HOW RELEVANT IS THE IDEA OF PUBLIC BROADCASTING IN RELATION TOCONTEMPORARY TELEVISION?
...f the digital era, the corporation still pledges to compete against the high quality programming of the commercial market by pursuing the same objectives that the BBC began with. As “Extending choice in the digital age” a publication done by the BBC, recites: “To counter the incentives of purely commercial funding, licence fee funding will allow to provide the accurate and balanced news and current affairs programmes which are key building blocks of modern citizenship; to give all homes access to the best of British culture and entertainment; and to help build knowledge and open up opportunities through educational and factual programmes.” Essentially public broadcasting today in the western world can be defined as those television corporations that are primarily funded by the state and/or licence fees, and whose stations have the objective to provide programming suitable for a national audience with a certain cultural identity, while minding the ethnic composition of the demographic. In these terms public broadcasting may seem like a simple concept, yet there are many different ways of interpreting the value which it must have within a society and various different systems and regulations which have been adopted in relation to the matter across the globe. A nation’s history, economics, politics, geography and culture strongly determine how that nation organizes its public broadcasting service. In the USA for example public broadcasting is a concept that has trouble surviving in a wide spread competitive free-enterprise market of commercial broadcasting. The permissive nature of the American broadcasting system allows space for pragmatism, materialism and aggressive competitiveness. Few government restrictions and regulations tutor what is broadcasted, allowing almost complete freedom of programming to commercial broadcasters. Therefore the majority of programmes have the main objective of obtaining high viewing rates and popularity in order to raise profits from advertising. The product of such a system is an enormous variety of channels which feeds itself off viewers’ preferences and rather low subscription rates. In such a competitive commercial situation it is inevitable that a non-profit service like public broadcasting has little importance over audiences and struggles to offer quality programming due to the lack of funding. In fact American public broadcasting’s evolution through time has been nothing but a struggle for survival because it’s role has been so hard to define. One of the biggest problems that public broadcasting has faced in the past fifty years is being able to obtain air time, seeing as that rich commercial broadcasters could simply buy out the poorly funded educational broadcasters, precursors of public broadcasting. In many instances, especially during the birth of the PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) unions of commercial broadcasters have worked against public broadcasting in fear of the centralization Viktor Pesenti W03021040 of authority. Today PBS doesn’t even produce its own programmes, instead it provides a distribution service for programmes produced by major PTV stations, local productions, foreign or international productions or independent producers. Americans follow this capitalistic system because they find it to be more democratic given the fact that just about anyone can broadcast just about anything they want and it is the amount of people that watch it that determine their success, this mechanism also seems to be more suitable for the melting pot character that the USA have . Yet although this system has produced programmes which are famous all around the world, the cultural quality of programming is often sacrificed in order to appeal to the masses and furthermore an exaggerated amount of air time is dedicated to advertisements. Broadcasting has a very strong political and social power due to its capability to communicate rapidly and incisively across vast territories. In recent history, but even still today, many different governments have assumed complete control over broadcasting, using it as a weapon of propaganda. Extremist totalitarian regimes through out eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America have had complete control over any broadcasting done within their region, thus imposing nationalistic ideals to viewers by not providing them freedom of choice. In these countries the government had the monopoly of all operations regarding television and radio (aside from any rebel broadcasts that where clearly illegal) hence funding was not a problem because it derived directly from taxes. This eliminated any commercial competition whilst creating one centralized authoritarian power that dominated. The result was a programming scheme which strongly enforced a national identity and eliminated any freedom of broadcast aside from what the state offered. Essentially western and central Europe can be considered the region where there is most balance between public and private broadcasting. Countries like Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom all live dualistic realities which include strong paternal corporations of public broadcasting as well as private commercial broadcasters that have been invading the air waves throughout the past decade. Although Europe is an ever more politically united and technologically advanced continent as history unravels, European nations are obliged to maintain their regional identities which enhance their cultural richness and create interesting diversities. At the same time private commercial networks are sprouting all over Europe and providing hig...