Voice of the Listener
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VLV International Conference Report

VLV's 10th International Conference, held on 11th February 2005 at the Royal Society London, had as its theme the future for Public Service Broadcasting in Europe and the Commonwealth.

Adam Singer, Content Board Member, Ofcom, speaking in a personal capacity, opened the first session of the day which was devoted to considering the impact of digital technologies. In a barnstorming speech which stressed that although public service broadcasting was as relevant as ever, it was in need of a serious re-invention. Technology, Singer argued, was transforming broadcasting and the only certainty would be a falling cost-line where digital technologies became increasingly cheaper and bandwidth increasingly broad. The age of digital music downloads would eventually be followed by digital television and film downloads. The key to public service broadcasting would be how to find relevant content and he suggested that a key task for the future would be the creation of a public service electronic programme guide, which enabled people to find the content they wanted to view or listen to.

Adam Singer speech Adam Singer speech (filesize is 66k).

A very different view of the world came from K S Sharma, Chief Executive of India's Prasar Bharati Broadcasting Company. The state of economic development in India, he explained, meant that the country lived in four centuries at the time and public service broadcasting had to provide information for people who had no access to information at all. Ken Clark, CEO of the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation, provided an overview of a plan to create Fiji Public Television and the potential for a Pacific Island TV network covering a vast geographic area from the Solomon Islands to the Cook Islands. The final speaker in this session was George Valarino, General Manager of the Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation, who described how under the pressure of unregulated satellite television, GBS was increasingly focusing on local programmes.

Dr Verena Wiedemann, Head of European Affairs, ARD, Germany, was the first speaker in the second session of the day, and painted a picture of public service broadcasting on the defensive in Germany. The combination of economic uncertainty in Germany, and what she described as a new 'neo-liberal' agenda by the new EU commission, meant that some for-profit broadcasters were seeking to restrict the ability of public service broadcasters to play a full part in the new media revolution.

Dr Verena Widermann speech

Karol Jakubowicz, Chairman of the Council of Europe CDDM Committee, told the Conference that it would be ideology and not technology which determined the future of public service broadcasting. He outlined three ideological approaches: I) Full Market - where public sector involvement in broadcasting is not needed; ii) Market Dominance - where the market does not satisfy every need, but public service broadcasting must not compete with for profit broadcasting; iii) Market/Public Balance - where the community has a duty to provide a supply of what people need as citizens and this can be provided by public service broadcasters.

Karol Jakubowicz speech Karol Jakubowicz speech (filesize is 41k).

In the final contribution to the session on Europe, Nicola Frank, Deputy Head of the EBU Brussels Office categorically asserted that public service broadcasting needed to play a full part in new media technologies. However, the next few years would see a major debate on the European level about whether this was possible. At the heart of this debate would be the future of the 'Television without Frontiers' directive and how broadcasting would be treated in any revisions to the Services Directive. In any discussions about 'liberalising' services, broadcasting, she said, needed to be treated as a distinct service and not lumped in with other services.

Nicola Frank speech Nicola Frank speech (filesize is 495k).

Session Three: Is News and Current Affairs safe in the hands of Public Service Broadcasters?

In a question and answer session, chaired by John Owen, Executive Producer, NewsXchange and Visiting Professor of Journalism at London's City University, delegates heard the differing approaches to journalism of leading broadcasters. Paul Gibbs, Programme Director of Aljazeera International, said that the brief of the new English language service of the news network would be based on 'covering the world from the world'. The service, which is to be launched in November 2005, will have no 'home' news, and hubs in Dohar, London, Washington and Kuala Lumpur. Nigel Chapman, Director BBC World Service, stressed that the BBC's 50 bureaux around the world allowed the BBC to make broadcasting that people trusted. The BBC's journalism, he said, had to be based on facts and evidence. News, Chapman said, had to be objective, independent and produced with transparency at its heart, which meant being able to own up to mistakes. Nick Wrenn, Director London Bureaux CNN, explained that CNN International had a global agenda, and had a separate editorial process to the USA's CNN station.

The final session of the conference examined how citizens could be more active in determining the future of public service broadcasting. Jamie Cowling, from the IPPR, outlined the history of governance and regulation of broadcasting in the UK. This, he said, had been marked by paternalism, where the great and the good chose what the people should watch. However, the present day demanded a 'bottom' up' approach, where government and regulators needed to work with people. Manfred Kops, of the University of Cologne, did not agree with either a bottom up or a top down model. Rather, the strength of public service broadcasting in many senses reflected the strength of civil society. The problem was, he said, that in many parts of the world civil society was not strong. Moreover, whereas the market was international, civil society was local or regional, and so could not present an effective counter-balance to the power of the market.

Manfred Kops speech Manfred Kops speech (filesize is 117k).

Vladimir Gai, Chief, Communications Development & Endogenous Production, UNESCO, described public service broadcasting as being "editorially independent broadcasting" and highlighted the importance it had in providing access to information and knowledge. Over 1 billion people around the world had no access to even a radio, and this was a major challenge facing mankind.

Vincent Porter, VLV Board Member, concluded the Conference by describing what he thought should be the priorities for VLV and other listener and viewer bodies around the world.

• 1. To help PSB re-invent itself for the digital age
• 2. To ensure that public service broadcasters are adequately funded
• 3. To develop links with other bodies engaged on strengthening civil society
• 4. To broaden the work of VLV and other bodies to Europe and the rest of the world

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