PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING

Public Service Broadcasting

Public Service Broadcasting

Introduction

Public service broadcasters around the world are having to fight for their survival. Whether it be progressive cuts in public funding, constitutional restrictions imposed on national broadcasters, progressive deregulation of the commercial sector or direct interference by governments in output or management, the fundamental issues remain similar: as the media environment becomes more fragmented and more competitive, and as convergent technologies blur the lines between broadcasting and other media platforms, the arguments against a publicly subsidised presence become more vocal and therefore make a single publicly funded institution more difficult to sustain(Tracey, 1998, pp.89-109). 

The PSB after the Second World WAR

The past decade has seen a widespread assault on the importance, even legitimacy, of public service broadcasting in the major industrialized democracies. From the close of the Second World War until the late 1970s, public broadcasting organizations had stood in powerful, resilient opposition to commercial systems, and they dominated the cultural geology of the societies from which they had been formed(Jarvik, c1997, pp.45-52). (The only major exception to this pattern was in the United States, where public broadcasting had been much slower to develop and had far fewer resources.) Political problems faced even the strongest of these institutions, but as an intellectual, cultural, and creative construction, the edifice of public service broadcasting seemed permanent and inherently stable(Aufderheide, Clark, 2008, pp.78-81).

By the closing years of the 1980s that edifice was widely seen to be crumbling. Public broadcasting institutions and the notions of cultural and political discourse that undergird them seemed everywhere to be under serious attack(Eisenberg, 1998, pp. 15-21).

This unprecedented crisis occurred because public service broadcasting was being challenged from three different directions. Ideologically, the New Right was questioning the very idea of public culture, and the New Left was calling the national broadcasters elitist, statist, unaccountable, divisive, and exclusive. Economically, the financial basis was being eroded by diminishing support from public funds, increasing disparities in income between public and commercially funded broadcasters, escalating costs, and questions of equity.

The Ethos of UK PSB

The establishment of the idea of broadcasting being for the public good was not the arbitrary outcome but was a natural consequence of the technical developments that made the first radio broadcasts possible. The limited spectrum of frequencies upon which radio broadcast was available and questions on how such a system might be financed ushered in the need for government intervention in the development of the emerging medium(Tracey, 1998, pp.89-109). The way in which this practical necessity for regulation developed into a rich and respected creative tradition has a huge amount to do with the government committees that have met regularly since 1923 to shape and guide the direction the PSB provision should take. The first such committee, which met in 1923, under the chairmanship of Sir Frederick Sykes, was charged with defining what the purpose of broadcasting might be. Some had even at this early stage dismissed the utility of a medium sending messages out to unidentified recipients. Perhaps the most central pronouncement of the Sykes committee was that the available broadcasting frequencies should belong, in some part, to ...