ABSTRACT
Chapters 3 to 8 offered the reader concise political histories of the six public service broadcasters (PSBs) studied here. These political histories were not comprehensive: instead, they dedicated special attention to the key concerns of my argument, namely the recruitment of programme-workers, the development of written rules governing content and the broadcasters' relationship with politics. The reader will hopefully be able to perceive how my argument applies to each of the countries studied in virtue of the facts presented in the country specific chapters. At the same time, however, the need to present information in rough chronological order, and to present background information concerning the respective broadcasters, has obscured the argument somewhat. Here, I present the argument taking the information presented in Chapters 3 to 8 as read, though the argument can be followed without having read these chapters. This chapter is also an opportunity to fulfil the promissory note issued in Chapter 2. In that chapter, I developed a statistical model of PSB independence which showed that the independence of the broadcaster depended on the degree of legal independence it enjoyed and the size of the market for news. I argued there that the size of the market for news was an adequate proxy of the degree of professionalization of the news corps, and that this would have effects on the independence of the broadcaster through the possibilities for the development of written rules concerning output. Having spent much of the preceding chapters describing the state of the market for news, I can now make that argument more concrete. I therefore start with an overview of the various markets for journalism and their degree of professionalization (1), before discussing the stock of journalists (2) and managers (3), before, in the final section, discussing the development (4.1) and deployment (4.2) of rules governing content. A summary of the main points can be found in Table 9.1.
