Television in a digital age: What role for public service broadcasting?

Economic Policy

Volumn , Issue 41, 2005, Pages 112-157

  Hargreaves Heap, Shaun P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMPETITION (ECONOMICS); MEDIA INDUSTRY; TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE; TELECOMMUNICATION;

EID: 14044257064     PISSN: 02664658     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0327.2005.00134.x     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. These PSB interventions are designed to change the character of what is produced in the television market and I focus on them in this article. There are other types of public policy intcrvcntions in this industry, like controls with respect to cross media ownership and vertical integration, which are more simply designed to promote competition and thus encourage whatever is produced to be done so efficiently (see Motta and Polo, 1997, for a recent discussion of these public policy interventions and Brown and Cave, 1992, for a general survey).
2. This is a version of a more general point that is sometimes overlooked in public policy discussion. When public provision is designed to offset market failure, some care must be taken not to create market-like incentives within those public organizations, Which encourage it to behave like a private company. The introduction of such incentives is an understandable response to the desire to make public organizations efficient but if they also have the effect of encouraging the organization to mimic rather than compensate for the market failure, then they actually undermine the origina case for intervention.
3. Naturally when the extent or size of the option set is valued independently of actual choices, then a measure of diversity that ignored actual tastes could be appropriate. However, in this case it becomes important to measure the offerings of all channels and not just those that achieve a threshold level like that of the Nielsen year-end summaries.
4. I set aside the obvious difficulty that the measure of broadcast time ignores possible changes in the quality of what is broadcast. Some attempt to gauge what has happened to quality would be possible if there were measures of total expenditure on each programme type.
5. In the discussion of PSB, a distinction is often made between our needs as 'consumers' and those that we have as 'citizens' and while the analysis of market failure is deemed appropriate for the role of PSB in relation to our needs as 'consumers', the case for PSB in relation to our needs as 'citizens' is different. Citizens need to live in a well-informed society that has the cultural resources to reflect critically and collectively on its own practices and institution (c.g. see Ofcom, 2004, for a recent statement and Tracey, 1998, for a general survey of the part played by this distinction in policy discussions). That people should have these citizenly concerns and that television matters in relation to these concerns is not implausible. The case for some kind of public intervention to further these objectives does not, however, follow automatically. To make such a connection it is necessary to show how individual action based on these concerns fails to deliver the appropriate citizenly outcomes. In other words, there has to be an analysis of Why individual choice fails (i.e. an analysis of market failure).
6. What is also revealing in these ligures is the way that the market for news has become segmented. The advent of more news broadcasters has led, just as might be expected on theoretical grounds, to product differentiation. In the early evening news slot, there was very little difference in this respect in 1975 and 1980 between the BBC and ITV and likewise in the late evening one. All offered a similar mix of news stories. But by the 1990s the early and late evening ITV news and C5 had become noticeably more 'tabloid' than the average, BBC remained close to or moved away from tabloid while C4 was markedly less 'tabloid' than the average. In short, diversiy developed in the 1990s.
7. The more direct approach of looking at whether someone who, say, never normally watches a gardening programming is persuaded to watch one is not going to be possible because of the absence of data on individual viewing habits.
8. It will be evident that expenditure shares for PS broadcasters may have to be adjusted to remove the influence of any other PSB objective in this test.
9. I set on one side for reasons of space the tricky question in political economy as to how to motivate governments to use such indicators.
10. Elstein et al. (2004) argue against this view citing the facts from the UK that the ITV franchises used to have well-respected PSB departments before the introduction of competitive bidding for franchises and that the lauded documentary on the 'Death of Yugoslavia' was made by an independent producer. Actually neither example tells against the point made here. The first reinforces the worry over what happens when a commercial broadcaster truly becomes commercial and the second overlooks the key fact, which is that this documentary series was commissioned by the BBC.
11. Thus in terms of the newly established tier 2 and 3 regulations in the UK, tier 2 would be more simply and narrowly defined and there would be no tier 3 for commercial broadcasters.
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