9-9.30am 20.11.03
Bob Collins: Introduction in Irish.
I thought it was not inappropriate that having heard the wonderful, being present at the wonderful powhiri last night that the symmetry of the three languages that bind these two countries should be reflected in this event. I grew up in a household where New Zealand was a regular presence because my mother had a very close friend who had gone to Dunedin and they corresponded. I don't think they ever saw each other after that departure from Ireland but we are diametrically oppose each other on the globe and in thinking about that we often envied one of the geographical phenomena that distinguishes your country from ours, you're 1,000 miles away from your nearest neighbour. And just to be sure to be sure, you divided the country into two islands. Why didn't we think of either one of those as a solution.
No discussion about the role of broadcasting would proceed very far before someone demands a definition of public service broadcasting. Sometimes this call for clarity is genuine and disinterested. But frequently, it is the opening shot in a campaign to reduce its scope and ultimately its resources: the definition that is being sought is limiting and restrictive, rather than clarifying and liberating.
I tend to take comfort in the words of A. E. Housman who, when faced with a similar question in relation to poetry, said
"I can no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat but, like the terrier, I recognise the object of my attention by the emotions it arouses."
And perhaps the reality is that the question to be asked is not "what is the definition of public service broadcasting?" but, rather, "what are the goals of public policy in broadcasting in any given society now and in the medium term?" The question is no longer one of definition; instead it is about the appropriate scope for public policy to intervene in the broadcasting environment.
But let we remain with the issue of what it is we mean by or expect from public service broadcasting - or rather what I mean and expect because what I say this morning is very much by way of a personal reflection. It is not remotely a prescription nor a set of advices but a view informed both by my absolute commitment to and belief in public service broadcasting and the experience of 29 years' involvement in broadcasting in Ireland and with the European Broadcasting Union.
I believe that it is entirely appropriate that governments should allocate public funding to public broadcasting - whether as its sole funding or as one of a number of sources. That is the key issue. If all broadcasting were funded from commercial, market derived revenue, we would not be here today. The issue is: is it proper for Governments to make funding available and, if so, on what terms? As I say, I sincerely believe that it is and that in return for that public funding, the audience, the ultimate payers, are entitled to a service which matches as far as is practicable the full range of their interests.
For me, there are some clear and succinct statements which can be made about public service broadcasting:
There are and there should be differences between public broadcasting and commercial broadcasting,
This is as it should be. Plurality of ownership and diversity of services are two central elements in any broadcasting framework. The range of services which will offer real choice is an essential part of the entitlement of citizens in contemporary societies.
The commercial broadcasters can, quite properly, focus a service on a particular age group or interest group or geographical centre. That is an option not open to a public service broadcasters which must, or should, address the entire audience, with no age or social group being accorded a value greater than any other. Thus, the schedules of a public broadcaster must have:
These are fundamental truths for a public broadcaster in my view - not a counsel of perfection. I will have something to say about accountability later, but the most basic accountability of all is to meet and honour these obligations which represent the deep-rooted, legitimate entitlements of the communities who comprise the audience.
You will not be surprised, then, if I say that the public service character and obligations are of the essence and must inform the very fabric and texture of the broadcaster. It is not simply a case of welding on some areas of defined social responsibility to an otherwise wholly commercial organisation. It also follows that the public character is reflected in the overall schedule and is not something which inheres in individual programmes which are then distributed across a schedule, somewhat like sultanas in a fruitcake.
I want to turn briefly to the Irish context - the one with which I am obviously most familiar and I do so for a number of reasons:
Radio was introduced to Ireland on 1 January 1926 - four years after the Treaty with Britain, which presaged the establishment of the State. The opening was performed by Douglas ?? who some years became the first President of Ireland he said our enterprise today marks the beginning not only of the new year but of a new era. An era in which our nation will take its place amongst the other nations of the world. A nation has never been made by an Act of Parliament. A nation cannot be made by Act of Parliament. No, not even by a Treaty. A nation is made from inside itself. It is made first of all by its language if it has one, by its music, its songs, its games and customs. These words were spoken by a man who, among other things, was a cultural campaigner who had recovered and revalued the bits and pieces of our shattered Irish identity more than a century ago. His every experience underlined the truth that a society, that people and the political entity have no existence without self expression. If we are to be free we must first be free to speak.
The defining moment of public broadcasting in Ireland came in 1960 when broadcasting emerged from the Department of Post and Telegraph and contrary to the advice from the Commission which had been appointed to provide the framework for the introduction of television was established as an independent public service corporation. Government policy has consistently supported the public service model since then and whatever problems may have been encountered over the years, and I could lead you down many byways if I were to outline there, there never was a departure from that founding principle.
