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Abstract
When, from the 1980s onwards, market-driven politics won widespread recognition in liberal capitalist Western democracies, processes of broadcasting marketization in the UK and Germany were decisively determined by two inquiries: the Committee on the Financing of the BBC, chaired by Alan Peacock, and the Commission for the Development of the Technical Communications System (KtK), chaired by Eberhard Witte. This article compares how both inquiries, driven by their chairmen, affected domestic communications policy-making. The research is situated within a critical political economy framework and it is argued that critiques from scholars within cultural policy depicting Alan Peacock and the inquiry he chaired as driven by a narrowly economistic understanding of broadcasting are partly unjustified. As the comparison with the radical restructuring pursued by Eberhard Witte brings to the fore, Peacock, in fact followed a moderate reform agenda of gradual change, aiming to preserve some core cultural elements within public service broadcasting.
Notes
1. With respect to funding, in 2011 ARD and ZDF recorded a total income of €6,141 million and €1,998 million, respectively, while the BBC’s total income was £4,993 million.
2. Four relevant historic processes are to be distinguished in this regard: the development and evolution of the media; the extension of corporate reach; commodification; and, last, the changing role of the state in regulation and intervention (Golding and Murdock Citation2005, p. 64).
3. After chairing the Committee on the Financing of the BBC Peacock would become Chairman of the Scottish Arts Council (1986–1992) and a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain.
4. In 1985, Peacock became its first Executive Director.
5. Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism is distinct from German ordoliberalism in that the latter is more driven by socioliberal concerns in distributing wealth and income.
6. Münchner Kreis was founded in 1974. The institute was chaired by Witte from 1976 to 1997.
7. There are two key German PSB organizations: ARD and ZDF. Both broadcast a national programme. The ARD’s collaborative programme is made up of contributions from the nine Länder-based ARD corporations. Apart from the collaborative ARD programme, the nine ARD corporations also broadcast fully regional television programmes.
8. The key event which changed the CDU’s party position from apathy towards actively striving for competition and thus ending the media policy consensus between the two mass parties was Christian Schwarz-Schilling’s speech ‘Ist das öffentlich-rechtliche System zu retten?’, presented during a conference at the Evangelical Academy, Tutzingen, 26–28 November 1976. Schwarz-Schilling served as Minister for Post and Telecommunications (1982–1992) under the Kohl administration. For his excellent and detailed accout of telecommunications liberalization in Germany see Schwarz-Schilling (Citation1999).
9. Beyond that, the Witte Report led in the short term to the installation of large-scale cable networks across the country. By 1986, about 2.3 million households had been connected to copper cable, making Germany the country with the largest cable infrastructure worldwide (Humphreys Citation1994, p. 270).
10. The Länder usually feature governments dominated by either the social democrats (SPD) or the conservatives (CDU/CSU), making it difficult to reach cross-party agreement over a common proceeding in broadcasting policy.