signals to society

MEDIA | FOLLOW UP

Public service broadcasting remains a sticky topic, unwanted in the free for all of globalisation, yearned for by critics trying desperately to maintain standards in a fast shrinking industry.

Time then for a look back towards a UNESCO conference from 2004 where an academic calls for public service broadcasting to remain one of the last bastions of independence and diversity. Why 2004? Not much has happened since then, at least not on the UNESCO site.

Comments from Professor John Horgan remain relevant: "in an era in which media production is being pushed inexorably towards the entertainment end of the information/entertainment spectrum, public service journalism, particularly in broadcasting, remains as an institutional and structural counterweight to this trend, and should be defended and strengthened where possible. It is, after all, one of the supreme ironies of our age that the de-regulation of electronic media, driven not only by the profit motive but by a reaction – sometimes justified – against the allegedly monochrome and statist nature of PSB, should have generated a media landscape in which media homogeneity is now to be seen primarily in the commercial sector, and in which the public sector has, at its best, the capacity to become one of the last bastions of independence and diversity."

Triangulating a Tense Debate: UNESCO-CI