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.

Protectionism vs. Non-Interventionism: Two Approaches to Media Diversity in Commercial Terrestrial Television Regulation

“…In media markets relying strongly on advertising, commercial enterprises can be expected to cater sufficiently only to audiences that are important to advertisers (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2008). Groups of less or no commercial value will not be addressed (Donders and Raats 2015;McManus 1994). The production of less commercially attractive programming is associated with "opportunity costs," as more lucrative alternatives must be waived due to the constant of scarce resources.…”

Impacto de los recortes en las televisiones autonómicas en la industria audiovisual: los casos de Euskadi y Cataluña (2007-2014)

“…En el terreno de la descentralización, además de la cuota de producción fuera de Londres del 10% ("out of London quota"), se han desarrollado estrategias hacía otras regiones inglesas (Noonan, 2012) u otras naciones del Reino Unido (Hibberd, 2008). Otros medios públicos europeos también han desarrollado estrategias para apoyar al sector independiente, como el media fund holandés que replicaba la inversión en proyectos que realizaba la televisión pública (Donders & Raats, 2015).…”

Is the Role of Public Service Media in Estonia Changing?

“…Users face new challenges in finding news in the oversaturated media landscape, as well as navigating between the growing number of news sources (Swart et al 2017). The role of public media in analysing facts and filtering content in the information overload of network society has become a central question of media policy (Donders, Raats 2015;Goodwin 2017).…”