The future of public service broadcasting (PSB) has been debated over the last 25 years, generally in anticipation of its demise (Murdock, 2004: 1;Tracey, 1998), which has been variously envisaged as institutional withering driven by excessive populism or elitism, elimination in the marketplace from commercial competition, or privatization/commercialization by neoliberal governments. Yet, while public broadcasters continue to struggle for funding and audience in the fragmenting marketplace, it is clear the system has survived the market liberal reforms of the late 20th century; around the world, they continue to register considerable public support (
Innovation is blooming among public service broadcasters across the world, with the term public service media (PSM) now in common parlance as services are extended across "new" media platforms and experiments undertaken into new interactive content forms. Driven by both an institutional instinct for survival and a traditional remit to innovate, the new phenomenon of PSM invariably entails risks for publicly funded media, provoking increased hostility from commercial rivals, new and old, and invoking new regulatory hurdles and benchmarks for proving public value. Exploring how one incidence of PSM innovation is endeavoring to address "balance" and accountability and to provide a broader scope for viewer participation and interaction in political public discourse, integrating multiple media platforms, this article discusses the potential implications of such ventures for the public service remit.
During widespread neoliberal economic reform in the 1980s, New Zealand’s public television broadcaster, TVNZ, was restructured as a ‘cash cow’. A new agency, New Zealand on Air, was established to address public service goals, subsidizing local production on TVNZ and the new privately-owned TV3. The result was two high-rating strands of local documentary in prime time. A decade later populist programming had begun to pall with the revival of public television emerging as an election issue. Helen Clark’s Labour government recently restructured TVNZ as a Crown-owned corporation and approved a new Public TV Charter but, with financial objectives intact, the changes appear more makeover than reform. Exploring the impact of funding changes on social documentary production, this article draws on interviews with key industry players in the context of documentary outcomes for 1998. At stake in this discussion is the relationship between social agency and cultural subsidy in the global era.
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