Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

88 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
not only within the EU or the wider European space but also within
the international terrain of trade agreements and the emerging global
governance of content.
The battlefield where public service broadcasters
were (nearly) slaughtered
It is true that PSB is greeted as a European institution, which, free from
the pressures of market competition, bases its foundational principles on
the noble ideals of education, information and high-quality entertainment.
Or at least this is part of the myth of PSBs. An integral part of
the European model of welfare society, the PSB emerged at different
times in Europe (with the first one being the BBC in the 1920s) under
the organized efforts of European governments to use radio and television
for the education of their citizens. Programming was meant to bring
the arts to those with the least knowledge about – and possibly lowest
interest in – high culture, informational programmes for farmers, morning
household-focused magazines for housewives, children’s programmes
and a variety of other genres of information and entertainment. Public
and state-owned media also served to reinforce a sense of homogenous
national culture – a tangible imagined community – by bringing home
the government’s voice as news, transmitting Sunday Mass and broadcasting
speeches of royalty, colonizers and political strongmen. It is of
no surprise then that commercial broadcasting became partly associated
with the negative freedoms associated with the free print press in the
late 1980s and 1990s. From the prime minister’s hour in London to the
oath to the Führer in Nazi Berlin, and from the Armed Forces-run television
channel in Athens to the Franco-ruled television in Barcelona,
state-controlled PSBs provided plenty of examples of unfree media and a
range of propaganda strategies. Overt propaganda as well as covert persuasion
has been used as one of the main functions of public service media,
despite differences in the political principles behind totalitarian regimes
and liberal democracies. State actors have repeatedly demonstrated hostility
to community, pirate and citizens’ media throughout the twentieth
century by criminalizing radio transmission on unlicensed frequencies.
This situation continues today whereby government policies push pirate
radio stations out of available frequencies, in order either to make room
for commercial enterprises or otherwise to control the distribution of
airwaves. 2 Even in the era of digital, infinite spectrum for broadcasting,
spaces for non commercial media are neither guaranteed nor protected.
Despite their various degrees of autonomy, PSBs were rather closer to
the government than to ‘impartiality’. 3 Having been financially supported