Page 110 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 98
This is reflected in the British government’s most recent official policy document, the
Home Office’s White Paper Broadcasting in the ‘90s: Competition, Choice and Quality
(1988). Even the document’s title suggests a convergence of market discourse and public
service discourse. In this White Paper, audiences are squarely conceived as consumers
whose freedom of choice must be extended by opening up the British broadcasting
market to new channels. The document explicitly constitutes ‘diversity’ and ‘quality’ as
the central values for broadcasting in the 1990s, but it also adds a third: ‘popularity’, a
norm that, contrary to the first two, is directly related to the audience. The value of
‘popularity’ principally foregrounds audience-derived judgements about what counts as
satisfying ‘diversity’ and ‘quality’, thereby subverting the independent authority of
professional judgement. This tends to upset the public service institution’s proud self-
presentation as the exclusive guarantors of ‘diversity’ and ‘quality’ (Collins 1989a). The
White Paper even suggests replacing the licence fee as basis for funding BBC Television
with subscription finance, reasoning that this would improve consumer freedom because
individual viewers could then decide for themselves whether the BBC offers them ‘value
for money’. This would of course mean the end of the BBC’s time-honoured status as a
universal and comprehensive public service for all citizens. Shocking as such a
development may be—and it is highly uncertain whether it will ever be implemented
(e.g. Miller 1989)—it does indicate how the BBC’s public service discourse has lost so
much of its normative distinctiveness that it could easily be incorporated in a discourse in
which ‘quality’ and ‘diversity’ are seen as a matter of ‘competition’ rather than as
pregiven institutional guarantees.
This discursive convergence in public service and commercial philosophy, I suggest,
explains why audience measurement despite the continuing scepticism with which it is
regarded by BBC executives and programme makers (see Madge 1989:93–95), could
become such an entrenched part of the institutional process of broadcasting as a whole,
not only within the BBC, but in many other European public service institutions as well.
This happened only gradually, however, and it was paralleled by the erosion of an
institutional point of view that could no longer depend upon the authority of normative
knowledge alone to gain control over the audience, and became less and less at odds with
the empiricism of market thinking. The case of VARA, to be addressed in the following
chapter, illustrates the subtleties of this process of transformation even more
dramatically.