Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

90 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
A second and related argument employed against the financial assistance
for PSBs is based on the notion of market sovereignty. The ‘free’
market depends on the discourse of ‘fair’ competition among market
forces. Through this competition of interests, neoliberalism holds that
the best (or most popular, strongest, adequate etc.) solution will prevail.
‘Fairness’ derives from the assumption that participants know and can
defend their own interests, while competition offers stability through a
self-organizing, spontaneous order of the system. The claims of ‘fairness’
of competition in media landscapes echo the post-Fordist context of contestation
of welfare state and all things related to that. At the same time,
the need for legitimization maintains its power through concepts that are
held high in Western democracies and administrations, such as freedom
and ‘merit’ (or fairness) and individual ‘choice’. Previous modes of PSB
funding are seen as breaching the social contract as it renders the competition
between private and public media unfair. This argument makes
sense only if understood within the logic of ‘free market’ and only if the
PSB system is understood as a foremost market actor. The circularity of
these arguments fails to address the serious objections as to the role of
public service media and as to the achievement of a free market, and the
total withdrawal of the state as a regulating actor, assuming that this is a
consensual goal of societies.
Questioning PSB legitimacy at the supranational level
Despite their obvious weaknesses, arguments against the support for PSBs
became an increasingly dominant position by policy-makers and critics
within the international field of communication policy through a series
of interventions promoting the liberalization of communications industries
and ‘services’ through the GATI. Although it is not surprising that
industrial lobbies turned their attention to Brussels, it is nevertheless indicative
of the lengths to which the private sector was prepared to go to
secure as much profit and control as possible in the newly constructed
markets (Hartcourt 2005; Sarikakis 2004c). The more technocratic and
market inclined directorate of the European Commission, 5 the Director
General for Telecommunications (DG4) responded to this challenge
with a proposed set of guidelines that sought to redefine the function of
PSBs (Sarikakis 2004b).
The continuous pressure by media conglomerates for the abolition of
any support for PSBs in Europe reached its high point with an ‘ultimatum’
to national PSBs to follow competition rules and rationale in the
late 1990s. Before that, a decade of de facto liberalization had taken place,
accompanied by the neoliberal governments of the UK and other EU