Page 205 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING

interests’. Public interest, like the construction of the public, is based
on inclusion and exclusion. Those who have not been included as part
of the contemporary mediated public may include youth, gays and
lesbians, and the disabled. It is groups such as these that are recognised
by newer theoretical paradigms such as cultural citizenship that
involve a move from the conception of a unified public to a notion of
publics. But even then, in many countries the line of exclusion is still
drawn at migrants, especially those fleeing zones of turbulence in the
Middle East and Africa. They ‘belong’ to no public and are treated as if
that status made them not migrants or refugees but criminals.

See also: Cultural citizenship, Public sphere
Further reading: Hartley (1992b)

PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING

Publicly funded broadcasting services. By extension, all broadcasting in
countries with a public service broadcasting regime, for example, the
UK, where the BBC is the archetypal public broadcaster but the
commercial channels ITV, Channel 4 and S4C, also have ‘public
service’ obligations in their enabling statutes – and in their culture. At
the heart of conceptions of public service broadcasting is the notion
that a healthy public sphere is required in order to produce
democratic conditions (Garnham, 1986). By remaining outside of
market influences, public service broadcasting provides a much needed
public forum within which information dissemination can occur,
aiding in the stimulation of public debate.
Public service broadcasting plays a significant role in shaping
national identity by creating and reinforcing cultural products and
practices. Its attempt to provide quality content for the nation has
placed public service broadcasting in the problematic position of
having to assume what it is that citizens should know and enjoy as
citizens of a particular country.
In having to negotiate the provision of what could be considered
‘quality’ content, public service broadcasting directs itself towards an
audience that is presupposed, fixed and homogenous. It presumes that
citizens are consensual in the public service broadcasting culture (and
hence in the national interest) and, more often than not, that they are a
speaker of the national language. As a consequence, public service
broadcasting has attracted criticism for denying difference within the
national community, for being elitist, assuming a commonality and

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