In Lithuania, media content is monitored by the institution of the Inspector of Journalist Ethics and the Radio and Television Commission (the RTC). Both institutions perform these functions according to the law. The Lithuanian Journalism Centre (an ngo) has different projects, some of which are related to media content and performance monitoring as well as policy drafting.
In principle, media-performance-related discussions are fairly often found in the public discourse. Debates also take place in the Internet media (all leading news portals have special sections on media), and these activities are coordinated by media scholars, public intellectuals and media professionals. However, an organized process of self-criticism in the mass media is quite rare, except for a few projects (one radio program and several Internet projects) that offer programs resembling the logic of “media reviewing the media”. These are fairly small projects and are treated as a niche media. Academic media studies are also accessible to the public, but their results are often based on small-scale studies, thus there is a need to supplement these studies with long-range media monitoring. generally, the absence of thorough, regular, independent and publicly accessible media monitoring data is considered to be a serious shortcoming in the media.
