Polls on CBC's independence

No sooner do I complete my June paper (a 15,000 word research design for the thesis), than I find a new data point on perceptions of political independence by the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.

The first poll is by Ipsos-Reid, and asks

Thinking specifically about the CBC...which of the following two statements is closer to your own opinion?

Statement	May. 04	Aug. 02
The Prime Minister’s power to appoint the CBC President and Board of Directors gives the government too much influence over the nature and content of programs broadcast on the CBC	45	46
The CBC is independent and it doesn’t matter who appoints the Board of Directors and President	52	50
Don't know/no opinion	3	5

The poll is poorly worded, since the options are not mutually exhaustive. One might think CBC is independent, but it still matters who appoints the Board of Directors. (It reminds me of the get-out-the-vote campaign in West Wing, Season 4, where will changes one kid's sign from "It doesn't matter who you vote for, make sure you vote", to "No matter who you vote for, make sure you vote").

A similar question was asked in 1999 by a different polling group (Compass); at 35%, the percentage replying "independent" was much lower.

The governance of public broadcasters

Most of the time, I look at public service broadcasters (PSBs) as exquisitely political creatures.

Most of the time, I think that's the right perspective.

Recently, however, I've been looking at PSBs as corporations, with all the associated paraphernalia of corporate governance. The results have been interesting.

PSBs can be divided into two types: dual board, or single-board.

German PSBs have dual boards: a massive, supervisory board (aufsichtsrat), composed of upwards of twenty members representing civil society, and a much smaller executive board, led by a generalintendant. Something like France Télévisions, by contrast, has a single board of five members, with a President/CEO.

Until now, I've viewed the institutional choice between single- or dual-board structures as a political one: where politicians choose a dual-board structure, they do so because they believe this structure provides a buffer against political pressure, and because they want to insulate the PSB from such pressure.

What if these choices aren't made with conscious objectives in mind? What if, instead, politicians just follow examples drawn from other fields?

In corporate governance generally, we can draw a line between three groups (Hopt, Klaus J., "The German Two-Tier Board", in Hopt, et al, Comparative Corporate Governance (Oxford, OUP):

• single board countries: UK, USA, Ireland, former British colonies, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece
• dual-board countries: Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Scandinavia;
• mixed countries: Eastern Europe, France, Belgium

If the corporate governance of PSBs reflects national practice rather than political views about the desirability of independence, then we should expect single-board countries to have single-board PSBs, dual-board countries to have dual-board PSBs, and mixed countries to plump for either. What's the evidence like? Of the twenty-nine PSBs for which I have access to the legislation, here's the breakdown:

• single board PSBs (11): USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, Spain [post-reform], Portugal, Greece(?), France, Bulgaria
• dual-board PSBs (18): Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain [pre-reform], Italy, UK, Ireland,

The fit is not bad. Three dual-board countries don't fit: Italy, UK and Ireland; no single-board countries don't fit. There are some countries whose systems of corporate governance I don't know enough about to decide whether their placement is accurate (Israel, Japan, Chile).

Some tentative conclusions:

• PSB governance may be strongly influenced by more general corporate practice;
  
• those countries which could have opted for either system chose dual boards;
• the choice of governance for the BBC and RTÉ was contrary to corporate practice;
• It nevertheless seems to have been a good choice, with both broadcasters enjoying a better reputation than TVNZ, ABC, or (especially) the CPB in the USA, at least in this author's judgement;

Therefore, the dual-board model may be preferable for public broadcasters, squaring the circle of accountability and independence.

Public attitudes towards Rai

In my thesis, I claimed that "there is no available polling evidence on whether Italians believe Rai to be independent of the government". That's not quite right. There's no public polling data, but I've hit the jackpot through trawling through the catalogue of the Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale: I've got Rai's own internal data.

Granted, it's from 1986. But still, it's tremendously useful. I don't know why the Fondazione Gramsci and the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi have copies, but I'm very glad they do.

They key data - on spontaneous and prompted responses to judgements on Rai - are as one might expect:

• Rai is "an instrument in the hands of the leading class" [unprompted response]: 9.3%, a marked increase over the past ten years
• Rai is "an organisation controlled by a few political parties" [prompted category]: 41.9%, five points down from ten years before;
• Rai is "an organisation of the government" [prompted category]: 24.6%, five points down from ten years before;
• Rai is "an organisation controlled by all the political parties": 20.4%, two and a half points up from 1979, or before the birth of RaiTre
• Rai is "an organisation outside of politics": 4.1%, a marginal increase over ten years previously

So, Italian citizens judged [quite correctly in my view], that Rai was a political organisation; that it was controlled by an agreement between some parties, and not per se by the government or the entire political class. Let's take "outside of politics" as being equivalent to "independent from politics". If that's the case, then the 4.1% of Italians who judge Rai to be politically independent is much less than the 22% of Britons who judge the BBC to be politically independent.

More on the independence of French journalists

Even better data from this 2003 CSA / Marianne poll on l'image des journalistes: 23% of French people think the media are independent of "political power", Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, Jean-Pierre Pernaud, and Claire Chazal are cited as particularly independent. Cross-tabs are included!

Journalistic independence in France

Via a long chain of googling too tedious to repeat, I find a wonderful poll on public attitudes towards French journalists. My interest was drawn to the question on public perceptions of journalistic independence. Two questions are asked, one on independence from political parties, and one on independence from economic concerns. Here's the time-series on independence from political parties. Only one third of French people believe journalists are independent.

	Rappel enquête SOFRES								Déc 2001
	nov 1993	déc 1994	déc 1995	déc 1996	déc 1997	déc 1998	déc 1999	déc 2000
From political parties and the powerful
Yes, they're independent No, they're not independent Wouldn't say	32 56 12	33 55 12	28 62 10	30 59 11	27 64 9	32 59 9	28 60 12	32 59 9	33 55 12

Unfortunately, the question wasn't asked for different channels, so there's no direct way of telling whether journalists from France Televisions are judged less independent, say, than journalists from TF1. (One could run cross-tabs on main channel watched and perceptions of independence, but the link would be tenuous).

In general, the news isn't good for France Televisions: whilst in 1989, 43% of respondents cited either France 2 or France 3 as their most trusted source of television information, compared to 33% who said the same of TF1, the gap has now swung in TF1's favour, with 41% citing it as their most trusted source, compared to the joint total of 35% for France 2 and 3, with the latter gaining impressively.

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.