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Marketisation has undoubtedly posed the greatest challenge to European public broadcasters, which have been compelled to adapt to competitive entry. According to Hultén and Brants (1992: 117-8), three possible strategies became apparent for

public service institutions: 1.) adaptation, which means competing with more or less the same logic as commercial stations, running the risk of diluting or abandoning the traditional public service. Hultén and Brants name RAI in Italy and RTVE in Spain as examples of broadcasters which have chosen the adaptation strategy; 2.) purification (also commonly referred to as the ‘Monastery Model’ (Aslama 2006: 22; Bardoel and d'Haenens 2008: 344)), restriction to public service only, which means withdrawing from competition and concentrating on programmes which the commercial channels do not prefer to offer, resulting effectively in marginalisation of PSB. Application of this strategy has been very limited, although commercial broadcasters and opponents of PSB frequently present this as the only fair model of modern PSB. France and Germany have introduced some thematic public service channels, such as Arte and 3SAT, and; 3.) compensation, which is the middle way between the previous two strategies, avoiding both the logic of commercial television and the role of marginalised cultural enclave and concentrating on the strengths of established public broadcasting.

While several scholars have suggested that accelerated commercialisation has prompted public broadcasters to adopt a programming strategy that imitates that of their commercial competitors (Ang 1991: 103-4; Dahlgren 1995: 13-4; d'Haenens 2001: 111), empirical evidence indicates more elaborate responses to the competitive entry. Syvertsen (1992), Siune and Hultén (1998) and Bardoel and d’Haenens (2008:

340-44) argue that the vast majority of public service broadcasters have chosen the compensation strategy, trying to balance between traditional public service values and commercialism. In addition, Siune and Hultén (1998: 29) and Brants and De Bens (2000: 18) argue that there is insufficient evidence to support the so-called convergence hypothesis, which stipulates that competition will gradually make public service and commercial channels increasingly alike. Experiences from European PSBs point rather towards a divergence hypothesis: public service channels and their commercial rivals emphasise different content segments, with public service channels stressing their fortes of e.g. news, current affairs and domestic fiction. Empirical research on Finnish television supports this argument: while Hellman’s (1999) study demonstrated that certain convergence had taken place in Finnish broadcasters’

strategies in the 1980s and 1990s, Aslama et al. (2004: 126-7) concluded that the strategies of public (YLE TV 1 and TV 2) and commercial (MTV3 and Nelonen) channels had been increasingly diverging in the 2000s.

The new competitive market, together with the aforementioned transformations in the interpretation of public service, has forced PSBs to redefine their relationship with their audiences. While they were responsible mainly for political elites during their monopoly/duopoly era, the commercial market has necessitated PSBs to consider the multiple markets of television: the popular, political, technological, business and professional markets (Lowe and Alm 1997: 169-91; Hellman 1999: 26-7). In seeking legitimacy for their privileges, the previously dominant tradition of paternalism that was based on a priori, normative knowledge on audience ‘needs’ has been replaced by increased awareness to the presumed ‘wants’ of the mass audience (Ang 1991:

103-4). Ang (1991: 103-4) refers to this practice of measuring audience preferences by audience ratings and viewing shares as ‘ratings discourse’; a system which is naturally geared at audience maximisation. Syvertsen (1992) argues that public service institutions have been forced to adopt a dual role in the post-monopoly/duopoly broadcasting landscape: they are simultaneously institutions providing a public service in the same sense than public libraries do and media corporations operating in a competitive media market. Balancing between these two roles requires them to constantly compromise between the potentially contradicting requirements of each domain: they are obliged to maintain their popular support – commonly measured by audience figures – while simultaneously fulfilling their social and cultural public service duties (Hellman 1999: 27-9; Mäntymäki 2006: 34).

Contrary to the scenario of Ang (1991: 103-4), rather than leading to a straightforward consumerist paradigm within public service institutions, empirical evidence suggests that they have adopted more elaborate frameworks for audience preference measurement than those simply based on ratings. However, quantitative audience measurements such as ratings and reach nevertheless play a key role in PSBs’

considerations. How much they are weighed over cultural and social externalities depends on each individual case. For example, empirical research of the viewing of

Yleisradio’s programmes has, since the 1980s, been conducted all but exclusively by its own audience research unit³. Its primary methods have mainly comprised quantitative research on audiences. Such an approach is considered to have a legitimate status in assessing the relationship between the broadcaster and the audiences, while the validity, significance and generalisability of qualitative research on individual media experiences is commonly challenged in the political discourse (Yleisradio Oy 2004: 12; Mäntymäki 2006: 27).

Public service institutions have recently introduced methods of assessing their impact that extend beyond conventional tools of audience measurement. In its 2004 report Building public value: Renewing the BBC for a digital world (BBC 2004) the BBC introduced a new concept; public value, as the measure against which its performance was to be measured. Introduced by the Harvard University professor Mark Moore in 1995 and combining a mix of economics and management theory, the concept and approach sought to improve the accountability and efficiency of public enterprises through a more pronounced framework for public value measurement (Coyle and Woolard 2010: 5-6). The public value of a public service was defined to include three components: value to individuals, value to society as a whole and impact on the performance of the wider commercial market (i.e. net economic value) (BBC 2004: 29). The BBC, the report states, contributes to public value in five main ways: by producing democratic, cultural, educational, social and global value. The realisation of these objectives will be measured by a number of diverse measures in four categories that the BBC considers to be ‘the main drivers of public value’: reach, quality, impact and value for money (see figure 2.3) (BBC 2004: 87). In contrast to the paternalist discourse of the traditional public service paradigm, the model contains several economic measures such as value for money that have little to do with the social and cultural value of broadcasting. By placing these measures to an equal significance with content measures, the model accepts that economic interests of the consumer are equal to those relating to citizenship, much in the same way that the

3 The unit was closed down in 2006 as part of the corporation’s cost efficiency programme (Mäntymäki 2006: 27).

Communications Act 2003 paralleled citizens and consumers (Doyle and Vick 2005:

86). This indicates that the BBC has, to an extent, accepted the aforementioned interpretation of public service as broadcasting in the service of the listeners/viewers.

Figure 2.3: The BBC model for measuring public value

(Source: BBC 2004: 87)

In terms of evaluating positive externalities of programming, such a mixed method approach for public value measurement does not waive problems associated with the complexity of the accurate measurement of public value, especially from minority interest point of view. A key question can be raised whether this model can appropriately allow for social and cultural externalities of a programme, as these externalities – together with the values and objectives associated with them – are hard to quantify (Steemers 2003: 127). While certain programmes have impact on smaller audiences, the positive externalities they produce may be significant and extend beyond boundaries of the audience group. The model also features systemic bias against certain low-reach programme genres whose cost per viewer is high (e.g.

arts and religious programming), as the reach, impact and value for money of these programmes are low in spite of the significant cultural, educational and social externalities associated with them. Thus, the model employs elements of the ratings discourse that are antithetical to the values of PSB and risk placing these minority interest genres to a lesser position to genres that enjoy a more widespread

acceptance amongst audiences. By mixing quantifiable concrete measures such as audience size, weekly reach and cost per hour, with abstract hard-to-measure content features such as impartiality, trust and impact, the system risks of bias towards the former, as they provide concrete information in numerical form about programme

“performance”. The use of ‘[a]udience share and volume […] as indicators of programme or service impact’ (BBC 2004: 83) is also problematical, since audience figures are heavily dependent on factors like scheduling and audience inheritance, as will be examined in chapter 6.