An Irish language radio service was introduced in 1972. A youth-oriented radio station in 1979 and, most recently, a classical music channel in 1998 - all now broadcasting 24 hours a day. A second television channel opened in 1978 and an Irish language service, Teilifís na Gaeilge began in 1996.
Commercial radio was introduced to Ireland in 1989, ten years after it was first promised. There are now a national channel, 24 local channels, several special interest channels and many community stations. Commercial television, initially licensed in 1990 came on air in 1998. TV3, which a half sister of your own TV3, is owned 45% by CanWest from Canada, 45% by Granada from Britain and the commercial broadcasters have done well they are a significant part of the broadcasting landscape in Ireland.
The funding of public broadcasting followed the predominant European model - a combination of licence fee and advertising. Throughout much of RTÉ's life these sources were broadly in equilibrium although the RTÉ Authority or Board of Governors consistently cautioned against the extent of the dependence on commercial revenue. A prolonged period without any adjustment in the licence fee from 1986 to 2001 changed all that. The sharp decline in the real value of public funding coinciding with what turned out to be a temporary growth in advertising revenue meant that public funding came to represent less than 35% of all income, with commercial revenue accounting for the rest - the inverse of the European norm. Inevitably, the centre could not hold and with the sharp increase in competition, the contraction of the Celtic Tiger economy, RTÉ ran into serious financial problems - cushioned for a time by the proceeds of the sale of its 25% share in the country's biggest cable operator. And our eternal gratitude ever since then has been due to NTL's acquisition strategy.
RTÉ had long been advocating a more ordered approach to the determination of funding levels, a structured system of accountability and a clear contract with the audience in relation to programme output. The past three years have seen extensive dialogue (if that's not too tame a word)with Government and a public debate through an extensive series of public meetings organised by RTÉ and through the deliberations of a Forum on Broadcasting established last year by the Government. In its report, the Forum strongly supported the continuance of RTÉ's role as the national public broadcaster. That that should be a central pillar of public policy, it reiterated the role of the licence fee as a funding mechanism, it rejected the suggestion that all or part of the licence fee should be open to other broadcasters and it urged that it be "erosion proofed" and it made several other recommendations, many of which were in line with proposals already made to it by RTÉ.
The outcome, in brief, was a set of Government decisions in December of last year which;
Politics and broadcasting will always, and should always, be in some kind of tension. The series of decisions taken last year- if honoured in the observance - should remove some of the political dimension from the question of funding. We shall see.
The real questions which we must face in any debate on the future of broadcasting are:
The context in which these matters come to be considered is ever changing. A feature of relatively recent times is the emergence of a view of the world which questions the existence of a range of public services or of public policy interventions and relies instead on the market to provide. Thus, it is argued that there is no need for public broadcasting; it is argued that in a world where values are increasingly commercialised, market forces should prevail; it is argued that, even if publicly funded broadcasting is permitted, the public broadcaster should be confined to those areas where the market does not have an interest.
Against that background and in a time of accelerating technological and social change, public policy formulation has to find a language which is adequate to this challenge. In truth, we rarely hear a discourse that is tuned to a social and cultural reality of broadcasting as a mainstay of healthy democracy, of citizenship and of personal development. How can we promote such a discourse? Well, we might begin by reminding ourselves of two basic principles that ought to guide wise public policy on broadcasting. The first principle is that viewers and listeners are individuals and citizens. From this it follows that the primary service of broadcasting must be universally available to all citizens. Like the right to go to school and to receive an education - which resembles broadcasting in being a powerful agent of social change operating through the personal experience of the individual - like education, broadcasting should be there for each and every one of us.
And like a good schooling, the primary service of broadcasting must aspire to offer the public the best that is available. It must be broad spectrum comprising high quality content, presented in diversified schedules. In other words, it must be capable of both popular outreach and specialised appeal. It must serve the public's interest. Its news and current affairs must be independent, authoritative, impartial, reliable. It must include minority interests in its mainstream offerings. It must be accountable to the citizens who own it and pay for it and it must reflect and renew the heritage and tradition of the society it serves. It must, then, be universally available, comprehensive, convocational and affirmative of each one of us as citizens and individuals. These are the measures, the criteria of public service broadcasting.
Competition is the second principle. The primary service of broadcasting must flourish in a competitive world. Competition is a good thing: there are many reasons for agreeing that this is so. In broadcasting, competition is important because it offers the possibility of extending diversity by offering the consumer substantive choice. And it is that offer of substantive choice that constitutes the measure, the criterion of genuine, meaningful competition in the public interest. But, of itself, a plurality of providers will not guarantee a diversity of services.
The starting point for public policy is that broadcasting is not just a commodity. It has a value, it has a social role, it has a community influence. It does not always reflect that but it has that capacity. Public policy cannot be indifferent to it. This does not mean that there should be some Orwellian attempt to shape, limit or control all that people can see or hear but it does suggest that one of the functions of public policy is to ensure that there exists within the community a genuine range of services.
