Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

The consequences of European media policiesand organisational structuresfor cultural diversityResearch position paper 1By Denis McQuailProfessor emeritusUniversity of AmsterdamIntroduction: on cultural diversity and media policyDiversity has long been an important goal of media policy and a criterion for evaluatingmedia performance in many countries, although often under other namessuch as pluriformity, pluralism or multiculturalism. Its origins are generally to befound in democratic social theory and in the critique of media monopoly, especiallyin the years after the second world war, when most European press systemswere threatened by a strong wave of newspaper press concentration. Initiallydiversity was mainly interpreted in political terms, because press monopolytended to favour conservative or “bourgeois” parties. 1 Another impetus was giventowards the promotion of diversity as a value by the institution of public broadcasting.In many countries, public broadcasting was explicitly required to representthe diversity of the national society according to a number of dimensions. 2Moreover, the promotion and protection of diversity came to be seen as a primaryjustification of the broadcasting monopoly. According to Hoffmann-Riem (1987),“the public service philosophy of broadcasting (…) is oriented towards the accessibilityof pluralistic information for citizens and society rather than the freedomof communicators.” When commercial television was introduced in much ofEurope, there was much emphasis on cultural diversity in national licensingconditions.Media systems in Europe are often rooted in certain historic cultural divisions.This is evident in countries such as Belgium and Switzerland which have quiteseparate media for the different language communities, and also in countries withstill flourishing (regional) minority languages (and cultures), such as Spain or theUnited Kingdom. Elsewhere, the ideal of “media cultural diversity” was supportedon grounds of political, religious and local/regional divisions. The Netherlands isan example of a historically “pillarised” national society, with a vertical politicalreligiousstratification reflected in social life and in media policy and structure.__________1. See Picard, 1985.2. See Hoffmann-Riem, 1996.73