Page 35 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Audience-as-market and audience-as-public 23
terms public service broadcasting institutions constitute what Williams (1976:131) has
called a ‘paternal system’. A paternal system, Williams states, is ‘an authoritarian system
with a conscience: that is to say, with values and purposes beyond the maintenance of its
own power’. In this philosophy, the institution-audience relationship is primarily defined
in cultural and ideological terms: ‘the paternal system transmits values, habits, and tastes,
which are its own justification as a ruling minority, and which it wishes to extend to the
people as a whole’ (ibid.). ‘Serving the public’ then means, as Anthony Smith has put it,
‘forcing [the audience] to confront the frontiers of its own taste’ (in Kumar 1986:59),
although it should be noted that this ideal does not necessarily have to be linked to a
conservative form of cultural elitism, as was the case in the early days of public service
broadcasting. As we will see in more detail in Part III, contemporary public service
broadcasting has over the years developed a much more eclectic conception of its task,
emphasizing the duty to offer a broad range of high quality programmes (Blumler et al.
1986; Manschot 1988). Nevertheless, the relationship of public service institution to its
audience remains essentially characterized, not by economic profit-seeking, but by a
pervasive sense of cultural responsibility and social accountability, which is emphatically
opposed to the easy-going commercial dictum of ‘giving the audience what it wants’.
As a result, a different positioning of audience is at stake here. Not the audience-as-
market, but the audience-as-public is the central object of concern within public service
institutions (McQuail 1987:219–220). The audience-as-public consists not of consumers,
but of citizens who must be reformed, educated, informed as well as entertained—in
short, ‘served’—presumably to enable them to better perform their democratic rights and
duties. Within this context, broadcasting has nothing to do with the consumerist
hedonism of (American) commercial television—it is a very dignified, serious business.
Typically, popular entertainment, so conspicuously and self-evidently the prevailing fare
on American television, tends to be considered a less important programme category in
European public service broadcasting, even though in practice entertainment
programmes, both domestic and foreign, are an established part of the daily schedules of
most public service channels (cf. Ang 1985a; 1985b).
The difference between the two paradigms of audience is impressive and can be
clarified by placing them in two diverse theoretical models of mass communication. The
audience-as-public idea is in fact the more classic one of the two and fits in the so-called
transmission model of communication: here, communication is defined by such terms as
sending or transmitting messages to others. Implied in this model is the conception of
audiences as ‘receivers’ of those messages, and a more or less ‘ordered transference of
meaning’ as the intended consequence of the process as a whole forms its basic rationale
(McQuail 1987:43–4; Carey 1989). In the audience-as-market idea, however, such
purposive transfer of meaning is only of secondary importance. As McQuail (1987:45)
has remarked, ‘the essence of any market is to bring goods and services to the attention of
potential consumers, to arouse and keep their interest’. Thus, the essence of what
McQuail calls the attention model of communication is comprised by the mere gaining or
attracting of attention: communication is considered effective as soon as attention is
actually given by audiences, no matter its quality or impact. This is the model of
communication that undergirds the institutional arrangement of commercial broadcasting,
but it is clearly insufficient and inadequate from the institutional perspective of public