Lecture 8 - Public Media

"The difference between commercial broadcasting and public broadcasting is the difference between consumers and citizens" Nigel Milan

In this week's lecture, we talked about last week's topic's sibling: Public Media.

To start off we talked about a few points and properties of this specific kind of media. Its mission is to serve or engage a public, and it is, contrary to popular belief, not necessarily a non-profit kind of business. Public Media is either funded by tax money (e.g. Australia) or a viewer fee (e.g. Switzerland).
It serves a vital role in a democratic society and is in support of public and democratic processes. It should have a public value. This can mean a lot of things; one possible feature is that there are special provisions for minorities.


Example: Switzerland has 4 official languages (German, French, Italian and Rhaeto-Romanic). The German, French and Italian speaking parts of the country are relatively big and therefore have their own media in their respective languages. However, as the old Rhaeto-Romanic language is only spoken in very few mountain valleys and only by just a few hundred people, commercial media would never cater for them since it is completely unprofitable. But the Swiss public broadcasting company (Schweizer Fernsehen, SF) actually produces and airs programs and news in Rhaeto-Romanic, to ensure that minorities are treated fairly.

We talked about how the ABC initially was funded as a "nation-building project" and that this is actually one of the core functions of Public Media, amongst others:

-Nation Building
-National Heritage
-National Identity
-National Conversations

We briefly touched on the subject of commercialisation of the Public Media and went on to talk about News, as this is probably one of the more prominent features of the Public Media. News in P.M. are usually perceived as being "broad-sheet style", important, of interest and well considered. One important property has to be political independence. While this seems to be the case in Australia, there are examples of how it can go wrong.

Example: Italy's prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has incredibly strong influence over the media in Italy; he practically controls the media landscape. The American organisation Freedom House issues a "Freedom of the Press Global Survey" each year - and Italy, despite being a modern, Western European democracy, was rated "partly free" because public media is pretty much in Berlusconi's control.

To wrap up the lecture, we shortly talked about what the challenges facing Public Media were.