ABSTRACT
In the European tradition of public service broadcasting, making money has always been emphatically rejected as the object of television and radio programming. Instead, the aims and purposes of these media were conceived by the overriding consideration that broadcasting is a ‘servant of culture’, in the words of John Reith, the illustrious and influential first Director General of the BBC. For Reith, the major task in the BBC’s cultural mission was the ‘systematic and sustained endeavour to re-create, to build up knowledge, experience and character, perhaps even in the face of obstacles’ (quoted in Briggs 1985:54). It is striking-and rather prophetic-that Reith should have made mention of ‘obstacles’. He clearly expected difficulties in pursuing the endeavourdifficulties which ultimately resided in resistances on the part of the object of that endeavour: the audience. In fact, a history of European public service broadcasting in general could be written from this perspective: a narrative in which the resistance of the audience against its objectification in the name of highminded, national cultural ideals drives the story forward. Part III is a contribution to the construction of that ongoing story. The recent crisis of European public service broadcasting in the face of increasing transnational commercialization of television is a key episode in the dénouement of the story.
