Week 7: Public Media

"The difference between commercial broadcasting and public broadcasting is the difference between consumers and citizens." Nigel Milan.

This is the quote that opened our 8th week of JOUR1111 classes. Evidently, after looking at commercial media last week in class, the natural progression was to public media.

Last week we learnt that commercial media is profit-driven media production and fails or succeeds on business success.

Public media is a completely different ball game. One definition of public media is:
"In general, a media whose mission is to serve or engage a public... Increasingly the term "public media" is less associated with taxpayer supported media; it may be for profit as long as its ultimate aim is to serve the public and not to turn a profit." WGBH Educational Foundation Conference.

This is a very suitable and clear definition and I've included it because it is relevant and modern.

As I said in my last post-lecture blog, I think there is a place in the landscape of Australian media for both commercial and public media. Commercial media may be profit driven but that means that it must attract a large amount of viewers to be successful, public media is not profit driven and thus has different goals for the media it produces.

Public media must have 'public value', which makes it an important form of media for the public.
Public value', according to the BBC, is defined as:
1. Embedding a public service ethos
2. Value for license fee money
3. 'Weighing public value against market value'
4. Public consultation

This public value ensures that public media is conveying information that means something or should mean something to the public. It also means the public has a say in what they view which is an important feature of public media (although public consultation is likely not limited to just public media).

Finally, I really appreciated the advantages and disadvantages that were raised towards the end of the lecture because I hadn't considered all of them before.

Advantages for public media included:
- serious
- broadcast style
- importance over interest
- considered (not quick or unchecked)

Thus, when watching public media we know that they are giving us information that is important and considered relevant to society at that point in time. They're not going to be talking about who punched the paparazzi or which 'celeb' is getting a face-lift. Also, their information is thoroughly checked before it is published/broadcasted and most of the time this means the information is more accurate and reliable. Additionally, public media could also be said to have more connections through government sponsors and thus can often access information that commercial media cannot.

The disadvantages of public media were listed as:
- boring
- elitist
- of limited interest
- poorly presented
- out of touch

The other side of having a serious, broadcasting style is that it can be considered boring. Personally, I often get bored when watching public media. Also, although I know the information being discussed is of public interest, it often doesn't interest me. The 'out of touch' comment is interesting to me. I can see how this could be argued since the information that is presented is said to be due to importance rather than interest but I think this means that the information (whilst of limited interest to certain individuals) is not out of touch. Rather it is in touch with what is relevant to Australian audiences at the time but they're simply not interested in those particular topics or they want more flashy stories to read about.

It may be hard for public media to stay true to it's traditional form since now commercial media is also producing news, but I think it's important that it tries to. Otherwise we will not have enough variety in our media which is always important.

Finally, the last point I'd like to discuss is the effectiveness of public media being a government watchdog. The slide read "There is a tension between being a watchdog of the government while being allocated funds by the government. It has to 'bite the hand that feeds it'."

This point is of upmost importance. It's hard to imagine that public media can be totally unbiased when it is receiving financial support from the government. Public media is considered to be a fair, reliable source of uncensored (within reason) media but it's hard to believe that it can be totally impartial when it is discussing it's sponsors.

I learnt a lot from this lecture because it opened my eyes to the 'behind the scenes' of public media and made me realize that public media has is drawbacks too.