Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest

Comunicação e Sociedade, 2016

In an age marked by multiple distribution platforms of content, oligopoly of media sectors and transnational nature of cultural industries it is not any longer enough for the Public Broadcast to inform, educate and entertain with independence and technical, ethics and aesthetics quality, as proposed by the British BBC in 1927. Public Radio and Television need to find a new social function that distinguishes them from the private media and justify state investment in communication. A rising number of scholars point out that this new function is the creation and strengthening of a broad media public sphere able to guarantee citizens a space for debate on common issues, a process that encourages citizen participation and transformative action. This article examines the role of Public Broadcasting in the twenty-first century according to the media theories influenced by the thought of the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, whose concept of the public sphere has become c...

VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture, 2019

2009

This thesis is a study of public service broadcasting facing a digital media system. Its focus is on internet services since the mid-1990s. With a comparative design, the thesis discusses how public service broadcasters seized opportunities and handled challenges related to the internet, and how national and supranational regulatory regimes and policy actors coped with public service broadcasting venturing online. I concentrate on publicly owned former monopolists, assessing four such institutions in three states: the British BBC, Norway’s NRK, and the ARD and the ZDF in Germany. I argue that traditional practices of media policy do not suddenly change in the digital era. Rather, settings for public service are to a large extent still defined within well-established frameworks, and dependent on the conditioned legacies of each state’s political culture. Discussing similarities and differences in the development of the institutions’ internet activities, and their corresponding national regulations, I find the development characterized by ad hoc solutions. This also applies to the EU policy regime, built on a competition law-logic. With the latter regime, I argue, we are incapable of grasping the autonomous democratic functions of public broadcasters’ online services. Moreover, the regime pro- vides insufficient space to play out national differences. The thesis goes on to explore the democratic functions of public broadcasting institutions in an online environment. With a founding in normative public sphere theory, I contend that there is a potential in online communication not only for dialogue, but also for dissemination. Both communicative forms should be utilized by public service actors in ways that consistently counter processes of enclosure and balkanization in the public sphere. On this basis, I develop a scheme for public service media online. By scrutinizing marginal parts of the cases’ internet activities I lastly explore this scheme, and the limits of public broadcasters’ publicly funded online offers. Thereby, I aim to revitalize discussions about the functions of public service as a media policy tool in the digital era. In my view, public service media remain relevant. The thesis substantiates why, and outlines how.

Irish Communications Review, 1992

From Public Service Broadcasting To Public Service …, 2007

2018

Public service broadcasting (PSB) has a long and noble tradition in the UK. We invented it and the BBC has been its finest exponent, admired and respected throughout the world. This is the case whether in the breadth and integrity of its news reporting or, at the other end of the spectrum, the brilliance of its entertainment offering. This highly successful model is now under existential threat as never before. The threats come externally from market forces, from commercial adversaries chipping away to advance their own agendas and from the political class with their concerns about bias. The BBC also faces the challenges common to all mature organisations: that of calcification and inertia consequent upon size and success. These attacks have not only had a real effect at the BBC, but also the wider industry with UK PSB content spend reduced by almost £1billion in the space of a decade. 35 Both management and government need to recognise that content must be re-prioritised. If this can't be done the industry must act to found a new organisation whose sole priority is the support of content. It is widely agreed that British public service broadcasting (a term which principally encompasses the BBC and Channel 4) is and has been both culturally and commercially good for UK plc. Despite this consensus there is regular debate and criticism, not only of the BBC, but also recently a serious suggestion that Channel 4 is a national asset that should be sold off to the highest bidder. The main focus of attack is generally value for money or of regulatory issues borne out of perceived concerns of political bias or, in Channel 4's case, a simple desire by the government to realise value. Issues around regulation, which is a costly necessity of PSB, seem to attract more debate than the more important and fundamental question of the actual purpose of PSB. 104 basic policy solutions fall in and out of favour. Few politicians are media policy specialists; rather, they are usually generalists preferring particular types of policy solutions over others. Stable political compromises in overall policy continue to be important-such as the Nordic welfare state contexts where there is broad consensus for state intervention and support for universal solutions to reduce inequalities in society. 160 As political debates over public broadcasting across Europe demonstrate, public broadcasting may be seen as both cause and indication of, as well as a solution to, problems in the social and political sphere, whether these refer to issues of diversity or pluralism or a more profound loss of trust in media and public institutions.

The proliferation of global niche media with the uptake of digital and broadband technologies has long prompted predictions of public broadcasting's demise. However, despite the ongoing insecurity of public funding, national broadcasters appear to have won a stay of execution, finding new purpose in the digital era. This research explores the proposition that rather than facing death in the user-pays narrowcast marketplace, as many predicted in the 1980s and 1990s, public television broadcasters are undergoing a reinvention, identifying new ways of delivering public value in the era of interactive, ondemand media. Now repositioning as media content companies, the trusted brands of public service broadcasters acquire a heightened premium in the unstable online environment where un-credited, nonaccountable content abounds; where economies of scale are fuelling corporate conglomeration (such as News Corp's recent acquisition of My Space) transferring more power and influence to fewer hands; and where media access is increasingly conditional. Drawing on recent literature and policy documents and grounded in a series of industry interviews taken from across six case studies, this paper explores the social implications of this reinvention of public broadcasting in the digital age.

This article presents a summary of the most important standpoints of the economic debate about public service broadcasting as a public good, and its provision in both the analogue and digital age of broadcasting. Due to frequent technological developments, which heavily influence the broadcasting sector, this debate, initiated in 1958 by American economist Paul A. Samuelson, has continued up to the present day. It also reflects on the concept of PSM as a public good in a globalizing, multi-platform, user-generated content infused media landscape. Finally, it ponders the future developments of PSM as a public good in the digital era of broadcasting.

Public Service Broadcasting as Subjects and Objects of Media Study :A Philosophical Examination, 2023

Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) has long been a subject of study in the media landscape and communication disciplines. This paper aims to summarize PSB research by engaging with philosophical and conceptual issues that consider PSB as both objects and subjects of media study. Why does PSB need to be studied in a dual capacity and explore the implications of this approach? PSB is a subject tool when media characteristics are studied in grounded theory in practice and when studied by the complexities considered as objects inherent in media research. Therefore, I aim to suggest various theoretical frameworks for studying PSB to emphasize the importance of balancing grounded theory with an appreciation for the dynamics of PSB in media research. (PDF) Public Service Broadcasting as Subjects and Objects of Media Study: A Philosophical Examination. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380857305_Public_Service_Broadcasting_as_Subjects_and_Objects_of_Media_StudyA_Philosophical_Examination [accessed Nov 17 2024].