If the twin principles of citizenship values and breadth of choice are accepted as being significant and necessary, it cannot be an adequate response to rely on the market to deliver the goods.
Communities need to have a sense of themselves and the capacity and opportunity to express that sense of identity - that sense of self. There must be a frame of reference that is recognisably and distinctively ours, not in any chauvinist sense but at the very basic level of recognising that the human experience is found in and framed by the communities of cultural and social reality in which we live. Children must grow up with a sense of the world that relates in some way to their own existence and experience. People must know what is happening in their own communities, where the power lies, how decisions are taken, what the political process means and how it works.
It will be an impoverished approach to the formulation of public policy generally which will not attach weight to these considerations. If this is so, it follows that public policy will want there to be a comprehensive range of content which will reflect the full range of programme categories, which will reflect all interests, which will be available to all. That cannot and should not be dependent on commercial decisions alone. It seems to me axiomatic that if you take seriously a view of broadcasting in society, then public and commercial broadcasters must operate side by side - representing a balance in the range of services offered, each with different roles and of which the audience will have different expectations, but neither one confined nor limited in terms of the material it can offer the audience.
Related questions of public policy are:
There is no easy prescription or formula for the level of funding but it is relatively easy in any given set of circumstances to determine what is required. The essential requirement is that it be adequate. Debate rages in many countries about how public funding is best provided - by licence fee, by exchequer grant, by a central fund to which all can apply, by a charge on general taxation. All are or have been used. I do not intend to propose policy options for New Zealand but I believe from Ireland's perspective that the Irish Government took the right decision last December in accepting the Forum Report which concluded that the continuation of the licence fee, index-linked and regularly reviewed was the best and most appropriate course for us.
The other issues are, in relative terms, easier to resolve. I said earlier that there will always be a tension between broadcasting and politics but a key requirement of public policy is to allow critical decisions about broadcasting to be taken on a detached and professional basis. Each country has its own needs, its own imperatives in terms of its broadcasting services. It is not beyond the wit of human ingenuity to identify the mechanisms whereby they can be articulated in an achievable fashion. Broadcasters will have a real sense of audience needs and interests; public policy will have a legitimate role in setting out what the community is entitled to expect. And each has to recognise the entitlements of the other in this process. An important task for public policy is to cause the right questions to be asked and an important responsibility is to use other than exclusively quantitative indices to measure performance. Responsibility follow funding. Funding follows purpose, therefore it there is a public purpose there must be appropriate public funding and if there is public funding there must be clearly defined public responsibility.
There are some other elements of relevance to public policy on which I would like to touch:
All the foregoing issues of policy concern the public broadcasters as well but there is a set of issues and challenges which bear very specifically and very directly upon broadcasters who discharge a public purpose.
The first and obvious challenge is that the world has changed and continues to change, with rapid and continuing growth in competition now an established fact. There are, for example, up to 250 channels available in Ireland, perhaps a few more since I began to speak. This, frankly, is not the biggest issue which we face. Of course, it's a problem. It represents a challenge in maintaining audience and revenue but, in the same way that the rain falls equally on the just and the unjust, so this phenomenon affects everybody. Competition is good: choice is good. We look for it in all other areas of our lives; why should broadcasting be different? It poses one particular challenge for public broadcasters, however, because they cannot respond in the same coin. Virtually all the new competition is from commercial interests but public broadcasters cannot reply in the same wholly commercial way.
I have already referred to the changes in the value systems around us and the commercialisation of the approach to almost everything. This may be part of a process which will see the pendulum swinging the other way in time but, for now, it is a fact of life. It is not sufficient to adopt a superior attitude. It is necessary to develop and to articulate responses which assert the contrary view. I have tried to address the question of justification in these remarks and I remain adamant in my view that the market alone is not an adequate source to meet the audience's needs. The laws of the market are important but the laws of the market are not divinely ordained. There is no divine ordinance which suggests that market rules should be normative in terms of the provision of public broadcasting - that the market should say this is how things ought to be.
One of the very basic tests or challenges for a public broadcaster is to want to be one. If the public charge is a burden; if one is being led, as it were, reluctantly to school; if the public responsibility is in some way perceived as a restraint on more "normal" commercial behaviour, then perhaps it's time to consider a different profession. Maybe one is being called to a different life. To be successful, the public purpose must be that around which the very concept, the structure, the funding, the obligations and the perspective on the world are built.
Perhaps the most evident, and at once the most complex, of the challenges for a public broadcaster, if it is dual funded, is how to square the circle of public remit and commercial resource. Can you be a public broadcaster in your schedule with commercial revenue in your bank account? Can your schedule be public in its character if it is partly commercial in its funding? Does the funding shape the content?
