In the 1970's, before the start of satellite television, audiences as high as 23 million were recorded for some of the top programmes on the main TV channel BBC1. Recently the soap opera East Enders has recorded figures only one third of that. Domestic subscriptions to British Sky Broadcasting are now approaching 8 million, which means something like 25 million individuals have access to a great deal more choice.
Competitive or complementary?
Similarly, the BBC's radio channels now compete for listeners with nearly 300 commercial stations across the country. But that poses a problem. Should a public broadcaster be competitive or complementary to services being offered by commercial stations? Here in the Netherlands, Deputy Minister for Culture and the Media Medy van der Laan doesn't think the public broadcasters should be competing with the commercial stations. Her views are shared by some others in the Dutch parliament. The media spokesman for the social-liberal party D66 said this week that the public broadcaster 3FM was too much like a commercial station during the day, and needed to have more "news, opinion and education" in its programmes.
The broader picture
Across the rest of Europe, public broadcasting is being threatened in a variety of ways, and for a variety of reasons. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) is so concerned that it believes the time has come to "sound the alarm" over the future of the European model of public service radio and television. It says public broadcasting is under attack in almost every country of the region. "We are extremely concerned over these developments. There appears to be a growing number of attacks on the fabric of public service broadcasting," said EFJ Chairman Arne König. "These attacks are not acceptable not just because they undermine employment rights and working conditions, but also because they undermine the quality and structure of public broadcasting".
Service
I think the use of the word "service" by Arne König is significant, because I believe it is crucial to define what sets the public broadcasters apart from commercial competitors. When I started working at the BBC in the 1970's, the term "public service broadcaster" was in general use. Somewhere along the line, and I must confess I don't know exactly when or why, the word "service" was dropped, and in Europe now we have "public broadcasters". To many people, that simply means a broadcaster funded by public money, with no reference to its function.
International broadcasters, including Radio Netherlands, generally still use the word "service" in their announcements, and I like to think we have a clear idea of what we're here for. You can read our mission statement here. Of course, we don't have commercial competitors in our own country trying to reach the same audience. But we keep a close watch on what the other international broadcasters do, and we play a full and active role in the organisations, meetings and conferences for our industry.
Quality as well as quantity
Here on the website, I often remind colleagues that simply counting page views, which seems to be the way most websites gauge their "success", does not give us the whole picture. We should also know who exactly looked at the page, what they thought of it, how it influenced their thinking on a particular subject, and so on. I call that qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, feedback. The same should apply to radio and TV programmes produced by the public broadcasters. It's surely better to positively influence a smaller number of people than to leave a larger number of people completely unmoved. There's no doubt in my mind which is the better service.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Radio Netherlands.