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Public Service Broadcasting and Digital Television in the UK: The BBC, Channel 4, and the Politics of Positioning

Georgina Born

Emmanuel College and Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge

Abstract

This paper compares the digital television strategies of the BBC and C4. The two have different funding bases, remits and audience profiles, and together highlight the challenges faced by PSBs in the digital, convergent climate. The paper presents the results of a study in mid-late 2001 on how they are adapting. The BBC plans to use the multichannel digital environment to enhance its free-to-air services. The challenge marks a new phase in the BBC’s complex war of positioning, in which it must be both sufficiently popular to remain a mass broadcaster and to legitimise the licence fee, and yet offer distinctive and innovative programming of the kind under-supplied by its competitors. Channel 4, by contrast, sees as its priority the need to maintain its funding in an era of declining advertising revenues; it has used digital potential for commercial expansion and increased populism, opening up a gap with its remit for innovation and diversity. The result is a serious question as to whether the Channel 4 model of PSB-regulated commercialism can survive the transition to digital. Comparative attention is given to how the respective strategies enhance cultural pluralism and the conditions for cultural citizenship.

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Coming Out – Public Broadcasters and Social Responsibility

Jo Bardoel, Kees Brants, Lodewijk van Noort

The Amsterdam School of Communications Research, University of Amsterdam.

Abstract

In a competitive media environment public broadcasters rethink and often rediscover their social responsibility towards society. On the basis of a content analysis of policy documents of public broadcasting organizations in the Netherlands over a 30-year period, we trace how they have defined their role in relation to the public interest, to providing diverse, reliable and quality information, and to minorities in a changing society. Moreover, we seek to demonstrate how traditional broadcasters come to terms with changed attitudes and media policies of subsequent governments.

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Turn on Diversity

Heikki Hellman, Minna Aslama, Tuomo Sauri

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the findings of the study “Finnish Television Programme Supply
2000”, commissioned by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications. First, we construct program structure profiles for the main national channels, the public service TV1 and TV2 as well as the commercial MTV3 and Nelonen for the years 1997-2000,  by examining, e.g., distribution and origin of program types, prime time, seasonal and weekly variation. Second, we measure and describe diversity by channel and broadcaster. Finally, we draw an overview of the recent changes and contrast them to findings of some other European studies. With our empirical evidence, we hope to contribute to the discussion of the role of public broadcasting in the new digital era of increasing competition and convergence.

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Money and Meanings

Tamar Ashuri

London School of Economics, London.

Abstract

Last summer the  documentary series ‘End Game in Ireland’ was broadcast on BBC2. The  viewers had been promised  the full story of the  Good Friday Agreement, as told by  those who made it happen.  No one was told that the film had been co-funded by three different public service networks (BBC, PBS and RTE). Nor was it made known that  an  independent production company had been  hired by those three networks to produce the film, so that, for example, while the  film was being viewed in Britain, the American and the Irish commissioning editors were cooking up their own national versions of ‘The Full Story’, using the same footage  that had been produced by the independent production company. The final outcome will thus be a documentary series, titled  ‘Endgame in Ireland’, existing in three different versions, American, English, and Irish, where in each version the conflict in Northern Ireland is being presented differently.

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RIPE conference coming

This year RIPE conference is held in London, UK.