National Conversations: Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity in Europe

National Conversations

National Conversations:

Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity

in Europe

Edited by Karina Horsti, Gunilla Hultén and Gavan Titley

First published in the UK in 2014 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2014 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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ISBN 978-1-78320-175-4

ePDF ISBN 978-1-78320-285-0

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: National Conversations: Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity in Europe

Karina Horsti, Gunilla Hultén and Gavan Titley

Section 1        The Rise of Diversity and Transition to Public Service Media: Complementary Perspectives

Chapter 1:     Diversity, Broadcasting and the Politics of Representation

Sarita Malik (Brunel University)

Chapter 2:     The Cultural Diversity Turn: Policies, Politics and Influences at the European Level

Karina Horsti (University of Jyväskylä)

Chapter 3:     Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity: European Regulatory and Governance Frameworks

Tarlach McGonagle (University of Amsterdam)

Section 2:        Policies, Practices and Future Directions: National Case Studies

Chapter 4:     Between Diversity and Pluriformity: The ‘New Style’ of Dutch Broadcasting

Isabel Awad and Jiska Engelbert (Erasmus University, Rotterdam)

Chapter 5:     Struggling With Multiculturalism? Cultural Diversity in Flemish Public Broadcasting Policies and Programmes

Alexander Dhoest (University of Antwerp)

Chapter 6:     Ireland, the ‘Migration Nation’: Public Service Media Responses Between Discourse and Desire

Gavan Titley (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)

Chapter 7:     A Vulnerable Diversity: Diversity Policies in Swedish Public Service Media

Gunilla Hultén (Stockholm University)

Chapter 8:     The Politics of a Multicultural Mission: Finland’s YLE in a Changing Society

Karina Horsti (University of Jyväskylä)

Chapter 9:     The Multicultural Mission in Public Service Broadcasting: The Case of Norway

Gunn Bjørnsen (Volda University College)

Chapter 10:    Estonian Broadcasting and the Russian Language: Trends and Media Policy

Andreas Jõesaar and Salme Rannu (Tartu University)

Afterword:    ‘And That’s Goodnight From Us’: Cultural Diversity and its Challenges for Public Service Media

Andrew Jakubowicz (University of Technology, Sydney)

Index

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the Publications Committee of the National University of Ireland for their generous grant in support of this publication.

Introduction

National Conversations: Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity in Europe

Karina Horsti, Gunilla Hultén, Gavan Titley

Introduction

This book is shaped by an awareness of the somewhat paradoxical position of public service broadcasting (PSB) and public service media (PSM) in Europe. As has been the case in most western European contexts since at least the 1980s, PSBs face a significant and intensifying range of challenges: digitalization and convergence, audience fragmentation and transnationalism, fragile funding models and ideological relegation. However, the consistent and often intensive contest over their relevance and mission, even in a world of communicative abundance, suggests that for many they still represent a normative vision of what mainstream media ought to strive to achieve in terms of pluralism and societal representation. In-depth examination of PSB and PSM institutions, strategies and programmes remains critical to media analysis, both because of their continuing centrality in national polities, but also because discussions of public service, by their nature, open up a range of further interesting questions about society, media ecology, technology and politics.

One such critical question is that of recognition and representation in societies characterized over time by migration and settlement, and by public debates about difference, belonging and legitimacy. This book aims to explore the shifting landscape of PSB and PSM in relation to migration, sociocultural change and the politics of ‘diversity’. Focusing on how public service media have re-interpreted their general mission to foster both ‘national conversations’ and a pluralist spectrum of perspectives in migration societies, it positions media developments as a lens on sociopolitical change, and as implicated in some of the most fractious political debates in contemporary Europe. In turn, by examining how institutional shifts towards ‘diversity’ and ‘integration’ policy and programming are inseparable from wider pressures relating to digitalization, neo-liberalism and audience fragmentation, this book positions the politics of diversity as a lens for understanding the ongoing transformation of public service broadcasting and media.

