Can anyone outline some arguments in favour of and against Public Service Broadcasting please?
Here’s a couple of arguments…. For: It acts as an objective public forum away from vested interests, e.g running a story against a particular brand would impinge on the likelihood of them advertising with the broadcaster if it was commercial you could argue would consumer affairs programmes exist on commercial channels? Largely not. Nurturing Home grown talent. Many commercial channels rely on imports – how many times has Friends been repeated on E4 for christ’s sake – as programmes are cheaper to import than make from scratch, with psb they have the budget and the remit to ensure that a percentage of their programming are from domestic producers in the BBCs case not only from England but Wales and Scotland. There are also arguments of the quality of programming, commercial channels look purely at profit the cheaper the programme the greater the return for investors. With psb profits are of no consequence so investment in “quality” programming that yield little profit are possible. A
