Page 36 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 24
service broadcasting, for whom attention would only make sense when connected with
some meaningful communicative purpose.
Audience-as-market and audience-as-public then are two alternative configurations of
audience, each connected with one of the two major institutional arrangements—
commercial and public service—of broadcast television. These two configurations
provide the founding paradigms for the production of knowledge about the audience
within specific institutions. Thus, institutional knowledge produced in the context of
American commercial television generally displays a vocabulary and a set of
preoccupations which articulate and ultimately fit into the idea that the audience is a
market to be won, while the repertoire of institutional knowledge circulating within
public service institutions in Europe and elsewhere needs to enhance and sustain the idea
that the audience is a public to be served with enlightened responsibility.
As we have seen, commercial television has equipped itself with a highly formalized
procedure of knowledge production to buttress its audience-as-market paradigm, namely
audience measurement. The audience-as-public paradigm however does not have such a
readily-available and straightforward discursive instrument to assert itself. This is not
surprising, for the desire to ‘serve’ the audience, the aim to transfer meaningful messages
necessitates a much more intricate, multidimensional and qualitative discourse than one
that capitalizes on numbers of people giving attention, as offered by audience
measurement. Therefore, public service institutions tend to have more problems than
their commercial counterparts in coming to a satisfying knowledge about their
relationship to their audience: knowing the size of the audience alone is not sufficient to
gauge the degree of success or failure of public service television’s communicative
efforts, not least because success and failure are a normative rather than a material issue
here.
The recent changes in Western Europe’s television landscape as a result of national
and integrated European deregulation and privatization policies correlate closely with a
crisis in the audience-as-public paradigm of public service broadcasting. With the
proliferation of commercial television offerings in the European airwaves, the idea of
audience-as-public comes more and more under pressure. Several observers have noted,
generally in a tone not unaffected by a sense of nostalgia and regret, how European
public service broadcasting is in practice gradually pervaded by a mass-marketing
mentality to almost the same degree as in the United States (e.g. Gitlin 1983; Garnham
1983; Richeri 1985; Burgelman 1986). And indeed, the trend is unmistakable: more and
more have public service organizations developed an explicit interest in ratings,
‘audience maximization’ and similar concerns that derive from the competitive
commercial system. More and more have they implictly adopted, if not wholeheartedly
and not completely, a limited attention model of communication to judge their own
performance. More and more, in other words, is the audience-as-public transformed, at
least apparently, into an audience-as-market.
But this process of paradigmatic transformation should not be seen as a mechanical
one; on the contrary, as will become clear in Part III, it is accompanied by many tensions
and difficulties within the public service broadcasting organizations themselves, tensions
and difficulties having to do with the need for these organizations to develop a new,
acceptable way of thinking about the specificity of their relationship toward the audience.
In short, what they need to do is to somehow reconcile the two contrasting paradigms of