The thematic chapters in the first section place contemporary issues and debates in an historical context in Europe, and develop the political, theoretical and policy issues engaged in the empirical studies gathered in section two. These nationally-focused empirical case studies analyse the responses of public service media to the politics of representation shaped by migration and cultural diversity, in a context where economic and technological changes have further complicated the ethos of public service broadcasting, and where the dominant European political emphasis on ‘integration’ (see Guild, Groenendijk and Carrera 2009) manifests specific demands for national broadcasters.

All that is solid?

Central to the development of national radio, and subsequently television services in the early to mid-twentieth century, public service institutions have proved remarkably resilient. It has been a commonplace in both academic literature and public debate for decades that their marginalization, if not demise, may be inevitable. In part this is because the dominant organization of public service broadcasting through significant national institutions has resulted in structures that are symbolically associated with the western nation-state itself, and with the public culture of representative democracies. A combination of monopoly conditions and ideological conviction allowed for several postwar decades of national pre-eminence in most sites, where, as Hallin and Mancini note, ‘broadcasting has been treated as part of the res publica, as an institution whose influence on society is too great to be left under the control of private interests’ (2004: 164). Even allowing for distinctive national differences, the centrality of a public interest mission has been based, according to Jay Blumler’s early 1990s summary, on the shared foundations of comprehensive remit, generalized mandates, emphasis on diversity, pluralism and range, and a self-consciously cultural and political role (1992).

The cluster of reasons for the relative weakening of public service broadcasters, and the unsettling of the paradigm of public service, are also well known. As relative monopoly conditions rapidly dissolved in the 1970s and 1980s through broadcast deregulation, intensified and ideologically buoyant commercial competition, and the fraying and extension of national media spaces through cable, satellite and media globalization, the broadcasting landscape shifted irrevocably. According to Papathanassopoulos and Negrine:

While in the past they [PSB] might have been regarded as part of the infrastructure of informed democratic polities, untouchable and permanent, they have long ceased to be the only organizations of broadcasting that matter […] as these others [commercial competitors] provided news, sport and entertainment, the position of public service broadcasters began to erode, as they often lost their share of the audience, and their sole access to sources of public funding could be questioned.

(2011: 25)

This line of questioning has, of course, intensified in a digital media era where the rapid convergence of information and communication technologies (ICTs), telecommunications and broadcast media raises profound questions as to how public service remits could be re-shaped and meaningfully delivered in a multi-platform era. The ethical and pragmatic futures of public service in a digital era have, unsurprisingly, dominated both recent academic research and public discourse. In many sites, and particularly in the Nordic countries, commercial competitors have argued that the ‘mission creep’ of public service broadcasters into digital platforms and online services extends the historical unfairness of the compulsory licence fee into a convergent media environment where advertising is increasingly shifting online, and all revenue generation models are contingent and fragile. As against this, proponents contend that PSBs utilize long established methods of audience feedback and outreach, and that new modes of participation deepen an existing commitment to ‘connecting’ with the audience. The – uneven – digital strategies shaped in a context of competing for audiences in a multi-platform media environment, while seeking legitimacy for this expansive renewal, have resulted in the emergence of the label ‘Public Service Media’ (PSM) (see Donders 2012; Iosifidis 2012 [2007]).

The concept of public service media is not a precise analytical term or institutional description, and for this reason the studies in this book employ the concepts of public service broadcasting and public service media dependent on the context, content and medium. It is used to loosely describe an emphasis on modes of content delivery in a digital environment, as well as suggesting a more definitive, future policy project based on these shifts (Donders 2012: 2). The Council of Europe expert group on ‘Public service media in the information society’ frame this project as the deepening of democratic participation through enhanced digital capabilities for multi-layered audience reach and interaction, and where ‘PSM must increasingly strive to move away from one-way communication to reinforced dialogue and afford the public access to varied information as well as a possibility to engage and participate in the democratic debate’ (2009: 7). These extensive digital media possibilities, however, must be evaluated in a context where digitalization is seen, inter alia, to further erode the principled necessity for public service media. As Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Jeanette Steemers outline in their most recent Regaining the Initiative for Public Service Media (RIPE) study:

