However, the EMFA’s understanding of these issues may not fully reflect the challenge journalists face in their day-to-day work, or the deeper structural challenges associated with news that circulates within these platforms.
This study therefore seeks to evaluate the EMFA’s validity in supporting media freedom and pluralism online by comparing the regulation's understanding of “platformized” news with the challenges identified by journalists themselves. In doing so, the study aims to assess whether the EMFA is addressing the problems that matter the most in practice.
Research
Overview
Significance of EMFA
The EMFA represents a historic shift in media regulation, moving from national fragmentation toward a harmonized European standard. The study assesses whether these new standards effectively address the imbalances between Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and media entities.
Ethos and
Methodology
A substantial body of literature has examined the challenges that digital platforms pose to journalism. Similar research has also assessed the EMFA's capacity to address them. However, these have largely been done according to legal analyses and less so from how journalists themselves understand and navigate these issues.
This study seeks to fill that gap by evaluating the EMFA's capacity to support media pluralism and freedom online, comparing how the regulation frames "platformized" news with the challenges journalists identify from experience. To do so, it poses three research questions:
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How does the EMFA conceptualize the main threats to media pluralism and freedom in a platformized news environment, and through what mechanisms does it attempt to address these?
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What challenges do journalists in the European Union and Canada identify as most significant in a platformized news environment?
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What do the similarities and differences between the EMFA’s problem framing and solutions and journalist’s lived experiences reveal about the regulation’s capacity to support media pluralism and freedom online?
The study answers these questions through a qualitative, two-pronged approach grounded in a critical theoretical framework drawing on platform power and critical political economy, alongside an interpretivist approach to understanding the meanings journalists attach to their own experiences.
The first prong is a thematic analysis of the EMFA, which identifies how the regulation conceptualizes media and journalism, the challenges it attributes to platforms, and the logic behind its proposed mechanisms.
The second is a series of semi-structured interviews with journalists based in the EU and Canada, which surface the most significant challenges they face in a platformized news environment. Although Canada falls outside the EMFA's scope, the problems posed by platform power are not confined by borders. Canadian news outlets have faced particular harm when it comes to navigating the asymmetric power that platforms possess.
Together, the two analyses provide a basis for comparing the problems the EMFA is designed to address with the challenges journalists describe in practice. The aim is to assess whether the regulation has the capacity to meaningfully support media freedom and pluralism on platforms, and to draw out recommendations for how it might better do so.