The first poll is by Ipsos-Reid, and asks

Thinking specifically about the CBC…which of the following two statements is closer to your own opinion?

The poll is poorly worded, since the options are not mutually exhaustive. One might think CBC is independent, but it still matters who appoints the Board of Directors. (It reminds me of the get-out-the-vote campaign in West Wing, Season 4, where will changes one kid’s sign from “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, make sure you vote”, to “No matter who you vote for, make sure you vote”).

A similar question was asked in 1999 by a different polling group (Compass); at 35%, the percentage replying “independent” was much lower.

Most of the time, I think that’s the right perspective.

Recently, however, I’ve been looking at PSBs as corporations, with all the associated paraphernalia of corporate governance. The results have been interesting.

PSBs can be divided into two types: dual board, or single-board.

German PSBs have dual boards: a massive, supervisory board (aufsichtsrat), composed of upwards of twenty members representing civil society, and a much smaller executive board, led by a generalintendant. Something like France Télévisions, by contrast, has a single board of five members, with a President/CEO.

Until now, I’ve viewed the institutional choice between single- or dual-board structures as a political one: where politicians choose a dual-board structure, they do so because they believe this structure provides a buffer against political pressure, and because they want to insulate the PSB from such pressure.

What if these choices aren’t made with conscious objectives in mind? What if, instead, politicians just follow examples drawn from other fields?

In corporate governance generally, we can draw a line between three groups (Hopt, Klaus J., “The German Two-Tier Board”, in Hopt, et al, Comparative Corporate Governance (Oxford, OUP):

• single board countries: UK, USA, Ireland, former British colonies, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece
• dual-board countries: Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Scandinavia;
• mixed countries: Eastern Europe, France, Belgium

If the corporate governance of PSBs reflects national practice rather than political views about the desirability of independence, then we should expect single-board countries to have single-board PSBs, dual-board countries to have dual-board PSBs, and mixed countries to plump for either. What’s the evidence like? Of the twenty-nine PSBs for which I have access to the legislation, here’s the breakdown:

• single board PSBs (11): USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, Spain [post-reform], Portugal, Greece(?), France, Bulgaria
• dual-board PSBs (18): Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain [pre-reform], Italy, UK, Ireland,

The fit is not bad. Three dual-board countries don’t fit: Italy, UK and Ireland; no single-board countries don’t fit. There are some countries whose systems of corporate governance I don’t know enough about to decide whether their placement is accurate (Israel, Japan, Chile).

Some tentative conclusions:

• PSB governance may be strongly influenced by more general corporate practice;
• those countries which could have opted for either system chose dual boards;
• the choice of governance for the BBC and RTÉ was contrary to corporate practice;
• It nevertheless seems to have been a good choice, with both broadcasters enjoying a better reputation than TVNZ, ABC, or (especially) the CPB in the USA, at least in this author’s judgement;

Therefore, the dual-board model may be preferable for public broadcasters, squaring the circle of accountability and independence.

Granted, it’s from 1986. But still, it’s tremendously useful. I don’t know why the Fondazione Gramsci and the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi have copies, but I’m very glad they do.

They key data – on spontaneous and prompted responses to judgements on Rai – are as one might expect:

• Rai is “an instrument in the hands of the leading class” [unprompted response]: 9.3%, a marked increase over the past ten years
• Rai is “an organisation controlled by a few political parties” [prompted category]: 41.9%, five points down from ten years before;
• Rai is “an organisation of the government” [prompted category]: 24.6%, five points down from ten years before;
• Rai is “an organisation controlled by all the political parties”: 20.4%, two and a half points up from 1979, or before the birth of RaiTre
• Rai is “an organisation outside of politics”: 4.1%, a marginal increase over ten years previously

So, Italian citizens judged [quite correctly in my view], that Rai was a political organisation; that it was controlled by an agreement between some parties, and not per se by the government or the entire political class. Let’s take “outside of politics” as being equivalent to “independent from politics”. If that’s the case, then the 4.1% of Italians who judge Rai to be politically independent is much less than the 42% of Britons who judge the BBC to be politically independent.

