ABSTRACT
In their embrace of neo-liberalism and globalization, governments around the world are increasingly reluctant to invest in sectors that have long been considered vital components of the cultural and political life of the nation-state. National public service broadcasting has been one such site of economic retrenchment. Established during an era of spectrum scarcity, public service broadcasting (PSB), in the Western European tradition, was based on the assumption that the airwaves were natural resources that should be managed to the overall benefit of society. Consequently, fostering a national cultural community through universal access to information and entertainment programming, protected from commercial motivations, became a common organizing principle for PSB mandates throughout the countries and colonies of Europe. That was more than 80 years ago. Today’s new media environment of expanded channel capacity and multi-platform delivery has revitalized debates about the continued relevance and legitimacy of public investment in broadcasting in an age of spectrum surplus. Pessimism about the future of PSB is not limited to state actors and multi-
national media corporations who advocate marketization. Media studies scholars, too, are questioning the fundamental principles of contemporary public service broadcasting. Given the parallels between academic debates and those of media professionals, executives and policy makers – as evidenced in the recent spirited exchange between Elizabeth Jacka (2003) and Nicholas Garnham (2003) in a special issue of Television & New Media – the time has come to complicate our assumptions about the public-private broadcasting divide, particularly in light of technological convergence and global media flows. Jacka aptly contests the customary academic depiction of PSB as the ultimate arbiter of a mediated Habermasian public sphere. Her critique contrasts the modernist tendency to associate PSB with rationalism, civil society and the paternalist state against the emergence of a new media ecology that encourages decentralized identity and community formations. Herein, the expansion of digital windows that facilitate do-it-yourself (DIY) cultural politics are seen to resolve the ‘market failure’ argument that has long served to justify the existence of PSB, leading Jacka to conclude: ‘I must confess, I
cannot see the future for publicly funded media; I am not sure it has one’ (2003: 188). Garnham refutes Jacka’s bifurcation of the commercial and non-commercial
media spheres, and asserts that public and private broadcasting not only coexist within national broadcasting structures but, moreover, many PSB networks now rely on advertising for a portion of their overall operating budgets. Consequently, the future of PSB need not continually be framed within either/or scenarios. However, most troubling for Garnham (2003) is how ‘popular’ programming is equated with commercial media in a manner that presupposes a liberating, radical democratic potential juxtaposed to a caricature of public broadcasting audiences as coerced by programming that is ‘unpopular, elitist, and a killjoy’ (2003: 199). Democracy is a notoriously difficult concept to measure in terms of media
content and audience reception, particularly within non-authoritarian media regimes. Consequently, this chapter continues the productive dialogue initiated by Jacka and Garnham but explores the contemporary moment and possible future of PSB within much narrower parameters. Rather than revisiting theoretical conceptualizations of the relationship between media structures and public sphere politics, the following sections examine the challenges facing PSB institutions to fulfil their mandate obligations while simultaneously restructuring their production and distribution strategies to meet the demands of a global, post-network media environment. In accord with Jacka’s (2003: 188) assertion that public broadcasting must be considered through ‘situated microanalyses’, as opposed to generalized arguments about its ‘natural superiority’, I focus on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). As a PSB network that relies on both government funding and advertising revenue, the CBC epitomizes Garnham’s depiction of the tensions between the commercial and non-commercial goals that characterize many PSB institutions around the world. As I argue later, globalization and convergence may actually intensify, rather
than resolve, the ‘market failure’ justification for PSB. Operating within a small-market nation that is situated next to the world’s largest cultural superpower, the CBC has been at the forefront of developing global co-production partnerships with other public broadcasters to avoid ‘niche marginalization’ and maintain its capacity as a ‘full portfolio’ programming broadcaster (Bardoel and d’Haenens 2008: 344). Despite the breadth of academic analyses of PSB, few works examine the actual programmes that are expected to distinguish it from its private network counterparts. This is particularly true of ‘popular’ television drama. Consequently, I briefly compare two international co-productions to show how different institutional formations, public and commercial, can either restrict or augment the ways in which the same story can be told. The discussion concludes by examining the potential of such international co-productions, based on a shared public institutional ethos, to bolster the transnational profile of PSB as well as supplement the escalating need for national content across multiple media platforms.