Although dark clouds are nothing new, the magnitude of this storm is stronger and more threatening. The public media sector is being challenged on nearly every front at the same time. Publics and politicians alike have come to see the commercial approach as the ‘normal’ way of organizing broadcasting. There are strong pressures for downsizing PSM organizations, limiting investment options, restricting online and digital opportunities, narrowing remits to genres and audiences that are not commercially attractive, and for implementing increasingly intrusive assessment procedures. The principles of public service in media no longer seem to resonate very widely, and there is growing criticism about a decline in PSM distinctiveness as these organizations compete aggressively with commercial rivals.

(Lowe and Steemers 2012: 3)

One dimension of this criticism suggests that the representative, and for many critics, paternalistic mission of public service broadcasting is fundamentally unsettled in a media era defined by dramatically increased participation in media production and content dissemination. For all their stated ideals in relation to the (interactive) audience, PSBs structurally inhabit one side of the divide between what Leah Lievrouw (2011) terms the ‘pipeline’ view, and the ‘frontier’ opened up by the precise affordances of the ‘new’ in ‘new media’ (widely available devices for generating and sharing meaning and content, widespread expectation of and engagement in new communication practices and activities, and the ‘larger social arrangements’ built in and through these possibilities):

The pipeline view tends to see media technologies and content in terms of property and gatekeeping, production and consumption; the frontier view is more likely to value reputation, credibility, creativity, reciprocity, voice, and trust as well as ownership, and to see media and information technologies as opportunities to create and communicate as well as consume.

(Lievrouw 2011: 3)

If the ‘increasing unknowability of the media audience in the digital age’ (Couldry 2012: 21) is added to expectations derived from cultures of interactivity and participation, it is clear that public service media face a dilemma in ensuring accountability and legitimacy, and retaining the public service core values underpinning their existence, when the nature of the public addressed is fundamentally altered. Yet as Nick Couldry notes, ‘in the multiple-outlet digital media era, centrality becomes an even more important claim for media institutions to make, as they seek to justify the wider value they provide’ (2012: 23). What Couldry discusses as an inevitable tactical response to communicative abundance also provides a suggestive basis for theoretical and programmatic re-imaginings of de-centred institutions. Graham Murdock, for example, has argued for more emphasis on communicative rights in conceptualizations of citizenship (1999: 28), and subsequently linked this explicitly to the central position of public broadcasting in providing the shared cultural spaces required for fuller participation (Murdock 2005). He attempts to redefine the role of public service broadcasting within what he calls a ‘digital commons’. In his view public broadcasting is ‘the principal node in an emerging network of public and civil initiatives that taken together, provide the basis for new shared cultural space’ through a commitment to ‘values of diversity and deliberation’ (Murdock 2005).

As Donders and Pauwels point out, public broadcasting does not itself guarantee the production of public service programmes (Donders and Pauwels 2012: 80). Thus a new ‘centrality’ must involve realizing core values such as respectful conversation with the audience, citizen empowerment and societal credibility (see also Bakker 2012). They conclude that the imperatives of market competition rather than public service values provide more of an incentive to public service broadcasters to develop digital services, but ultimately the provision of these services must be seen to extend an established mission rather than simply provide more digital services (Donders and Pauwels 2011: 92). Thus ‘regaining the initiative’ (Lowe and Steemers 2012) at a time of a ‘crisis in legitimacy’ involves developing new and diversified forms of funding, negotiating a balance between existing services and new, probably commercialized services, and reinventing public service media to include services tailored to digital media technologies and interactive platforms (Debrett 2009). Yet it will also by necessity involve engaging in sustained argument as to why a common communicative sphere is a necessity in a fragmented and individualized media environment, and why public service media can be trusted to organize it, given how problematic the realities of ‘pluralism’ have been in past iterations.

