FORMER prime minister Iveta Radičová has left Bratislava to work as a visiting professor at Oxford University for one trimester. She will be part of an international team analysing relations between politics and the media and also politics and democracy. The team will analyse the state of the media in Europe as well as beyond. Radičová and the team will also analyse the digitalisation of society, since this has brought significant changes in how information is processed, the SITA newswire wrote.
“In terms of … the crisis of democracy and the trustworthiness of institutions, economic influences in the sphere of politics as well as the media are strong,” said Radičová, as quoted by SITA, adding that experts are also examining conflicts of interest and the scope of objectivity in media.
Radičová believes that in cases like the resignation of the director-general of the BBC (an institution which was once seen as a standard for measuring objectivity in the public media) and after the scandal surrounding media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the questions about ethics in the media and the possibility of non-political media supervision, are very relevant. She pointed out that in the UK a 2,000-page analysis of the state of media was published, and that a similar analysis was also published in Spain.
“My participation in the project will also be to focus on Slovakia in relation to other countries,” said Radičová.
