The Public Sphere and the Media: Market Supremacy versus Democracy

Abstract

Public service broadcasters face a severe dilemma. The neoliberals' aim is to weaken the public service broadcasting sector, by cutting into its audience share with commercial sports and entertainment channels and thus delegitimising the obligatory licence fee or tax share which provides its revenue; then to reduce its tax income, or licence fee where one exists; and finally to privatise it, or force it to depend on voluntary subscriptions, like American public service broadcasting, and become marginal and irrelevant. Public service broadcasters no longer feel confident that the socialist or social-democratic parties are going to defend them. Will these parties insist that audience share is not to be the measure by which public service broadcasting is judged? So far the left has, on the whole, not sufficiently gasped the seriousness of the problem. The aim of this essay is first to suggest why, then to describe in outline the way market forces are commodifying the media and closing down the public sphere, and finally to sketch very briefly the sort of alternative which the left needs to focus on and fight for.