Legitimacy, representation and cultural diversity

It is widely acknowledged that the national media of daily newspapers and public service broadcasting have historically played a constitutive role in integrating citizens into everyday practices of national belonging, not through forced homogeneity, but through the ritual and repetitive definition of sociability, common interests, and what Michael Billig has termed the ‘banal nationalism’ of routine practices of shared belonging and communal heritage (1995). In a discussion of national media and ‘boundary work’, Roger Silverstone (2006) distinguishes between what he terms centripetal and centrifugal phases of broadcasting. In the decades when single or relatively unchallenged public service broadcasters dominated the national media space of western European countries, a centripetal power worked to reflect and shape boundaries of national and local belonging. In the centrifugal phase ushered in by, among other factors, deregulation, globalization and accelerated technological change, the integrative role of broadcasting and the national press is diluted, with the result that ‘this boundary work is becoming even more significant, if not more complex and challenging’ (2006: 19).

This book is concerned in large part with this question of ‘boundary work’ in a centrifugal mediascape. Public service broadcasting evolved from the 1920s onwards to provide programming ‘for all’, and to produce programming that speaks to an assumed national, cultural commonality, if not necessarily homogeneity. Particularly in smaller nation-states in north-west Europe, the centripetal drive underpins the goal of language maintenance. It remains a central driver of PSB legitimacy, and audiences appear willing to pay for the services from public funds on the basis that few other actors will provide adequate programming in national languages. In, for example, Finland and Norway, YLE (Yleisradio, The Finnish Broadcasting Corporation) and NRK (Norsk rikskringkasting AS, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) are the main providers and contractors for national and minority language production (Lowe and Steemers 2012). For public service media, boundary work in postcolonial societies such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands has long implied complex questions around ethnic minority recognition, representation and participation. In the other national contexts discussed here, in recent decades immigration and the attendant and fractious political questions of legitimacy and belonging have added a significant dimension to the re-anchoring of PSM in a ‘centrifugal’ phase.

John Ellis’s periodization (2000) of media systems may be specific to the United Kingdom, but it has a wider heuristic value in insisting on placing the problematically simplistic narrative of a shift from ‘cultural homogeneity to heterogeneity’ in wider sociopolitical relief. For Ellis, the high era of public service broadcasting is that of an ‘era of scarcity’, that of the post-war industrial state, mass consumer society and political projects of national consolidation. What he terms as the ‘era of availability’ is marked by increased commercial competition and increasing technical possibilities for media content delivery, but also by an increased awareness of emerging ‘post-industrial social formations’ and consumer society. Writing in 2000, his ‘era of plenty’, characterized by ‘time famine and choice fatigue’, describes an abundance that scarcely features the online and the convergent. However, what is important about such a schema is that it frames the general unsettling of the representative role of PSB by emphasizing the tension between institutional form and sociocultural formation. Holding on to such a framework lessens the temptation to regard migration and its implications as uniquely challenging to the ‘imagined community’, a reduction that is both sociologically inadequate and politically toxic.

That said, precisely because, as Arjun Appadurai puts it, no nation-state is ‘free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius’ (2006: 3), the process of recognition has always been fraught with political tensions. The studies collected here proceed from the fundamental recognition of what Ben Pitcher terms the ‘facticity of difference’, that is, ‘an already-existing sociopolitical reality of which cultural difference has become a defining feature’ (2009: 2). He continues:

the existence of cultural difference – whether understood in terms of race, ethnicity or religion – has become fully acknowledged as a constituent part of the societies within which we live today. In this most basic of senses, and irrespective of the extent to which it is tolerated, celebrated or condemned, multiculturalism describes the widespread recognition that we can no longer be in any doubt as to whether or not cultural difference is here to stay.