There are no easy answers. Dual funding is a well-established reality in many states. It is not the extraordinary, exceptional thing that some like to represent it as being. In many cases, especially in small countries, it was and remains a practical response to real situations. If advertising alone were the funding source, how would the public responsibility be provided? How would you guarantee plurality from a small economy? If public funding alone were the source, how could the small population guarantee the comprehensive range of services without the economies of scale? This issue was easier to resolve in other times when competition was less widespread and when the measures of success or failure were less influenced by market criteria.
It remains, however, one of the decisive tests. Is the hybrid possible? I believe that it is. It becomes progressively more difficult but all my experience in Ireland tells me that it is still possible. While it is much easier to be wholly funded by one or other source, the public remit and commercial revenue are not mutually exclusive. This is not about being competitive; because being competitive is neither necessarily nor exclusively about being commercial. A wholly publicly funded broadcaster will have a responsibility to seek for audiences to justify the public money. This is really about values. And the challenge is to adhere to the values while living in a very real and very commercial world.
This brings us to the challenge by which day and daily the audience will judge performance - what is in the schedule? Some of these thoughts are echoes of themes already touched on in my earlier remarks but the challenge for the broadcaster is to hold on to the principle in the daily task of schedule building. Lord Reith's trinity of inform, educate and entertain was a ringing declaration in its day but no broadcaster today, public or private, can claim the formula as its sole preserve. What continues to be clear however, though, is that there is widespread approval and desire for broadcasting whose defining characteristics are not determined by commercial conditions alone and the tests of the schedule for me include:
In sum, having a schedule which is rich in local production, less dependent on acquired content, relevant to the lives of the audience, rooted in the community it serves and is distinctly different.
An abiding challenge for the broadcaster is to place the audience at the centre of its universe. The audience comes first. This includes, crucially, believing in the audience and placing trust in their ability to have a sophisticated view of the role that broadcasting plays in their lives and of what they should expect from public broadcasting. It means engaging with the audience through the schedules but also engaging in direct dialogue with them, being close to their minds and preoccupations, knowing their priorities, keeping them fully informed about the issues which confront broadcasting, helping them understand the decisions that are made and defending their right to comprehensive schedules.
Public broadcasters must come to terms in a comprehensive way with the requirement to be open, transparent and accountable. To be open so that the public understands where the funding goes; to be transparent in financial and other reporting; to be accountable in the sense of holding themselves open to account for their stewardship of important public bodies.
A concomitant responsibility is to be prudent in the use of all its funding, to return value to the public, to recognise that using public resources imposes a greater duty of care than does using your own or your shareholders, to be effective and efficient in managing the organisation and to expose oneself to the rigour of comparison with other broadcasters.
It must be realised that certain limitations come with public funding. It is for a particular purpose. It is not a subsidy for other areas of activities. It has implications for the extent to which the schedule can be "commercialised" - the greater the level of public funding, the more the commercial potential is diminished (and by the same token the less valid commercial are the criteria to evaluate the broadcaster). The funding must not be used to diminish the capacity of a competitor broadcaster but that does not mean that it cannot be spent on programmes which people will want to see and hear. I believe that everybody who is serious about public service broadcasting fully understands all these issues but there is a challenge to make that fact appreciated.
Perhaps the greatest challenge of all is to hold one's nerve, to hold fast to the values and the principles, to recognise that being challenged is normal, to fight the good fight and to keep the faith. There is no easy way. Maintaining public broadcasting intact will be a struggle but "say not the struggle naught availeth" and let us remember that Albert Einstein, a man who knew something about figures, said "not everything that counts can be counted"
In the overall scheme of things the 1870's are not a long time ago. Bell had invented the telephone, and Edison the phonograph. People juggled these new technologies in their minds and produced visions of the future. Towards the end of 1878, Punch magazine carried a remarkable cartoon depicting a new Edison invention called the "telephonoscope". The cartoon showed family members who were literally a world apart communicating with one another in sound and vision: parents in England seated at a widescreen, seeing and hearing their daughter in Ceylon. That was 125 years ago.
We have just a few years ago left the century in which those imaginings became realities, bringing about unprecedented changes in our cultural experience. When we imagine the technologies of the future, what we must also try to think critically about is their cultural impact, their significance for how we make sense of our lives, both private and social. This is the really important human consideration. In 1913, the novelist E.M. Forster published a short story entitled The Machine Stops and in that story he foresaw with precision the wired world and the electronic home that is now within our grasp. What he also saw was the human implications of such progress and the cultural challenges arising from the technology. These are the truly difficult things to ponder.
And while our focus today is not on questions of technology the same human, social and cultural questions are at the core of the debate about public service broadcasting.
Steve Maharey: Thank you very much Bob for that wonderfully clear articulation of the principles of public broadcasting and for exposing so clearly some of the challenges and issues that we face.
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