New study on PSB in multiethnic states

16 May, 2008

During the launch, two of the editors of the publication, Sandra Bašić Hrvatin and Mark Thompson, presented some of the project's findings and the questions they raised.

Mehmed Agović, director general of BHRT, the public service broadcaster, spoke about the great challenges that confront BHRT in a context where the public service broadcasting system mirrors the highly decentralised constitutional arrangements in the country. Frane Maroević, director of communications at the Office of the High Representative, discussed the difficulty of defining the 'public interest' in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and suggested that this helps to explain why the public has apparently been so reluctant to see the public service broadcasters as their institutions. Amer Dzihana of the Mediacentar presented the findings of a separate research project, analysing the political paralysis that has blocked the development of public service broadcasting in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Open Society Fund Bosnia & Herzegovina website presents his research.

The research presented in the publication Divided they fall was supported by the Open Society Institute (OSI), in the framework of the TV across Europe project carried out by the Media Program and EUMAP.

Divided They Fall: public service broadcasting in multiethnic states

In the beginning, broadcasters were national. Their purpose was to strengthen the political establishment by serving the dominant concept of national identity. Over several decades, the idea of ‘public service broadcasting’ emerged from beneath this stiff cloak to become one of western Europe’s gifts to civilization. Public service broadcasters (PSBs) evolved, in the best cases, into institutions that truly served the public interest – which sometimes has to be defined against the government of the day.

Despite its shortcomings, public service broadcasting is still the only model that can fulfill the commitments which all European governments have made to support cultural pluralism and diversity, and the media rights of minority groups. Yet PSBs take their shape and ethos from the states and societies that sustain them. So what happens when there is no single public to serve? Or, more accurately in some cases, when factional elites prevent publicly-funded broadcasters from trying to serve a single public? Can public service broadcasting ever help to convert ethnic division into ethnic difference?

These kinds of question underlie Divided They Fall: public service broadcasting in multiethnic states. Media experts from Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Macedonia and Switzerland describe their public broadcasting models and practices. In the Introduction, the editors argue that PSBs have a choice: they can either underwrite ethno-cultural differences, by confirming audiences in their static sense of ethnic belonging; or they can ventilate those differences by exposing them to debate, with all the risks that this may entail.

Media coverage of Divided They Fall:

"Politics often involved in functioning of public RTV systems", FENA