Focus Group Country Reports

Deliverable 3.3 encompasses eight country reports providing empirical findings of focus group discussions that shed light on civil society actors’ evaluations on the state of media and communication ethics in Austria, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Slovenia, and Switzerland. The reports constitute a landmark for the DIACOMET project (Fostering Capacity Building for Civic Resilience and Participation: Dialogic Communication Ethics and Accountability) in general, and the Work Package 3 focusing on “actors’ perspective to communication ethics” in particular. Rather than concluding the field work and empirical analysis that started in early months of 2024, the reports should serve as basis for elaboration in the form of comparative analysis and policy papers.

Total of 87 focus group discussions were held across Austria, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Switzerland. Over 500 participants took part in these discussions, reflecting on the ethics of public communication and the media environment in their respective countries. The empirical findings are presented in eight separate national reports.

The research setting highlighting the voices of “non-institutional media actors” was developed collaboratively with research teams under the leadership of Tampere University. A shared framework for the study was established around the notion of attention economy. In doing so, it was assumed that the pursuit and commodification of attention have become key logic to contemporary public communication, shaping the dynamics of information dissemination and participation in digital spaces. As public attention is becoming a scarce and unequally distributed resource, the distribution of attention is an ethical issue in itself. In this Work Package the scholarly interest was set on social actors with varying degrees of attention capital. Four analytical categories were established to valorise different positions with regard to public attention: “Attention Magnets”, Attention Workers”, “Attention Hackers”, and “Attention-Deprived”.

All the way from the early implementation of the study, each research team took responsibility for launching a research design to fit best to their national contexts. As shown in the country reports the recruitment of participants to the focus group discussions proved to be difficult and laborious. This alone, gave to the research teams insights into the structural, cultural, political, and ethical problems in public communication. Rather being identical for all actors and in all countries, a great deal of contextual differences were revealed across actor categories and countries.

AUSTRIA

ESTONIA

FINLAND

HUNGARY

LITHUANIA

SLOVENIA

SWITZERLAND

THE NETHERLANDS