It’s Not So Easy Being a European Public Broadcast Executive These Days. Was It Ever?

Philip Stone April 25, 2005

One EU investigation ends as another begins, budgets are cut, laws are changed, not to mention strikes, and let’s not forget the occasional blasphemy charge.

After a six-year investigation the European Commission (EC) dropped some good news on public broadcasters in France, Italy and Spain that it was ending its investigation of their finances, but their governments had to promise to implement rules that ensure public money is not used to subsidize commercial operations.

But dropping one investigation just gives the EC more resource, with experience, to start another -- it has warned public broadcasters in Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands that by using the license fee to fund online and other commercial activities that they are violating EU rules on state aid.

The EC wants every country with a public broadcaster to publish a formal definition of the public service remit. It also wants independent bodies established to ensure those remits are followed. The bottom line is that the EC does not want public broadcasting funding to subsidize activities not related to public service broadcasting.

Italy has already implemented the rules, Spain has gone part way and says it will enact all changes by the end of the year, and although the French have yet to do anything they have promised to implement all recommendations within two years.

There was an added twist for Spain – the government had to agree to stop its annual guarantee to make up the debts of state broadcaster RTVE, and that could seriously affect what RTVE can afford to do in the future.

Commercial networks throughout Europe have been getting angrier by the second at what they see as public money being spent by public broadcasters to subsidize competitive commercial online operations and TV advertising. And the EU is sympathetic to their complaints.

The EU issued rules in 2001 that allowed state aid for public service broadcasting, but that money was not to be used to gain an unfair competitive advantage within commercial ventures. And the EU is cracking down where it believes those rules are being flouted.

Public broadcasters in Switzerland, Slovenia, Britain and Portugal are also in the spotlight for different reasons.

The Swiss public broadcaster - SSR-SRG idée suisse - has announced plans to cut its terrific Swissinfo Internet service to the bone, eliminating some 80 jobs in a quest to save some €10 million annually. The Swiss eliminated their shortwave services in 2004 after 70 years of transmissions with the announcement that the Internet was by far a better (and less expensive) way of getting Switzerland’s message out to the world.

The service, written in nine languages, is about as good as one will find on the web today as an example of how a public broadcaster can develop multimedia, multilingual skills to provide news about its country to the rest of the world. If the cuts are implemented the service would be reduced to being just in English, and with far less information than now

SSR-SRG said it took the decision to reduce Swissinfo when the government announced it would stop funding it. It may well be that SSR-SRG managers figured a good defense would be a good offense, and it didn’t take long after their announcement for the Council of Swiss Abroad – an organization that represents some 600,000 Swiss living abroad – to condemn the move.

Then the Swiss Parliament’s foreign affairs committee got in the act and by a 16-7 vote said the SSR-SRG should not cut the service. But the committee did not get into how Swissinfo could be financed. The Traffic and Communications Commission is reviewing the broadcasters decision in May and there will be further discussions in June as Parliament debates a new television and radio law.

And talking of new laws, the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has protested to the Slovenian government over a proposed new law affecting public broadcasting that it says could compromise editorial independence.  The EFJ said the Culture Ministry, without consultation of professional organizations or civil society groups, has published changes to the current law that it had called a model for other post-communist countries.

The new law gives the Director General, a political appointee, more authority over senior editorial jobs.  “We fear that this backward step for media freedom is dangerous and unacceptable in a country that entered the EU last year and that is considered as one of the few new member states where transition from state broadcasting to public broadcasting was likely to succeed,” claimed Arne Konig, EFJ chairman.

Meanwhile, at RTP in Portugal journalists held a three-day strike trying to get negotiations underway for a collective bargaining agreement. And in the UK, BBC workers are planning various stoppages to protest plans to cut around 4,000 jobs.

In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi is trying to form a new government after having been slaughtered in regional elections. Just the week before his Finninvest holding company sold off 16.4%  of its stake in the commercial television company Mediaset. 

One reason given by Berlusconi’s financial advisers for the sell-off was the criticism he has received that via his Mediaset holdings and his political control of public broadcaster RAI that he controls some 90% of the Italian television advertising market.

RAI was to have been partly privatized by the summer, but with the political uncertainties now surrounding a new Berlusconi government, there’s no telling how this might affect those plans. The opposition, led by former EU President Romano Prodi, favors seeing RAI split into two companies – one financed by the license fee offering public service broadcasting, and the other financed by advertising revenue.

And finally back in the UK where a total of 63,000 viewers complained to the BBC over its airing of Jerry Springer—the Opera.  The show, which was a big hit on the London stage, had more than 200 separate occasions of heavy swearing, at one point had Jesus Christ dressed in a diaper, and then there was the dancing Ku Klux Klan dance number.

Christian groups protested before and after the broadcast, but some two months later the BBC Board of Governors complaints committee ruled the broadcast did not breach editorial standards, codes or guidelines.

That didn’t go down well with the Christian groups, either. They are now seeking a judicial review on whether the BBC has violated its charter in regards to taste and decency and also they are claiming a violation of Article Nine of the Human Rights Act covering freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

And, for good measure, since Scotland still has laws on the books against blasphemy, although there has been so such prosecution since 1843, Operation Christian Vote has written to Scottish prosecutors asking they charge the BBC.

Oh, the joy of being a public broadcaster!