(Pitcher 2009: 2)

Yet this facticity is a subject of political discourse, and, more fundamentally, of mediation: it is shaped, framed and represented by media sources and channels; flows of information and opinion; images; stories and voices; headlines and sidelines; inclusions and exclusions; and so forth. As a consequence, it makes little sense in migration societies to argue as to whether media should ‘respond’ to migration and multiculture, as it is constrained to do so, explicitly or implicitly. The question, rather, is one of representation, or as Sarita Malik puts it in this volume, of ‘recognition in a media democracy tasked with equality of representation’. The idea of recognition has enjoyed a philosophical resurgence in recent decades, both in normative theorizations of multiculturalism (Taylor 1994) and broader explorations of social justice (Fraser and Honneth 2003). The close relationship between ideas of recognition and what is at stake in the ‘politics of representation’ is reflected in a significant literature within media studies. Nick Stevenson (2003), for example, summarizes issues central to the literature on recognition for communication theory:

Our integrity as human beings does not flow from our access to material resources, but is dependent upon processes of cultural domination (being represented as inferior), non-recognition (being excluded from the dominant imagery of one’s culture) and disrespect (being continually portrayed in a negative or stereotypical way).

(2003: 47)

The studies in this book examine media institutions grappling with the task of recognition, and they narrate experiences that are often strikingly similar, if unfolding at different speeds and intensities, and over varying time spans. In most cases, the initial paradigm of what was broadly termed ‘multicultural programming’ focused on ‘niche programming’ for specific groups, while also seeking to ‘explain’ minorities to the national audience. Almost uniformly, this generation of public service programming came up against a key question for recognition-based approaches: what happens if ethnic minority audiences do not find themselves adequately represented in the media work aimed at them and about them? Annabelle Srebreny’s (1999) study, Include Me In, conducted for the British Broadcasting Standards Commission, found that audiences are ‘multiculturally aware’ and experience their society as cross-culturally connected, and individuals’ lives as involving multiple attachments and identities. However they believe ‘that even the standard descriptions of minority ethnic audiences do not do justice to the cultural mixes in which people live their lives’ (Srebreny 1999: 3)

A similar study, Multicultural Broadcasting: Concepts and Reality (Millwood Hargrave 2002) – commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and several other media institutions – stressed a ‘general need to be seen’ and linked it to feelings of belonging in British society and increased understanding between communities. Inadequate representation was held to encompass questions of tokenism, negative stereotyping, and unrealistic and simplistic portrayals of communities. At the same time, policy-making and programme strategies are subject to political evaluation, and are porous to and sometimes influenced by wider political discourse, atmosphere and policy prerogatives. Several of the studies here reflect the point made by Simon Cottle, that ‘political ideas of assimilation, integration, pluralism, multiculturalism and/or anti-racism can all variously inform the regulatory frameworks and cultural climates in which mainstream and minority productions can either flourish or founder’ (2000: 17).

As approaches associated with ‘multiculturalism’ have been critiqued by audiences as too flat and limited, and within wider political discourse as exacerbating differences and undermining ‘integration’ (for a general critique see Lentin and Titley 2011), most of the studies are located within a paradigm of ‘diversity’. According to Yudhishthir Raj Isar (2006), diversity has become a ‘normative meta-narrative’ widely deployed

with a view to supporting the ‘right to be different’ of many different categories of individuals/ groups placed in some way outside dominant social and cultural norms, hence including disabled people, gays and lesbians, women, as well as the poor and the elderly.

(Raj Isar 2006: 373)

What must be noted however, is that merely supporting the right to be different tells us little about either difference or rights. In other words, institutional practices of diversity vary enormously, and diversity is a fluid idea.

Ben O’Loughlin’s (2006) study of the ‘operationalization of the concept cultural diversity in British television policy and governance’ provides a useful comparative analysis to the approaches contained here. In the 1970s and 1980s, policy debates centred upon issues of ‘including diverse and marginalised voices’ in the ‘national conversation’ by focusing on including a diversity of contributors and dedicated programmes, and on the politics of representation. Organized under the rubric of ‘multiculturalism’, programming energies were directed towards ‘recognising, and managing different – essentialised – identities and voices’ (2006: 3). By the 1990s, O’Loughlin argues, the idea of cultural diversity had begun to replace multiculturalism. Politically, there was an increased emphasis in the United Kingdom on discourses of ‘social cohesion’ in the aftermath of the Cantle report into the urban uprisings in northern England in 2001.

