Download paper: Maintaining relevance
SBS has been the subject of some heated debates about funding models, commercial activity, perceived 'populism' and the continued relevance of publicly funded media. These debates and challenges are not unique to SBS or to Australia. Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) in many contexts is facing a 'crisis of legitimacy' as it struggles to retain audiences in the face of new technologies, rapidly globalising media, and the rejection of traditional patterns of media usage, particularly among younger generations. Debates around commercialism and the role of PSB in the market also continue in Europe, despite the plurality of models and funding arrangements. Public broadcasters have faced accusations of irrelevance. This is particularly the case in relation to cultural diversity, as old models of representation, universalism of access and nation-building are unable to keep pace with increasingly complex and diversifying societies.
There is a tendency in debates around PSB to conflate traditional public broadcasting with the public sphere and all its assumed virtues of strong citizenship, public debate and informed commentary addressing a ‘citizenry’, and to contrast this with bland commercial offerings and individualist consumerism (Barnett, 2003). The public service and market models are based, as least in terms of the funding and business models, on different views of the audience, but how different are the content, schedule and services provided under the two frameworks?
Views of the role of public service broadcasting can be grouped into three main camps:
• Market failure – characterised as ‘liberalism with a human face’, allowing for a place for ‘unpopular’ services and the notion that not all niches are profitable;
• Quality and diversity of voices – in which the perceived public interest is served by content of a range or calibre higher than that produced for profit;
• Public value and democratic principles – the vision of a desired public culture, greater participation in public life and genuine cultural pluralism
Cultural diversity and increasingly complex relationships between citizens and national public life have the potential, along with other forms of fragmentation amongst contemporary audiences, to pose one of biggest challenges to public broadcasting in all these models. If not managed effectively and engaged with creatively, claims to ‘public value’, legitimacy and relevance, as well as claims on public funds, are undermined.
