Page 109 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Britain: the BBC and the loss of the disciplined audience 97
fundamental principle that an institution like the BBC had to come to terms with. The
modern citizen—broadcasting—has come of age; she can no longer be addressed in a the
quintessential audience member of contemporary public service paternalistic manner, but
is assumed to make her own choice out of the diversity of programmes laid out before
her. However, this vision makes the contact between public service television and its
audience a rather diffuse, indistinct one. The classic model was based upon the
enunciation of a clear moral and aesthetic order, anchoring the sense of responsibility
towards the audience which is at the heart of any official public service broadcasting
philosophy. In the contemporary model, however, that responsibility is freefloating and
directionless: what the public service institution purports to do is give the audience the
opportunity to look into all parts of the mirror, but it acquiesces in its essential
powerlessness in summoning audiences to actually take up that opportunity. The
audience member/citizen is now a sovereign individual. The Reithean aspiration to create
a disciplined audience has disappeared: at best, public service broadcasting in Britain is
now praised for its ‘catering for popular tastes with high-quality production standards and
offering diversity to stretch interests and horizons without creating an impression that
uplift was being imposed’ (Blumler et al. 1986:354).
In summary, the history of the BBC indicates how normative discourse on the
television audience has slowly eroded. In classic public service philosophy, the stakes
were high: the audience-as-public was positioned as citizens who must be reformed. But
the obstacles that were foreseen by Reith turned out to be too great. The objectification of
‘television audience’ as a set of citizens ready to be unified and disciplined under the
central cultural leadership of the BBC was impossible to sustain in the face of what the
institution came to know about actual audiences in empirical terms. There is a sense of
capitulation here. The contemporary ideals of diversity and quality are in fact nothing
more than an attempt to reflect, as comprehensively and professionally as possible, the
given cultural profiles of a plurality of potential audience groups. Thus the audience-as-
public is no longer objectified so as to be reformed, but is to be reproduced in its existing
identities and divisions. In this respect, public service broadcasting has indeed retreated
from its mission as an interventionist cultural practice; it has come to content itself with a
far more modest conception of what it means to ‘serve the public’. A ‘take it or leave it’
attitude is thus unwittingly built into public service broadcasting’s normative relationship
with the audience: actual audiences are now granted the freedom to choose to do
whatever they want with the diverse range of programmes supplied them.
But it is precisely this premise of free choice that threatens to unsettle the foundations
for public service broadcasting’s legitimacy and authority. After all, in the paradigm of
free choice legitimacy and authority can logically only be derived from the actual choices
made by audiences. Against this background, the relevance of empirical knowledge about
the audience, not only pragmatically but principally, is clear. Empirical information fills
the gap that has grown between the BBC and the audience as a result of the loss of a
normatively defined disciplined audience. Empirical audience research is often justified
in public service contexts not for marketing reasons but, more idealistically, in order to be
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‘in touch with public opinion’. But there is only a thin line between the two: when it
comes to ‘free choice’, there is not so much difference between the free consumer and the
free citizen.