From Public Service Media Organisations to De-centralised Public Service for the Media Sector: A Comparative Analysis of Opportunities and Disadvantages

Abstract

Ideas on plurality and competition in public broadcasting delivery have re-surfaced in discussions on the future of public surface media (PSM) on regular occasions in different geographical settings since the 1980s. This article analyses several of the debates on distributed public service, critically evaluating whether governments across Europe would indeed be “better off” should they choose a distributed and de-centralised model of public service media. The article, firstly, investigates which arguments have been made in order to make the case for a distributed PSM model. On the basis of these insights, a typology of different forms of distributed public service delivery is then developed. Setting out from this typology, policy plans and actual practices of de-centralised PSM are being analysed. Findings in the four case studies (the United Kingdom, Flanders, the Netherlands, and New Zealand) are based on a combination of secondary literature, a qualitative document analysis, desk research and semi-structured expert interviews. The article concludes that distributed public service is as much a normative idea as the centralised public broadcasting project, that distributed public service as a policy solution lacks a clearly defined policy problem and, moreover, that there is, given the variety of media systems, not one distributed model that would fit all.

KEYWORDS:

• public service broadcasting
• public service media
• distributed public broadcasting
• Public Service Publisher
• media policy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the research centre CAMRI at Westminster University and in particular Dr Maria Michalis for hosting a study visit in London at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, which allowed one of the authors to conduct a number of expert interviews. The authors would like to thank the interviewees for sharing their insights.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Not to be confused with “pluralism,” a concept less related to economic competition, which crystallised in the choice of the German Länder to create ZDF in 1963, as second public broadcaster, next to ARD, a member-driven organisation of regional public broadcasters (Donders 2012).

2. Peter Jay takes a more economic view to public service broadcasting himself. He makes a somewhat crude distinction between economists and non-economists in his contribution to the edited collection The Peacock Committee and UK Broadcasting Policy, edited by Tom O'Malley and Janet Jones, acknowledging that a distinction between more leftist and right-wing approaches might be suitable as well (Jay 2009). Essentially, his distinction refers to those that take economic concepts and assumptions of classical economy as the starting point for media policy and those that set out from “fuzzy” social-democratic conceptions of society.

3. Including Dominic Young (Consultant, previously News Corporation), Prof. David Levy (Director Reuters Institute for Journalism, Oxford University), Magnus Brooke (Director Policy & Regulatory Affairs, ITV), David Elstein (Consultant), Jon McVay (Director, PACT), Martin Scott (Head of Regulatory Affairs, Five), Sophie Jones (Head of Corporate Relations, Channel 4), Benjamin King (Head of Public Policy, News International), Angela Mills Wade (Executive Director, EPC), Guy Black (Executive Director, Telegraph Media Group), Prof. Richard Collins (Open University London) and Prof. Sylvia Harvey (University of Westminster). Function descriptions apply to the period of conducting the interviews; interviews were conducted by Karen Donders within the framework of a study visit at CAMRI, University of Westminster.

4. Initially, however, radio services were catered for by telecommunication companies (including Marconi) with the aim to boost the sales of radio transmitters. The British Broadcasting Company was founded in 1922 and turned into the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a public organisation, in 1927.

5. Note that the press already receives a lot of indirect subsidies (especially for the printing of newspapers and the distribution thereof) in a number of European Member States (see Picone and Pauwels 2013).

6. Van Cuilenburg even denies that there is a market failure case for public service broadcasting in a digital age: “Does the Dutch media market fail from the perspective of media monopoly or merit goods? Is there a reason for a lot of government interference in the media market? Without hesitation, the answer to that question is negative: the Dutch media market does not fail at all, and in that sense market failure is no longer a suitable argument to defend government interference” (translated citation, Van Cuilenburg 2006, 183).

7. Up until 2014, an additional maximum of 2.52 million was granted from the Minister of Culture (the so-called “cultural contribution”). Since 2014, the contributions were scrapped and replaced by the investment obligations for distributors.

8. The broadcasting market in New Zealand is characterised by a considerable number of smaller players operating within a restricted market, structural financial shortages, and a lack of clear media regulation. For example, contrary to the European Union and Australia, all sport games can be carried within premium subscriptions. Hence, Sky in New Zealand is highly dominant, and other players such as TVNZ do not have enough financial leeway to bid on sports contracts (Scherer and Sam 2012).

Additional information

Karen Donders (corresponding author) is Professor Policy Analysis and European Media Markets in the Communication Sciences Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium.

Tim Raats is Assistant Professor Cultural Industries in the Communication Sciences Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium.