Introduction
Public Service Broadcasting (hereafter referred to as PSB) refers to programmes in the media broadcast for the public benefit rather than for purely commercial purposes. This form of communication seek to promote the national interest as opposed to the interest of making profits. This business model was very much important and vital in the 20th Century when national integrity was the priority of most states. However, in today’s world, PSB is widely criticised as being forced upon people who do not see the essence of maintaining public polity and its related structures. This argument is premised on the fact that the average citizen has little or no interest in the civil processes or the constitutional affairs of the country. Hence, imposing public service broadcasting to try to engage such a person is futile and does not meet any goals. People prefer private things that are meaningful to them and shape their worldview on a routine basis.
However, the nation-state idea is not dead yet. For all realistic reasons, intents and purposes, the nation and national identity is the framework within which everyone will interact and carry out activities in the world. Hence, the PSB system seem important. The purpose of this paper is to propose and defend the view that the principle of Public Service Broadcasting is important and it promotes the concept of nation and national identity.
Background of Public Service Broadcasting
Britain is widely viewed as one of the nations that pioneered and led civilisation and advancement in the world of today. Britain’s growth and development are linked to two main things – Parliamentary democracy and the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution led a lot of changes in Britain including the quest for international expansion to get new markets for the sale of products from Britain. However, the requirement of the British parliament to have full and absolute control over these things and events was important. As a matter of fact communication was viewed as an important element and aspect of the growth and development of Britain and as such, the Post Office system was viewed as a system of promoting the national interest before the 1900s.
In 1923, the Post Office set up the first British broadcasting committee headed by Major-General Sir Frederick Sykes and the committee concluded that broadcasting was a public utility and to optimise the resources and competencies of the British people to develop the nation and develop the British Empire, the broadcasting system had to be properly regulated and monitored closely by the government. This gave the impetus for the formulation of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) which became a tool for national development.
The essence of public service broadcasting is to inform, educate and entertain. Thus, throughout the 1920s and the 1950s, the BBC was used as a tool to spread elements of the national identity and national interest to the British people. This was aimed at sharing information that was important and vital for the development and growth of the nation. This is because there were some priorities for national development and national growth. Therefore, consolidating these pointers and encouraging the people to know, understand and appreciate them in a structured and organised manner was crucial for the promotion of the national interest.
Importance of Public Service Broadcasts in the Context of National Identity
Public service broadcast was seen as a system through which a state could find ways of getting its citizens to work within a certain framework and achieve certain national goals and expectations. This is because in the 20th Century, the state had the power to regulate affairs and ensure that the country was regulated and moved in a certain way that met some national goals and expectations.
“The state lays down broadcast regulations, employment rights, environmental measures, the paying of taxes, parking laws, the national education curriculum, and so on.”. This shows that the state has the power to define the core structures and essence of the society. This is because the society had to work within a given context and broadcasting was one of the many tools that could be used to attain the goal of moving the country from one point to the next in accordance with the rules and principles of the nation.
In the 20th Century, Public Service Broadcasting was presented as a tool of “enlightenment”. It was influenced by the need to get the citizens of nations to understand and appreciate the main elements and features of the society. Therefore, there was the need for some degree of mass education in order to ensure that the social structures of the nation were frozen around certain core principles and ideals.
Broadcasting was thus seen as a tool of change for people in the country. Therefore, it was presented as a subscription service that everyone had to pay for. This is because it provided a common goal and a common objective that was linked to the need for the government to control the country and ensure that the best things happened to the citizens and people.
Public service broadcasting is also a form of one-way communication which promotes a mass society and a mass culture. In theory, if the best people in the community and the most learned and trusted people formulated the main structures of society and presented it to the people, then the highest numbers of people could possibly get a positive life and the country and community could move from one point to another.
Therefore, PBS leads to a unity in purpose and promotes a system whereby the citizens come together to pursue common goals and agendas. This ensures that the best things are done for the people. PBS gives impetus for the strongest possible culture to be instituted. This created a homogenous culture and a homogenous identity for the people – which is the strong or dominant culture.
The idea of strong culture or high culture is almost always reserved for the richest people who got only the best. However, PBS brings this kind of luxury lifestyle to the masses and enable the commoner to get access to the highest levels of information that can transform his or her life for the best. “Homogeneous, centrally sustained high cultures, pervading entire populations and not just elite minorities, a situation occurs in which well-defined educationally sanctioned and unified cultures constitute very nearly the only kind of unit with which men [sic] willingly and often ardently identify
Therefore, public service broadcasting grows the middle class by giving these people who are mainly from the poor class information that gives them some advantages in life which enable them to get a good and a positive life. This allows the middle class to grow and become cultural intermediaries who also help the poor and underprivileged to get better lives by being role models or bringing certain things to them and to their domain.
Public service broadcasting helped Britain to build a stronger country. This is evident by the fact that there was a system of literature and information that educated the masses and enabled people to get access to information that could only be accessible to a person who went to Oxford or Cambridge in the 1900s. Thus, BBC and other public service systems were able to transpose information to the highest numbers of people. It is not uncommon for professors and scholars to be interviewed on PBS channels like BBC to provide information about some aspects of their lives and encourage other people to accept the best kind of life possible.
Britain also used public service broadcasting as a tool to promote its internationalisation and colonialization policies. During World War II, Britain used PBS to mobilise its citizens and improve a lot of things in the lives of the soldiers and citizens during some of the toughest times. It created a higher pool of intelligent people who were knowledgeable in a broad array of fields and disciplines. This was not the case in the colonies where PBS was not institutionalised on the same level and in the same framework as Britain was.
There is a high level of credibility that can be attributed to the sources that are given through public service broadcasting system. This creates a relatively stable culture. This system promotes a stable system of development and the opposite of this is anarchy. This seem to be the case in the 21st Century where there is a proliferation of online newspapers which spread falsehood and calumny without any forms of controls and limits.
The ethos of public service broadcasting is “to transform mere technology into a social philosophy”. This indicates that there is an ideological shift in the minds of people to an idealistic perspective which promotes national identity and the optimisation of the social and economic systems of the community.
The essence of public service broadcast (PSB) was to promote and grow aspects of culture that were good, progressive and helped society to advance. This meant that aspects that were not too good were kept in the dark and were not encouraged.
Certain elements of national identity were enhanced and promoted through public service broadcast. This is because these events were important and defined the identity of the nation and the people.
National Identity is illustrated through the statement that “migrant lives were prosaic, concerned with the daily round of work, home and family. Perhaps it is precisely in the mundane that the culture of migration can be observed for it is within the everyday, within the family and the workplace, the home or the street, that family values and cultural practices are transmitted, contested, transformed and where identities evolve.”
This means that national culture develops over time and it is done through conflicts. The role of public service broadcasting is to promote dialogue. This includes the presentation of people who present a thesis and antithesis. This includes the discussions on the issues that were salient and the presentation of some kind of synthesis that provided the best solution to issues and matters in order to create a kind of national hegemony.
Therefore, there was a kind of system through which the national identity was promoted and enhanced. This include the fact that the presentations of the elements of the nation. There were “forms of national dramas [which] are organised and enacted, and how the nation – and selective qualities associated with it – are staged and broadcast.”
Certain elements of national identity were enhanced and promoted through public service broadcast. This is because these events were important and defined the identity of the nation and the people.
“Commentators refer to the televised broadcast of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 as an event that heralded a national communion via the media. Likewise, the monarch’s Christmas speech, instituted in 1932, was a way for the monarch to reach her subjects over the airwaves, firstly by radio and latterly by television.”
This is known by the words “synchronised enactions” of everyday life and the repetition of these events which become an essential part of life and shapes social interactions in these nations. Also, there is the need for the government policy of a nation at a given time to be broadcast to citizens through public service broadcasting to get their support and indulgence
Public service broadcasting is a tool for promoting loyalty and an identity. National identity – culture, history, identification to build loyalties for the future
“For each of the major western powers, modern communication were a part of a tendency towards centralisation and an emphasis of national over regional influences" (Price 1995, 5). This reiterates the fact that there is the need for someone or an entity to set the standard and define the national identity. And this must be presented to the people and shown to the nation through a public service broadcaster. These are important things that cannot be left for the forces of demand and supply to determine and define. Therefore, there is the need for some kind of national identity to be formulated through the public service broadcaster.
