Page 94 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

11
Normative knowledge: the breakdown of

the public service ideal

In the European tradition of public service broadcasting, making money has always been
emphatically rejected as the object of television and radio programming. Instead, the aims
and purposes of these media were conceived by the overriding consideration that
broadcasting is a ‘servant of culture’, in the words of John Reith, the illustrious and
influential first Director General of the BBC. For Reith, the major task in the BBC’s
cultural mission was the ‘systematic and sustained endeavour to re-create, to build up
knowledge, experience and character, perhaps even in the face of obstacles’ (quoted in
Briggs 1985:54). It is striking—and rather prophetic—that Reith should have made
mention of ‘obstacles’. He clearly expected difficulties in pursuing the endeavour—
difficulties which ultimately resided in resistances on the part of the object of that
endeavour: the audience. In fact, a history of European public service broadcasting in
general could be written from this perspective: a narrative in which the resistance of the
audience against its objectification in the name of highminded, national cultural ideals
drives the story forward. Part III is a contribution to the construction of that ongoing
story. The recent crisis of European public service broadcasting in the face of increasing
transnational commercialization of television is a key episode in the dénouement of the
story.
Although Reith’s philosophy was especially formative for British public service
broadcasting before the Second World War, its influence reached further than Britain
alone, if not in its concrete policy impact then at least in its spirit of authoritative
idealism. Thus, throughout Western Europe public service broadcasting’s classic mission
is that it should convey highly imposing cultural ambitions—ambitions extending way
beyond the relatively forthright economic ones of commercial profit-making. Public
service broadcasting is a prime instance of the rejection of the subordination of cultural
politics to economic forces. Public broadcasters therefore often see their work as
unremittingly antithetical to that of their commercially-motivated colleagues. They often
display a confident disrespect toward the latter. ’Giving the audience what it wants’, a
principle celebrated within commercial rhetoric as a triumph of cultural democracy, is
deeply distrusted in public broadcasting circles, connoted as it is with submission to the
easy, unprincipled path of populism. It was Reith himself who wrote that ‘few know what
they want and very few what they need’ (quoted in Briggs 1985:55). More recently,
another European public broadcaster, André Kloos, in the seventies chairman of VARA,
the time-honoured Dutch socialist broadcasting organization, characterized the difference
as follows: