THE MARKET AND PUBLIC SERVICE

Underlying the foregoing discussion has been a tension that will run through the rest of this work, namely the struggle within broadcasting between market and public service values. A failure to identify, acknowledge and address this tension is likely to undermine any attempts to regulate. The public service tradition in Western Europe has served to insulate the media partially from what are perceived as the worst excesses of market forces. Certainly, European (and especially British) television output as a whole has historically been generally compared favourably, in terms of diversity and quality, with the US equivalent which has developed in the absence of a strong PSB tradition. That the insulation from market forces in Europe has been only partial, however, is evidenced by the experience of Italy, where the rise to dominance in the 1980s of Berlusconi in commercial broadcasting occurred in a regulatory vacuum which allowed the marginalisation of the public service tradition, representing what Humphreys describes as ‘a case of market faits accomplis in the absence even of formal or symbolic regulation’ (Humphreys 1997). A similar, though less marked trend is perhaps also suggested by the arrival of the then Channel 5 in Britain in the 1990s (now known as Five), though the latter example must be viewed alongside the continued existence of four other channels which remained essentially within public service traditions.