Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

96 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
participation belong to the normative debate regarding the future of PSBs
as well as constituting part of their assessment. Although the functions of
the public service broadcasters are relevant or fulfilled at various degrees
in various countries, they remain common characteristics that distinguish
this form of broadcasting from the commercial one. Across Europe, but
also in countries with similar concerns of financial viability, this domination
of US-originated content in domestic markets, political dependence
and the shrinking of the social ‘safety’ net, in the form of the welfare
state, have severely destabilized the position of PSBs in domestic politics
and society. This is manifested in attempts to change the structural organization
of PSBs (exemplified in the case of the BBC) and reevaluate the
conditions under which PSBs are supported in their mandate.
Not only Western Europe but also the ‘transitional’ democracies of
Eastern Europe are facing these dilemmas. The liberalization of the communications
sector has affected PSBs at multiple fronts. In several Eastern
European countries, the transition of their social and economic organization
into a system that embraces Western capitalism has proved wrong in
its claims that media market liberalization goes hand in hand with democratic
media as the dominance of political elites over state media continued
undisturbed. This time, the new discourse bases its legitimacy on the
ideas that PSBs are pivotal in ensuring diversity, an idea that is used ‘as
a cover for paternal or authoritarian communication systems’ (Williams
1976: 134, cited in Splichal 1995: 63). New political elites (some of which
derive from the previous regime) base their rule over the media on the
rhetoric of ‘ “democratic” organs of the new “pluralistic” party state, that
is, in the same way it was regarded by the old authorities’ (Splichal 1995:
63). The emergence of public service broadcasting systems adhering to
the ideals of servicing the public rather than the state is caught between
state control and the market and there is little evidence to suggest that
a social or public broadcasting system is flourishing in Eastern Europe
(Jakubowicz 1996; Vartanova and Zassoursky 1995; Zernetskaya 1996). In
most Eastern European countries, broadcasting policies have been successful
in introducing media liberalization to their system but have failed
to articulate an ‘idealistic’ form of public service broadcasting, the ‘civic’
or ‘social’ broadcasting system that has been the aim of critics of the old
regime (Jakubowicz 2004). Instead, a ‘transfusion’ of Western guidelines
and formats was introduced that is not compatible with the participatory
model of public broadcasting envisioned by the intelligentsia – and not
necessarily the civil society, if we accept that there is a lack of such a society,
at least as understood in the West. Nor does it manage to overcome
the problems of control by political elites. Differences in the political but
also professional, in particular journalistic, cultures in central and eastern