RSS feed about the BBC

I've only just noticed that the BBC Press Office has an RSS feed for news about the BBC itself. It contains links to notices on appointments and other useful things.

The current items are rather confusing, because many of the 'appointments' are either (a) posts which have been re-named as part of Mark Thompson's re-shuffle; or (b) posts which replace existing posts. The proliferation of titles - Controller, Heads, Directors - makes the appointments difficult to understand without an organigram.

Of the nine appointments, only one - Peter Salmon, Chief Creative Officer (BBC Vision) - is an external hire. He comes from Channel 4 after several years at the BBC. Five had had experience working with ITV or Channel 4. Three - mostly in MC&A - have come from outside the media (Coca-Cola, Bass Brewers). None are BBC 'lifers', but all have some experience at the BBC - from four to around twenty years', to be more precise. Those involved with content - as opposed to marketing or HR - seem to have been around the BBC for longer.

Are public service broadcasters important? Will they be so in the future?

Five years ago, a number of contributors to OpenDemocracy - largely drawn from the UK - discussed the merits of public service broadcasting (PSB), compared explicitly against the market and implicitly against some ideal broadcasting service which delivers just the right amount of merit goods. The key questions were normative - ought PSB exist, and ought it to be funded in the way it currently is funded - but relied on empirical judgements about the extent to which PSBs fulfilled the normative goals set out for them: variously, providing diverse and meritorious programming which is capable of contributing to pluralistic democratic debate within the broader public sphere.

The most pungent contribution came from David Elstein, who argued that the market was capable of fulfilling these normative functions. The two strands of his argument were (1) that during the period of moderate competition in the UK media market in the second half of the twentieth century, private suppliers - ITV - made programming of high quality, including high quality news and current affairs, and (2) that, in any event, the end of spectrum scarcity means that diversity and pluralism will be secured even better in the future by new private entrants. Consequently, the normative justification for public service broadcasting - or at least, publicly funded broadcasting - is no longer operative, and public funding for the BBC should dry up.

I do not share Elstein's optimism about the capacity of private suppliers to supply large amounts of merit programming; but I think that even if his argument were correct, the policy prescriptions he seeks would not be forthcoming. Politicians - perhaps because they are avid consumers of one of the most obvious types of merit programming, news and current affairs - have not been willing to tolerate gradual elimination of PSBs. Even in those countries where the public service broadcasters have most manifestly failed their remit, in Italy and Spain, governments have been willing to refinance these broadcasters, at some considerable cost to their Treasuries, at times of difficulty (1993 and 2006 respectively).

It might be thought instead that funding for PSB is contingent on continued high audience share and high audience reach, with PSBs who fall below a certain percentage share condemned to ghettoisation and reduced funding streams. If this is the case, the technological developments noted by Elstein may represent a problem for PSBs. If each additional entrant into the television market reduces PSB share and/or reach by a certain amount (even if the marginal amount is constantly decreasing), will the PSB still retain sufficient share or reach to command a claim to public finances? Or, if new means of communication reduce the relevance of television as part of overall media consumption, will PSBs claim a large enough share of this broader media market to lobby sucessfully for continued public funding?

If, as I believe, the continued rude health of PSB depends more on these more prosaic and measurable features of the media market than on notions of quality and the provision of merit goods, what are the current facts regarding PSB audience share?

First, when people want news and information, they turn to television. From the Eurobarometer surveys, we know that 70% of people in the EU15 watch television news every day. That's more than the 41% of people who read a newspaper every day. When people actively look for information on politics in the EU, for example, television is cited as the most commonly used source by 65% - 73% of respondents; newspapers and radio still edge out the internet, and the gap remains several percentage points.

We also know that, when they turn to television, people still turn to public service broadcasters. The European Audiovisual Observatory publishes data on the audience share of television channels across Europe. Of the 19 PSBs in Old Europe (broadcasters in the EU15, plus Norway and Switzerland, plus linguistic PSBs in Belgium and Switzerland), nine have increased audience share over the period 1995 - 2004; ten have decreased audience share. This is no artefact of the competitiveness of the media market in these countries - increased audience share was found in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, and Norway, which all have high take-up rates of digital terrestrial and satellite television.

Moreover, PSBs are not losing audience share dramatically. Only four PSBs - Radio e televisao de Portugal (RTP), RTÉ, Sveriges Television and Osterreichische Rundfunk - have lost more than one percentage point audience share a year, and only RTP has slipped below the symbolically important 25% figure.

Finally, some PSBs have built up major web portals. The BBC News website is the eighth most visited in the world, and the only one in the top ten to provide content (the other is Microsoft). Italian PSB Rai has been less successful: it lags behind other domestic telecoms groups (Telecom Italia; Wind; Kataweb; RCS) but stills beats its commercial competitor Mediaset. Consequently, should internet media consumption be rivalrous with traditional television and or radio consumption - and evidence on news consumption in the United States suggests that it is not - then PSBs can be well placed to meet the threat.

