The Public Service Publisher - an Obituary

In 2005, the British communications regulator Ofcom released its review of public service broadcasting (PSB), the remit governing the majority of broadcasters throughout British broadcasting history. While supporting a continuing role for PSB in a digital era, Ofcom found that the arrangement whereby commercial broadcasters provided public service programming in return for access to the airwaves was breaking down because of the declining value of analogue spectrum in the run-up to the switchover to digital television. In this situation, Ofcom, as the body with statutory responsibility for ensuring broadcast diversity and with specific oversight over commercial channels, concluded that the BBC was likely to end up as the near monopoly provider of PSB. It therefore recommended the creation of a new competitive supplier of PSB content, a Public Service Publisher (PSP), whose role would be to facilitate the creation of innovative and publicly engaged material

Diversity, Distribution, and Definitions of ?Media?

Typically discussion around media pluralism has focused on the variety of content available to consume, using the tools of internal and external diversity: external diversity has been linked specifically to media ownership, and internal diversity to regulation. In reality, the boundaries are not so clear-cut. The focus of this chapter is on structural controls, whether seen as regulatory or competition-based: either by providing for specific limitations on media ownership, or by including pluralism or public interest considerations in the general merger regime. Although competition regimes themselves have changed ? reflecting a greater emphasis on economic analysis alone ? over the years there has been a preference towards general regimes and market-led approaches. Thus, Harastzi (2011, p. 9) argued that, ?[i]n the digital and Internet era, with the number of accessible channels and audiovisual platforms multiplying by the year, urgency for detailed regulation ? the bulk of which is aimed at avoiding political domination ? will fade.

Representing citizens and consumers in media and communications regulation

What do citizens need from the media, and how should this be regulated? Western democracies are witnessing a changing regulatory regime, from "command-andcontrol" government to discursive, multistakeholder governance. In the United Kingdom, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) is required to further the interests of citizens and consumers, which it does in part by aligning them as the citizen-consumer. What is meant by this term, and whether it captures the needs of citizens or subordinates them to those of consumers, has been contested by civil society groups as well as occasioning some soul-searching within the regulator. By triangulating a discursive analysis of the Communications Act 2003, key actor interviews with the regulator and civil society bodies, and focus groups among the public, the authors seek to understand how these terms ("citizen," "consumer," and "citizen-consumer") are used to promote stakeholder interests in the media and communications sector, not always to the benefit of citizens

Citizens and consumers: discursive debates during and after the Communications Act 2003

The regulation of media and communications in the UK has recently been subject to reform resulting in the creation of the Office of Communications (Ofcom). This statutory body, established by an Act of Parliament, is a new, sector-wide regulator, protecting the interests of what has been termed the ‘citizen-consumer’. This article charts the discursive shifts that occurred during the passage of the Communications Act through Parliament and in the initial stages of its implementation to understand how and why the term ‘citizen-consumer’ came to lie at the heart of the new regulator’s mission. By critically analysing the various alignments of ‘citizen’ and ‘consumer’ interests within the debates, the underlying struggles over the formulation of power, responsibility and duties for the new regulator and for other stakeholders – industry, government and public – are identified. The article concludes that the legacy of these debates is that regulatory provisions designed to further the ‘citizen interest’ contain significant and unresolved dilemmas

Hierarchy to homeostasis? Hierarchy, markets and networks in UK media and communications governance

The author considers propositions that market and network governance are supplanting hierarchical governance in contemporary UK media and communications, Liberalisation of media and communication markets, adoption of new public management in publicly owned bodies, “outsourcing” of regulation from statutory to self-regulatory bodies and “fourth way” co-ordination of Internet institutions suggest that the importance of markets and networks as potentially “homeostatic” modes of governance is growing. However, hierarchical governance remains important, the Communications Act 2003 prescribes more than 260 duties for the statutory regulator, Ofcom, and the BBC makes a major intervention in broadcasting markets. All three forms of governance fail in distinctive ways and the author argues both that the potential for network governance failure is less well recognised than are market and hierarchy failures and that the complexity of established governance arrangements itself constitutes a distinctive form of failure of governance