The Blind Spot Reconsidered: Historical Legacies and European Entertainment Monitoring

Abstract

European institutions examine entertainment through several distinct lenses: cultural production, market participation, legal compliance and strategic communication. A gap between those forms of observation is not evidence that entertainment escapes institutional scrutiny altogether. This paper reconsiders a proposed historical genealogy of that gap by comparing four public outputs and revisiting US public diplomacy, the Hollywood blacklist, Finnish debates about self-censorship and the protection of cultural diversity. The historical sources establish different relationships between culture and political authority, but do not trace their transmission into particular EU monitoring decisions. Two contrary findings are quite decisive: NATO StratCom COE analysed Russian television entertainment in 2017, and the EEAS definition of foreign information manipulation and interference does not exclude fictional content or transparently funded production. The surviving question concerns the connection between systems that observe different objects, rather than a categorical exclusion of culture. Title-level provenance can connect information about production and circulation, but it cannot substitute for evidence of territorial access, viewing, manipulative coordination or legal responsibility. The paper offers a historically informed comparison of institutional visibility and identifies the evidence needed for a causal account.