A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD

CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD
The report – and indeed the Inquiry on
which it is based – is specifically focused
on television and not radio. It would not
be possible nor desirable to wrap them up
together given their different production and
consumption dynamics. We have focused on
television, above all, because it is the preeminent
and most popular media form and
thus the one that occupies a central place
in both the popular and the policymaking
imagination. We sincerely hope that others
will take up the challenge of launching an
investigation into radio’s enduring appeal –
it too has refused to die – and how best to
secure its future in the digital age.
We use a number of different and overlapping
terms in the report and we hope that this
will not confuse readers. Our main area of
concern is television and, in particular, public
service television (PST), a system of television
broadcasting that continues to be subject to
specific forms of public regulation in return
for particular benefits. The organisations that
have traditionally delivered PST in the UK are
public service broadcasters (PSBs) but, as our
report shows, this is likely to change as new
sources of public service content (PSC) start
to emerge. Instead of looking forward simply
to a future of public service broadcasting
(PSB), we attempt to consider how best to
secure an ecology in which public service
media (PSM) – organisations that produce
both linear video and non-linear, interactive
digital content – will play a central role.
The report is based on the findings of an
eight-month long Inquiry that organised
meetings all around the UK and took
submissions from a wide range of
broadcasters, academics, civil society groups
and campaigners. We did not commission
any large-scale audience research or content
analysis in part because of a lack of time but
mostly because we were fortunate to benefit
from the existing, high-quality research
carried out by organisations including
Ofcom, Thinkbox, Enders Analysis and Oliver
& Ohlbaum. We wanted to reflect, above
all, on “the nature of good broadcasting in
a democracy”, as Richard Hoggart, one of
the key architects of the Pilkington report,
put it, even if that debate takes place in
very different technological and political
conditions to those that shaped Pilkington.
According to Hoggart: “We could not enforce
our judgments scientifically; we could only
say at the end…‘This is so, is it not? Our
readers could say ‘Yes’; or ‘No’.” 23
We expect that some of our readers will
say ‘yes’ to our recommendations; some
will agree with at least a few of them;
while others will issue a vociferous ‘no’. We
will, in all likelihood, be accused of both
exaggerating and underplaying the pace of
change, of being too soft or too harsh on the
BBC, of being too timid or too unreasonable
in some our prescriptions. We welcome
this difference of opinion as, after all, the
Pilkington report itself was heavily criticised
in parliament and in the main newspapers
of the time. Hoggart recalls that one ITV
executive “gave a party in his garden at which
copies of the report were put to the flames…
Other [newspaper]s threw every dirty word
in their box of cliché abuse at us: ‘nannying…
elitist…patronising…grundyish…do-gooding.” 24
The language is likely to have changed in
the last 50 years but we nevertheless look
forward to a spirited debate about how to
improve and democratise what remains one
of our central preoccupations: the telly.
23
Richard Hoggart, A Measured Life: The Times and Places of an Orphaned Intellectual, London: Transaction, 1994, p. 62.
24
Ibid., p. 60.
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