eutsche Welle,
being part of the
German public
broadcasting
system, has always
been interested in
supporting this
great idea of public service media
in other countries.
There have been many attempts
in the past to transform state
broadcasters into public service
media. But although there have
been many ambitions and many
initiatives, before this study we
didn’t really know if these efforts
had succeeded or not, which is
quite amazing.
Two years ago, if you asked
experts in the field who had run
these projects, they were not always
able to tell you what had worked
and what had not. They were able
to tell you about the individual
projects they had been involved in,
but there was no overview of what
had been achieved and what had
not, what could work and what
could not.
It was the German Ministry for
Economic Cooperation and
Development that said: If you want
to continually invest money in
these transformation processes, do
you have proof that it will work?
And, to be honest, we didn’t have
that proof.
Because there are alternatives.
The alternative would be not to
invest in these former mouthpieces
of the government and to invest in
independent initiatives like
community media or private media.
So we selected a number of cases
that we thought would be
interesting and give us some
learning about this question.
How do you define whether
something is of service to the
public in a given country?
That’s one of the main mistakes. In
the past there has been this idea
that we could just export our great
Western European ideas to the rest
of the world, and of course it didn’t
work. There are different cultures
and different backgrounds and
different ideas of the media and
different traditions of the media.
We have chosen a more modest
approach, if you will. Not to take
the BBC or the German models of
public service media and build it
somewhere else, but rather to look
and see if certain functions are
realised in other media systems and
whether some of these functions
can be strengthened.
We developed this idea of
having two general functions that
are overarching. The first function
we called the “creation of public
sphere”, which has elements that
you associate with good quality
journalism – people being
informed, people being able to use
forums of participation. Journalists
are free for investigating, agenda
setting, in depth research. We
certainly don’t expect all of these
different dimensions to be realised,
but we look at what is there and
what is not. Because you can find a
consensus internationally that these
elements matter.
The second general function is
“integration”. It goes beyond
journalism. Public service media
should also integrate a society.
They build a glue for society and
integrate minorities and strengthen
cultural identities. And so we also
looked at that, and whether these
functions were provided by certain
kinds of media.
It all comes down to whether or
not these media act in the service of
the public, and not in the interest of
the government or owner or certain
groups - whether they really have
this drive to serve the public.
Are there some big common
hurdles in transforming some of
these state broadcasters?
The biggest hurdle is certainly the
legal environment - and not only
the question of getting the right
laws, which is a big issue, but also
the implementation of these laws.
Even if you have a law for a
public service remit, how do you
then ensure that the people within
the governing boards really are
independent experts and not just
representatives of certain political
parties? This is a big issue where it
D
Public
service
media is a
continuous
struggle
for inde-
pendence
“
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43
really needs civil society to play an
active role.
The other major issue is the
organisational development of
these former state organisations.
It’s a very hard thing to work with
these extremely overgrown
bureaucracies and to transform
them into an organisation that
really produces content for the
people. And this is a major effort
that cannot be solved in a few
months. It takes years of
engagement from many players to
change this.
Another challenge is that
capacity building has often been
conducted by media development
organisations from richer countries.
It’s important to strengthen these
organisations’ own capacity-
building structures. It would be
good if these public service media
had their own training centre and
their own human resources
strategy and find their own way of
developing the capacity of the
people, and the organisational
structure with it.
Are certain regions moving
towards public service media more
rapidly than others?
We certainly see some advancement
in southeast Europe, with Serbia
being a very positive example. The
Serbian state broadcaster, RTS, has
really stood out in our study. It has
really made the transformation
from the former mouthpiece of
Milošević to a broadcaster that
really integrates many opinions
and really informs the public in a
sensible way. And all the other ex-
Yugoslavian broadcasters are
trying to move in that direction.
However in Eastern Europe, the
situation is generally a little more
difficult.
We see some advancements in
Asia. We haven’t looked at all the
countries. We’ve only looked at a
selection of cases. But in
Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and
Moldova we really see good
progress.
In the Arab world we have not
found a case of public service
media that can really be called such.
