Creating a Television Culture in Post-Conflict Kosovo: from a Balanced Public Forum to Politicization and Commercialization
Creating a Television Culture in Post-Conflict Kosovo: from a Balanced Public Forum to Politicization and Commercialization

Summary/Abstract: This article aims to discuss and analyze television in Kosovo together with its socio-cultural and political dimensions, including its constituent elements, structure, functioning and influence. The establishment of independent media was as much the result of external intervention (UN) as it was of determination within society, media makers and private capital in a dual system of public and private broadcasters. However, the optimism which created here a television culture along European model, in order to fulfill its proper function in a new democracy and serve the public, is long gone; there is now a continuous fading of societal trust that television is a balanced public forum. Television in this country faces serious problems: the politicization and under financing of public broadcasters, concentration of ownership and non- transparent way of financing private broadcasters - problems that challenge editorial independence, constrain freedom of expression or restrict the possibility of choice. The article also examines the transformation of television from a cultural forum under socialism, through a potentially balanced public forum under democracy, to its new dimension in recent years,entertainment. In order to explain this argument, the article takes a theoretical and methodological multi-disciplinary approach, aiming to fill the gap in the research of television studies.

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