In a world of globalising media and growing international regulation, the Nordic countries seem to be at a crossroads of different tendencies in media policies. Nordic countries (Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and to an extent, Iceland) have been described as media welfare states (Syvertsen et al. 2014), characterised by both a democratic corporatist media system (Hallin and Mancini 2004) and social democratic welfare state ideology (Esping-Andersen 1990). Nordic media systems have been analysed as inherently similar and distinctive from other media systems (e.g. Brüggemann et al. 2015), their specificity based on four pillars: universally available communication services, institutionalised editorial freedom, extensive cultural policy for the media, as well as preference for consensual policy-making and compromises between key stakeholders. (Syvertsen et al. 2014.) Taken that Nordic countries have shared socio-political histories, including the development of liberal democracies with press freedom, such analyses are not surprising. The concept of media welfare state has turned out to be a useful tool for understanding the development of Nordic media systems.
However, the contradiction between the idealised Nordic model and reality has been increasing in the past years. The transition from welfare states to competition states has been ongoing since the 1970s, and especially the Nordic social democracy is in deep crisis. None of the Nordic countries is a perfect example of the suggested model and next to similarities, the media systems also have many market and policy based differences (Hilson 2008; Nord 2008; Engelstad et al. 2017). National path-dependence in the field of freedom of speech doctrine and media regulation creates even greater variation in the age of digital disruption. The ideas of media welfare state should thus be seen as dynamic, and in need of periodic re-examination (Syvertsen et al. 2014). Especially in the present era of digital media and global influences, it is relevant to ask, whether the Nordic media model still correlates with Nordic media realities.
This paper assesses Nordic media policies and regulation on direct and indirect press subsidies, the self-regulation and practices of journalism, and the regulation of online media from the perspective of national path-dependence and influence of supranational decision-making. For example, for many years VAT rates for the digital subscriptions of newspapers were subjected to the standard EU level for digital services, prohibiting member states from applying the same VAT rates to physical and digital newspapers. In 2018 the Council finally agreed to allow reduced VAT rates for digital publications, with the restriction that only member states that applied reduced rates to physical publications prior to 2017 can allow for reduced rates. Furthermore, policy-making is increasingly taking the form of EU acts being adapted to national contexts in path-dependent form. While due consideration tends to be given to other Nordic countries’ way of transposing EU regulation, the solutions tend to be more oriented towards catering for the needs of national industries and following the regulations previously in place. While the Nordic media model still forms a basis, we argue that the implementations are increasingly different.