ABSTRACT
So far, I have unproblematically described the operation of the television institution in commercial terms. But of course the institutional arrangement of television broadcasting is not always based upon commercial principles. While the United States is the home of the most full-fledged commercial system, the nation-states of Western Europe are the historical base of a range of public service broadcasting systems, embodied by stateregulated and collectively-financed organizations such as the British BBC, the Italian RAI, or the Dutch ‘pillarized’ system (see e.g. Kuhn 1985). The two systems are both formally built upon the communicative framework of broadcasting, but they differ fundamentally as regards assumptions about the cultural and political purpose of broadcasting, and this difference is inextricably linked to a marked distinction in how each system prefers to define the institution-audience relationship. In other words, although all broadcasting institutions must by definition imagine the audience as object to be conquered, the meaning, intent or import of the conquest is not construed in the same way in the two systems.
