A bridge too far? Analysis of the European Commission’s new developments on media policy and media freedoms through the concept of soft regulation

This article tries to examine the latest European Commission (EC) policy developments in the media sector through the new concept of soft regulation. Much criticized for its media policy approaches, the EC seems to try to rebuild media freedom and media pluralism protection foundations at the EU level with several new initiatives based on soft regulation. This article analyses these soft-regulatory media policy actions to answer the following questions: Have soft-regulatory measures been a good option to improve media pluralism policy at the EU level? Are there better mechanisms that EU can employ to assist Member States in promoting media pluralism? The aim of the research is to see whether these new EC debates and softregulatory initiatives have made a real change in the traditional way that EC has been dealing with audio-visual matters or whether it is only repeating old answers to old questions.