Page 37 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Audience-as-market and audience-as-public 25
audience. I will examine how this formidable work of discursive reconstruction has been
accomplished, by delving into the histories of two particularly interesting European
embodiments of the public service ideal: the British BBC and the Dutch VARA.
The BBC derives its relevance from its exceptional international influence and
prestige when it comes to defending the value and superiority of public service
broadcasting—something which is evidenced by the fact that British television has over
the years won by far the greatest number of awards at television festivals such as
Montreux and the Prix Italia (Blumler et al. 1986). VARA is a much less well-known
institution internationally, but its case is equally interesting because of its unique
democratic socialist roots (Ang 1987). While both organizations can pride themselves
upon a long and strong tradition of ‘serving the public’ through broadcasting, then, the
contrast between the two is also illuminating: while the ideological origins of the BBC,
particularly as voiced by its first Director General, John Reith, represent an outstanding
case of ‘authoritarian paternalism’, in which the audience is positioned as the public to be
reformed ‘from above’, the history of VARA, based upon its founding philosophy of
social democracy, is a peculiar case of what can be called ‘populist paternalism’, in
which the desire for cultural uplift came ‘from below’, from (a segment of) the audience-
as-public itself as it were.
Despite this seemingly radical difference in origins, however, both organizations have
evolved, in certain aspects at least, along remarkably similar lines. Briefly, both histories
are marked by an increasing uncertainty about how a public service institution should
establish and maintain its normatively-defined relationship to the television audience.
This is expressed in a growing reliance within both organizations on the kind of
knowledge about the audience that could be delivered by research, and by audience
measurement in particular. In other words, the prevailing form of institutional knowledge
employed within these organizations became less and less of a normative kind, and has
taken more and more the form of factual information. However, this does not mean that
the audience is now squarely conceived as a market; rather, as Part III will show, it is the
intermingling of old public service commitments and market thinking that motivates the
use of audience measurement and related forms of research in public service institutions.
Ideally, the information delivered by audience research is assumed to aid public service
institutions in their effort to better serve the audience in a time when their authority, so
taken for granted in the past, has been eroded by the growth of commercial competition.
These developments point to the fact that while the philosophical assumptions of
commercial and public service broadcasting are indeed radically different, there is also a
fundamental commonality in the two institutional systems which tends to be obscured—a
commonality which has everything to do with the fact that in practice both kinds of
institutions inevitably foster an instrumental view of the audience as object to be
conquered. Whether the primary intention is to transfer meaningful messages or to gain
and attract attention, in both cases the audience is structurally placed at the reception end
of a linear, one-way process. In other words, in both systems the audience is inevitably
viewed either from ‘above’ or from ‘outside’: from an institutional point of view which
sees ‘television audience’ as an objectified category of others to be controlled.
The paradigms of audience-as-public and audience-as-market are thus only relatively
conflicting. As McQuail (1987:221) has noted, ‘We never conceive of ourselves as
belonging to markets, rather we are placed in market categories or identified as part of a