Reinventing Public Service Television for the Digital Future. Mary Debrett. Bristol, England: Intellect, 2010. 253 pp.
There has been considerable ink spent in recent years bemoaning the dour outlook of traditional public service television broadcasting in the face of growing competition from digital commercial services. Mary Debrett, a senior lecturer in media studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, takes a different tack to that competition by examining in some detail the ongoing story of six major public service broadcasters in four countries.
Chapters deal with Britain (the BBC, of course, but also Channel Four), Australia (ABC as the national broadcaster, and SBC, the Special Broadcasting Service, which centers on indigenous people), the United States (the Public Broadcasting Service), and New Zealand (Television New Zealand). Such a choice is obviously quite narrow—all these countries speak (largely) English and are industrial democracies. Inclusion of such developing regional powers as Brazil, India, or perhaps South Africa might have produced more generalizable results.
Three chapters—the first and the last two—take a broader approach and apply some of the specifics of each service to a more general sense of where things stand with public broadcasting a decade into the new century.
Despite its fairly narrow focus, this is still a useful assessment that finds much to be positive about, as opposed to traditional handwringing. There is no question in these case studies that the old established order is under strain and changes are coming. What worked for the legendary Scottish broadcasting pioneer John Reith and other leaders in the 1930s no longer applies. But Debrett argues all is far from lost. To varying degrees, each of these services is filling a vital part of its country’s news menu—and likely will continue to do so, albeit perhaps with more commercial and less governmental support in years to come. And changes in financial support will clearly be reflected in the programming offered.
That Debrett works “Down Under” helps her to restore a bit of balance in the ongoing discussion of the issues she assesses. Her three chapters on public service broadcasting developments in Australia and New Zealand, for example, will provide largely new information to many of her readers.
Rather than focusing on the more typical menu of European services, the English-centric nature of the six broadcast services discussed here does demonstrate how different public service broadcasting can be, even in nations with a high degree of shared culture and history.
Christopher H. Sterling
George Washington University