Pro-active media accountability? — an Austrian perspective

Th e article analyzes media accountability instruments in Austria and how far they are designed to allow transparent, pro-active and participative operations. Firstly, the authors will have a look at traditional media accountability instruments and examine how they act, what their defi cits are and to what extent they include audiences. Secondly, web-based accountability processes will be ana- lyzed, focusing on their participation possibilities and on the problem of reactivity. Th irdly, the state of the art and the chances of online transparency of news production will be discussed. Next to a practice check, the implementation of such tools will be discussed. Th e authors argue that transparency on all these levels is an important, yet undervalued principle to media accountability. Th e analysis will be completed with recent data from the Austrian part of a comparative study on media accountability done in the context of the EU-funded RP7-framework research project MediaAcT.