Drawbacks of the approaches to PSB
“Changes in communication technology both enhances and destroy the power of the state to have an impact on the concept of national identity”. This is because modern communication technology places hindrances and limits on the public service broadcaster to enact the monopoly or oligopoly that they had in the past. For instance, the BBC was almost unique and autonomous in the 1920s and 30s. There were no other options and everyone had to watch BBC. However, in the 1970s, private television stations sprouted up and today, with the technology available, communication is not so much limited to media houses. The use of social media and the Internet allows anyone to be converted from a single person to a mass communicator.
Public service broadcasting has been defeated by the idea of individualism. This is because in today’s world, people are more willing to define themselves as independent of various social structures and systems like family and community. This is because the idea of true consumer sovereignty has come to eradicate and remove the view that consumers have to make choices and decisions
Margaret Thatcher once stated that “there is no such thing as society”. This was in the 1980s when the principles of Capitalism were being deeply entrenched in the British society. In this point, the mores, values and ethics of society were being questioned and challenged significantly. And this led to a process whereby Capitalism provided the basis and the impetus for the modification of the structures of society.
Therefore, “the emancipatory power of choice, diversity and self-expression” rendered the idea of public service broadcasting significantly challenged. This is because people wanted to make choices. Unlike maintaining a one-way communication, the likes of the BBC had to face competition and prove their worth by operating in the same terrain as other private broadcasters and smaller entities that appealed to the public.
Thus, in today’s world, broadcasting brings together the old and new media – so the old cannot exist in vacuum. There is the need for the PBS system to operate within the right framework. However, its justification is strongly debated and challenged. This is because the PBS providers seem to be lagging behind in many ways and forms.
PBS providers are often different in animation, character and lower in quality and as such, does not speak too well of itself. This means that PBS providers are generally in doubt and they go through major challenges and problems in our own time. The test of whether PSB is meeting the demands of a new communications environment is the extent to which it allows users to create their own identity and define things. This means the idea of PBS being an institutionalised system is in doubt. This is because many private broadcasters do thing that are of a superior quality and represent Britain better than public service broadcasters like the BBC.
Therefore, if the public service broadcasters do not live up to expectation, then there is a question of whether they should be subscription-based or should get subventions from the government. There is a question of whether they genuinely and truly define the British culture and system or not. After all, many other entities provide similar services to what the BBC and others do.
Secondly, it seems there is the need for a public service broadcaster to be conservative. This process has caused such entities to be slow in reflecting the real needs of the society. A station like BBC does not reinvent itself easily and does things slowly, hence cannot be justified so easily.
Furthermore, the national identity is what the people say it is, not what scholars or some authorities say it is. There is the need for the democratisation of culture. Hence, the idea of relying fully and solely on a public service broadcaster does not make sense. It is limited and flawed in many ways and forms. Therefore, it must not be encouraged and there must be moves and plans to limit these processes and systems.
Conclusion
The public service broadcaster is a service supported by the government to provide various kinds of programmes in the media that is representative of the nation and its people. It sets a formal and official standard that defines the way things are done in the community and the society. Therefore, they are used as a tool for the promotion of the national interest and enhancement of this. The PBS system provides services that consolidate and builds the national identity. They define ethics and are of a relatively high standard that brings together the high culture and encourages public education. However, this is often done in ways that are not representative of the crux of society and often leads to the side-lining of certain communities. This culminates in the ineffective process of doing things and does not justify the collection of subventions and subscription from the public. The quality is often low and does not really represent the public and the entire society.
References
Edensor, T., 2002. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg.
Goodwin, A. & Whannel, G., 1990. Understanding Television. London: Routledge.
Hendy, D., 2013. Public Service Broadcasting. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ofcom, 2015. What is Public Service Broadcasting?. [Online] Available at: http://ask.ofcom.org.uk/help/television/what_is_psb[Accessed 6 January 2016].
Price, M. E., 1995. Television, the Public Sphere, and National Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tracey, M., 1998. The Decline and Fall of Public Service Broadcasting. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