In conclusion - for those considering it, it's still worth writing a thesis on public service broadcasting, and still worth reading one. PSBs retain significant audience share and are not losing it fast enough for obituaries to be taken out of deep freeze.

RTVE Administrative Council and election coverage

This article detailing election coverage in the Catalonian elections is interesting for two reasons. First, it's another reminder to Britons that the debates about the distribution of party political broadcasts is astonishingly conflict-free - or at least appears that way. Second, it's the first time I've seen reference to the (national) RTVE board of administration, and, significantly, references to members include party affiliations. If Carmen Caffarel is to succeed in her ambition that the new Council of RTVE should not be "a platform for confrontation between political forces", this latter will need to change.

Must satire be parti pris?

Luttazzi: non mi vuole neanche la Rai di sinistra - La Stampa Web: Daniele Luttazzi, persona non grata at Rai ever since Silvio Berlusconi's 'editto bulgaro', has this to say about the politics of satire:

«The satirist must be interested in who is in power: who is there is there. The right argues that the satirists make left-wing satire: no, the satirist is of the left, and makes satire from his own point of view. There can't exist neutral satire - it would be trying to please everyone, satisfying no-one... The argument, however, becomes vulgar and insulting when someone like me is accused of giving the left an easy ride. Last September... I did fifteen minutes on the Unipol scandal at the Festa dell'Unita [left-wing gathering, note].. the kids applauded, the middle-aged froze up".

So, satire is always from a particular point of view, but it may not favour or benefit that point of view or its exponents. Is the commitment to impartiality held by public service broadcasters compatible with viewpoints of the left or right with are neutral with respect to their consequences for the left or the right, or must public service broadcasters adopt the 'view from nowhere', to quote from Tom Nagel? And if so, does that mean that PSBs can't do satire - or that if they do so, they must do so without fully understanding what they do?

Technorati Tags: luttazzi, satire, bias, impartiality

Rai - filo-governativo and disrespectful in one smooth package

RaiNews24 reports that four left-wing politicians (Giorgio Merlo, Margherita; Gennaro Migliore, RC; Loredana de Petris, Verdi; Esterino Montino, DS) have complained to Rai about the broadcast of the 'Prodi rap' during a news bulletin. The centre-right, in the shape of Altero Matteoli, accuses the left of stamping out 'liberty of expression', which presumably Rai enjoys.

At the same time, however, the centre-right - now in the shape of Paolo Bonaiuti - criticises Rai for being servile in its treatment of the Government's recently passed budget.

It would be a wonderful innovation if we could have evidence-based criticism considering Rai's coverage of politics over the medium-term - after all, why else does Agcom collect such voluminous data on politicians' screen time?

Technorati Tags: bias, monitoring, content+analysis, rai

Update on Italian politics

A friend recently asked me to give the five-minute version of what's going on in Italian politics. Here's my version, given in best Economist style:

"Dear Anna,

There are two major issues facing the Prodi government at the moment: the budget for 2006/7, and the government's relations with Telecom Italia.

The budget decree was agreed in the Council of Ministers on Sunday and signed that same day by the President of the Republic. It contains cuts ('savings') and tax-increases amounting to €33 billion, which according to the Treasury will reduce the budget deficit to 2.8% of GNP compared to 4.8 for the year 2006. The final figure represents a victory for Romano Prodi and finance minister Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa against the left-wing of the governing coalition, who had requested a change of closer to €26bn with fewer cuts. The manouevre was made possible by an unexpectedly good tax take earlier in the year (good fortune also shared by France and Germany), and by a judicious selection of cuts and tax increases. The government has been able to keep its promise to reduce employer and employee taxes, but employers' associations are upset about changes to the severance pay fund, from which the government will take €5bn more over the next year.

Attention now shifts to the Parliament. The Prodi government has only a wafer-thin majority in the Senate. It is likely that the government will have to make the Finance law a vote of confidence. One senator, Sergio de Gregorio, elected as part of the left-wing coalition only to defect shortly after, has threatened not to vote for the government, which would leave the government with a majority of one, perilously close to relying one the life senators, whose support would probably be enough to pass the budget - but also enough to show the government incapable of a majority in one of the chambers, thereby constraining it to resign. The government will have to whip carefully in order to ensure not only that it retains its majority, but that members of the leftist parties do not introduce amendments which will grossly distort the bill.

The decision on the finance bill will be a welcome relief for Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who has had a torrid week explaining his government's policy towards Telecom Italia. Prodi's consigliere Angelo Rovati, the author of a botched plan to rescue Telecom Italia's mobile arm from foreign ownership, has taken the fall for what was seen by many in Europe's financial press as excessive government interferene in a private company. Nevertheless, Prodi must ensure that he is a more collegial Prime Minister than he was President of the European Commission, where he produced a secret draft for a constitutional treaty unseen by fellow Commissioners".

Technorati Tags: majority, budget, Prodi, Penelope, telecom+italia

Notes on Polish journalism

Curry, J.L. (1990). Poland's Journalists: Professionalism and politics.