At the same time, ‘diversity’ was seen as congruent with governmental requirements to develop individual capacities in complex societies and competitive ‘knowledge economies’. Thus by the 2000s, the ‘concept of cultural diversity as a mode of thinking about identity’ was informed by the need to have ‘plural overlapping conversations within and across the differing political, social, cultural and economic spaces within which people living in Britain are located and locate themselves’ (2006:3). Concomitantly, it involved a shift to a ‘flowing concept of cultural diversity’ where the ‘policy goal has been to increase the social capital of individuals in Britain as a means to ends such as democratic renewal, social cohesion, and economic productivity’.

As the studies here detail, within European public service broadcasters, diversity is understood as a series of commitments to ‘diversify’ across three key areas: in programming (questions of representation and plurality of voice), in employment and in organizational development (training people to appreciate/learn from diversity). Diversity frameworks have provided what Håkon Larsen (2010) terms a ‘legitimation strategy’ for public service broadcasters, promising to reconcile this dimension of their public mission with the exigencies of commercial competition and audience share. In general, multicultural formats have been replaced by strategies designed to develop ‘cross-cultural forms’, as dedicated formats are seen not only as having a limited relevance to more diversified minority audiences, but also to represent a politically unacceptable parallelism. Similarly, the focus on ethnic minority recruitment is to a significant extent being replaced by the idea of diversity as a reflexive ‘competence’ – a way of perceiving and working that any journalist or broadcaster can cultivate.

Andra Leurdijk (2006) has conducted qualitative research with producers in Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom; and to a lesser extent, with producers in Finland, Ireland, Italy and Sweden. ‘Multicultural programming’ emerges as a fluid category underpinned by an educational message: ‘In general programmes are based on the assumption that cultural diversity and multicultural society are not (yet) sufficiently or adequately represented in the programme schedules and require separate attention, special staff and dedicated time slots’ (Leurdijk 2006: 27). At the time of her study, in all but the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, multicultural programming was based around the allocation of dedicated programme slots, a situation that has shifted, in large part because of the criticisms her research investigates: dedicated slots are seen as box-ticking, limited television, and in some instances, as a compromising of quality standards. When the contemporary politics of ‘integration’ are added to this picture, it illustrates why the smaller public service broadcasters featured here are moving away from conventional slot-based magazine programmes to various forms of ‘integrated’ approaches.

‘Cross-cultural appeal’ is a notion that combines the aspirations of a unifying public service with a sharp awareness of the competitive environment, and drives programme makers to ‘search for subjects of common interest or to find clever ways of presenting a subject in such a way that it appeals to viewers with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds’ (Leurdijk 2006: 30). In this context the ‘strong individual story’ has emerged from the putative suffocation of group-based representation, where a focus on personalities, experiences, emotions and human stories is regarded as the necessary basis for ‘cross-cultural’ programming. As many studies here explore, the hybrid generic possibilities of ‘reality television’ formats has centred a focus on daily life, modalities of social existence and stories of ‘exceptional people’, to an extent that viewers are familiar with the idea that ‘the particular stands for general social or human problems and displays something about present-day multicultural societies’ (Leurdijk 2006: 34).

While these new approaches are widely contrasted with the overly ‘paternalistic and educational’ approach of magazine and slot-based programmes, it may not amount to more than substituting a commodified, cosmopolitan, lifestyle ‘diversity’ for the equally flat, if less sexy, world of ‘multicultural programming’. Similarly, while the individual particular story may say something about wider social experiences and relations, just as easily it may not – this is a function of treatment, not merely form. As Leurdijk concludes:

Multicultural programmes do not necessarily imply a specific political stance, philosophy