Abstract
Promoting the active participation of ‘the public’ in public life has been viewed as a key purpose of public service broadcasting (PSB) since its inception. John Reith, the first Director General of the BBC, looked forward in 1924 to a time when ‘an intelligent concern on many subjects will be manifested in quarters now overlooked’ (Reith, 1924: 19). And, in 1932, Bertolt Brecht envisaged the ideal radio system in interactive terms as ‘a vast network of pipes that organises listeners as suppliers’ (1932[2000]). Today, with the rise of the Internet and social media and the opportunities these and other technologies afford for the development of public service media (PSM), Brecht’s vision seems closer to realisation than ever before. And yet, it seems that many people, for much of the time, still prefer to consume media output in a relatively passive and apolitical way: as Andra Leurdijk and Matthijs Leendertse put it in their contribution to this book, ‘the couch potato is not exactly an endangered vegetable’ (p. 155). Meanwhile, for a variety of reasons PSB institutions have tended to be lukewarm about transforming themselves into PSM.
This book is the fourth in a series of ‘RIPE Readers’ that are based on papers presented at biannual RIPE conferences. Although nowhere in the book is the meaning of RIPE explained, the latest conference website states that it stands for ‘Re-Visionary Interpretations of the Public Enterprise’. It goes on to define this more concretely as ‘an on-going initiative … devoted to strengthening collaborative relations between media scholars and researchers working on issues that have relevance to the public interest in electronic media with strategic managers working inside public service media companies’. In relation to these ‘collaborative relations’, it is worth noting that according to the biographical information provided in this book, fully 15 out of the 20 contributors have personal experience of both academia and the media industry. Gregory Ferrell Lowe, the editor of the book and founder and director of the RIPE initiative, exemplifies this: formerly a senior advisor on corporate strategy and development at the Finnish public service broadcaster, YLE, he is currently Professor of Media Management at the University of Tampere in Finland. Lowe’s institutional affiliation is also typical in that RIPE is very much an enterprise of scholars based in northern Europe (albeit with a significant UK presence), where PSB has historically been strongest, and this partly accounts for why the books in this series are published by Nordicom (the Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research).
As Lowe notes in his valuable introductory chapter, the key question that emerged from the 2008 RIPE conference was what ‘conceptualising and operationalising the public in public service media … requires of a PSB company in its many interdependent facets: strategy revision, organizational restructuring, retooling production processes, and redefining professional identities’ (p. 11). The key target audience envisaged for the book appears to be those ‘strategic managers’ in PSM companies mentioned in the definition of RIPE. Accordingly, Lowe provides a set of nine ‘takeaways for managers’ that he derives from three areas of business theory (knowledge management, customer relationship management and creative organisation). He distils these nine to yield a tenth: ‘The public in public service media matters not only as an altruistic principle; it is a practical success factor’ (p. 26). Many of the contributors display impressive fluency in the use of managerial discourse and indeed one value of this book for readers of this journal may be as a source of data on this subject.
Following Lowe’s introductory chapter, the rest of the book is divided into two sections. The first, ‘Trends and Theorisation’, consists of six chapters and the second, ‘Audiences and Accountability’, has eight. The first two chapters in section one provide a useful orientation to the chapters that follow by offering contrasting views – realisations of different discourses – on the future of PSM. In ‘The public’s choice: how deregulation, commercialisation and media concentration could strengthen public service media’, Joseph Trappel makes a case for seeing the current threats to PSB institutions as opportunities for them to acquire a new legitimacy through embracing PSM. In contrast, Richard Collins, in ‘From public service broadcasting to public service communication’, argues forcefully that the loss of trust in traditional PSB, and more importantly the rise of Web 2.0 internet applications, exemplified by the dialogic and participatory nature of Wikipedia, have largely undermined the authority and status of ‘legacy’ broadcast media. He supports calls for greater market liberalisation and for public funds to be shared on a competitive basis amongst a wider pool of online public service content providers.
In the next chapter, ‘Journalistic authority meets public participation: re-reading Reith in the age of networks’, Eeva Mäntymäki provides a helpful historical counterbalance to the book’s mainly forward-looking orientation. She also discusses the long-standing problem for PSB institutions of how to balance two key aspirations: the wish to reach out to as large an audience as possible and the desire to maintain high (or high-brow) standards of programme quality, which she characterises as a contradiction between two ‘value discourses’ – ‘the public service discourse about empowering publics and a professional discourse about striving for skilful and disciplined expression’ (p. 81). Reconciling the two aspirations is not simply a matter of adjusting the ideational content of programmes; as she notes, the style or mode of address is also a vital factor. Following Morley (2004: 418), she points out that this is a question of ‘who feels “at home” in a particular mode of address, who is included or and [sic] excluded from the symbolic unity that media convey’ (p. 73). The following chapter by Minna Aslama, ‘Re-thinking PSM audiences’, focuses on organisational development and strategic planning issues, but also touches on discourse in terms of how PSB firms conceptualise audiences in ways (e.g. as ‘clients’, ‘partners’ or ‘prosumers’) that tend to background the core idea of audience as citizen. She observes that ‘every conceptual choice informs mission statements, corporate strategy, and policy stance, either closing off or opening up varied options to steer development of contents and services’ (p. 93), but unfortunately she does not develop this idea further.
In the second section of the book, Lizzie Jackson’s chapter, ‘Facilitating participatory audiences’, reports on an observational study of five BBC ‘interactive presenters’ – the people who facilitate and moderate discussions in online message boards and chat rooms. She suggests that what she refers to rather confusingly both as ‘sociable media theory’ and ‘social media theory’ is a useful way of conceptualising the mediation of ‘engager’ (her preferred term for audience) participation by PSM institutions. Of particular interest is her observation that this theory ‘offers a way to change the focus from analysis of texts to analysis of audience behaviours within and between texts’, which is ‘a more suitable means of looking at networked and semi-converged media’ (p. 178), but again this theme is not pursued. In ‘Quality taste or tasting quality? Excellence in public service media from an audience perspective’, Irene Costera Meijer reports on a large-scale survey and interview-based study that investigated the views of Dutch ‘public intellectual’ audience members about quality television, and compared this with the views of producers. The views of the two groups were found to be very similar, but audiences were less inclined to actually watch programmes that they themselves classified as high quality for reasons which she suggests relate more to a general shift ‘from information society to experience society’ (p. 206). Although she states that the interviews were analysed using interpretative repertoire analysis (Wetherell et al., 2001), this is not evident from the results as presented here.
In conclusion, this book is likely to be most useful to those involved in the study or practice of media policy and strategy development. Although questions of media and democracy are of interest to the readers of this journal, and media texts frequently form the topical focus of the articles published in it, there is little discussion in this book of the role of media discourse and audiences per se and what there is tends to be undeveloped. Readers looking for such discussion would be better off with one of the many treatments of this issue, such as Talbot (2007), Machin and Van Leeuwen (2007) or Coleman and Ross (2010).