The European Commission's Creative Europe programme is due to replace the current programmes Culture, MEDIA and MEDIA Mundus in 2014, setting partly new priorities for supporting the European culture and creative sectors. In this context, the European Expert Network on Culture prepared a report on audience building across Europe, recommending that audience development should become a future assessment criteria for arts and cultural funding and that, for this purpose, a new European regulatory agency should be set up. It is noted that the report lives up to its objectives, though there are shortcoming. In particular, the evidence base is not sound and the sample of case studies does not appear representative. Notwithstanding, audience development will play a key role in the future Creative Europe programme.
In October 2010 the British and German broadcasting licence fees were settled. In the UK, the BBC's worst settlement in its history appears moderate compared with other cuts in public sector spending. However, whereas the near future of the Corporation and public service broadcasting (PSB) in the UK may lie in the provision of narrower services and competitive funding, in Germany the current change of the fee towards an excise duty make ARD and ZDF, the two key German PSB organisations, appear stronger than ever. The implementation of the new model will harm individual freedom, commercial broadcasting operators and the taxpayer.
When, from the 1980s onwards, market-driven politics won widespread recognition in liberal capitalist Western democracies, processes of broadcasting marketization in the UK and Germany were decisively determined by two inquiries: the Committee on the Financing of the BBC, chaired by Alan Peacock, and the Commission for the Development of the Technical Communications System (KtK), chaired by Eberhard Witte. This article compares how both inquiries, driven by their chairmen, affected domestic communications policy-making. The research is situated within a critical political economy framework and it is argued that critiques from scholars within cultural policy depicting Alan Peacock and the inquiry he chaired as driven by a narrowly economistic understanding of broadcasting are partly unjustified. As the comparison with the radical restructuring pursued by Eberhard Witte brings to the fore, Peacock, in fact followed a moderate reform agenda of gradual change, aiming to preserve some core cultural elements within public service broadcasting.
This paper compares the structural developments of regional television in Britain and Germany from the early days of broadcasting to the present from an institutional and organisational perspective. Drawing on a series of interviews with policy-makers and other key personalities, it is argued that the combination of political administrative borders and regional television boundaries, as exists in the German Länder, provides a fruitful basis for a strong regional television service. During the post-war period divergences between Länder borders and Consortium of Public-Law Broadcasting Institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany (ARD) broadcasting boundaries, palpably manifest in south-west Germany, have been harmonised, leading to thorough conformity. However, in centralised England questions of regionalism have strangely played such an important role in the evolution of television, and there are evident disjunctures between regional boundaries and television regions. This applies to the regional structure of Independent Television (ITV) as well as to the regional initiatives of the BBC, which, since the mid-1980s, increasingly takes over ITV"s regional duties, fulfilling primarily political demands.
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