Media policymaking and multistakeholder involvement: Matching audience, stakeholder and government expectations for public service media in Flanders

Abstract

This contribution analyzes government, opposition, public service media, media stakeholders and audience views regarding the role and remit of public service media in the run-up to and their impact on the renewal of the 2021–2025 management contract between public broadcaster VRT and the Flemish Government. Results show that, despite a shifting media ecosystem and academics and government pushing for fundamental reform, audiences and most stakeholders’ views stick to a centralized, broad and multiplatform public media institution. Moreover, they expect public service media to solve ever more media and societal issues (e.g. fake news) within a shrinking budget. The case illustrates how mature, evidence-based multistakeholderism pushes public service media to meet an increasingly challenging set of expectations, hampers both public service media and government to build a well-balanced, long-term vision of public service media's role and, instead, pushes them to pursue their own agenda. Lastly, an evidence-based process also suffers from issues of validity of the data.

Conformity of public policy and citizens’ attitudes towards the public service media

“…In some democracies, PSM accountability is adequately embodied by supervisory bodies (at “arm's length” or fully independent), audience councils, and regular surveys (Benson et al 2017) that can provide reliable information on citizens’ perceptions of PSM content, PSM's service to the public interest and democracy. Accountability is also organized in the framework of competition when the market can guarantee diverse and high-quality content, when government intervention should decrease so as not to distort the market, and when the role of PSM should be more transparently defined and monitored (Van den Bulck and Raats 2022). For example, when investigating the accountability communication of PSM organizations in five European countries (BBC, RTE, ARD, France TV, and RTVE), it became clear that these organizations are interested in the transparency of their activities, but not all show good availability and updating of information about themselves (Lopez-Golan et al 2018).…”