Unfortunately, the question wasn’t asked for different channels, so there’s no direct way of telling whether journalists from France Televisions are judged less independent, say, than journalists from TF1. (One could run cross-tabs on main channel watched and perceptions of independence, but the link would be tenuous).

In general, the news isn’t good for France Televisions: whilst in 1989, 43% of respondents cited either France 2 or France 3 as their most trusted source of television information, compared to 33% who said the same of TF1, the gap has now swung in TF1’s favour, with 41% citing it as their most trusted source, compared to the joint total of 35% for France 2 and 3, with the latter gaining impressively.

The most pungent contribution came from David Elstein, who argued that the market was capable of fulfilling these normative functions. The two strands of his argument were (1) that during the period of moderate competition in the UK media market in the second half of the twentieth century, private suppliers – ITV – made programming of high quality, including high quality news and current affairs, and (2) that, in any event, the end of spectrum scarcity means that diversity and pluralism will be secured even better in the future by new private entrants. Consequently, the normative justification for public service broadcasting – or at least, publicly funded broadcasting – is no longer operative, and public funding for the BBC should dry up.

I do not share Elstein’s optimism about the capacity of private suppliers to supply large amounts of merit programming; but I think that even if his argument were correct, the policy prescriptions he seeks would not be forthcoming. Politicians – perhaps because they are avid consumers of one of the most obvious types of merit programming, news and current affairs – have not been willing to tolerate gradual elimination of PSBs. Even in those countries where the public service broadcasters have most manifestly failed their remit, in Italy and Spain, governments have been willing to refinance these broadcasters, at some considerable cost to their Treasuries, at times of difficulty (1993 and 2006 respectively).

It might be thought instead that funding for PSB is contingent on continued high audience share and high audience reach, with PSBs who fall below a certain percentage share condemned to ghettoisation and reduced funding streams. If this is the case, the technological developments noted by Elstein may represent a problem for PSBs. If each additional entrant into the television market reduces PSB share and/or reach by a certain amount (even if the marginal amount is constantly decreasing), will the PSB still retain sufficient share or reach to command a claim to public finances? Or, if new means of communication reduce the relevance of television as part of overall media consumption, will PSBs claim a large enough share of this broader media market to lobby sucessfully for continued public funding?

If, as I believe, the continued rude health of PSB depends more on these more prosaic and measurable features of the media market than on notions of quality and the provision of merit goods, what are the current facts regarding PSB audience share?

First, when people want news and information, they turn to television. From the Eurobarometer surveys, we know that 70% of people in the EU15 watch television news every day. That’s more than the 41% of people who read a newspaper every day. When people actively look for information on politics in the EU, for example, television is cited as the most commonly used source by 65% – 73% of respondents; newspapers and radio still edge out the internet, and the gap remains several percentage points.

We also know that, when they turn to television, people still turn to public service broadcasters. The European Audiovisual Observatory publishes data on the audience share of television channels across Europe. Of the 19 PSBs in Old Europe (broadcasters in the EU15, plus Norway and Switzerland, plus linguistic PSBs in Belgium and Switzerland), nine have increased audience share over the period 1995 – 2004; ten have decreased audience share. This is no artefact of the competitiveness of the media market in these countries – increased audience share was found in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, and Norway, which all have high take-up rates of digital terrestrial and satellite television.

Moreover, PSBs are not losing audience share dramatically. Only four PSBs – Radio e televisao de Portugal (RTP), RTÉ, Sveriges Television and Osterreichische Rundfunk - have lost more than one percentage point audience share a year, and only RTP has slipped below the symbolically important 25% figure.

Finally, some PSBs have built up major web portals. The BBC News website is the eighth most visited in the world, and the only one in the top ten to provide content (the other is Microsoft). Italian PSB Rai has been less successful: it lags behind other domestic telecoms groups (Telecom Italia; Wind; Kataweb; RCS) but stills beats its commercial competitor Mediaset. Consequently, should internet media consumption be rivalrous with traditional television and or radio consumption – and evidence on news consumption in the United States suggests that it is not – then PSBs can be well placed to meet the threat.

In conclusion – for those considering it, it’s still worth writing a thesis on public service broadcasting, and still worth reading one. PSBs retain significant audience share and are not losing it fast enough for obituaries to be taken out of deep freeze.

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