European Parliament: Resolution on European Media and Audiovisual Plan

IRIS 2021-10:1/11

Francisco Javier Cabrera Blázquez

European Audiovisual Observatory

On 20 October 2021, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on Europe’s Media in the Digital Decade: an Action Plan to Support Recovery and Transformation. The Action Plan (see IRIS 2021-2/3) focuses on three areas of activity and 10 concrete actions, with the overall aim of helping the media sector recover from the crisis. This will be achieved by facilitating and broadening access to financial support, transforming by stimulating investments to embrace the twin digital and green transitions, while ensuring the sector's future resilience, and empowering European citizens and companies.

In its Resolution, the European Parliament pushes for substantial support for the media sector from the EU and member states in order to help the sector recover from the pandemic and transform itself to keep pace with the changing business models of the digital age. It also calls for legislative and non-legislative tools to protect media organisations. Moreover, Parliament wants a permanent EU news media fund in order to safeguard the financial and political independence of European journalists and journalism, and stresses that EU recovery funds earmarked for the media must support media organisations in those EU countries where media face particular financial and political pressure or rule-of-law concerns. MEPs also point to the dangers of the “disproportionate economic impact” and “predatory behaviour” of global online platforms that dominate data and advertising markets and which have the power to remove legal content provided by media services. Additionally, they demand the urgent adoption of the Digital Services Act package, which can provide a level playing field for the EU media and ensure equal access to data and rules on online political advertising.

In order to support the EU’s audiovisual industry, MEPs demand the EU to develop special tax policies as well as fiscal and financial incentives to boost production and investments, the setting up of EU insurance guarantees for audiovisual co-productions and rules to ensure catalogues of on-demand services contain a share of European works of at least 30%.