High Ground Shakes In Public Broadcasting Debate

Michael Hedges April 13, 2011 Follow on Twitter

Public broadcasters have long drawn fire from private commercial competitors for audiences they attract and the money they spend doing it. The biggest public broadcasters have managed to fend off serious attacks on their financing and mission claiming the high-ground of public service, staying well above the hoi polloi of commercial media. Critics claim it’s just not right.

Sweden’s public broadcaster Sveriges Radio (SR) holds a dominant position in the country’s broadcast landscape and has for decades. Private sector broadcasting, made legal in the mid-1990’s, has had an impact with television, far less with radio. SR is financed through a household license fee. Successive Swedish governments, shifting right and left and right again, have struggled with media policy.

Two Swedish parliamentarians – Lars Beckman and Carl-Oskar Bohlin - challenged the public broadcaster’s reach in an article published in media website Medievarlden.se (April 6). Both Mr. Beckman and Mr. Bohlin are members of the center-right Moderate Party, largest of the governing coalition. They called for other members of parliament to resist the “intensive lobbying campaign from representatives of Sveriges Radio.”  The Swedish Parliament is beginning its evaluation of SR ahead of a full funding review.

“What, then, is the public interest in this matter,” they questioned. “It must be that we create a level playing field between media companies in Sweden.” They noted that between 1993 and 2010 private sector broadcasters paid about SEK 2.1 billion (roughly €230 million) in concession fees while SR received SEK 35.9 billion (roughly €4 billion) in license fee funding through the same period. They favor eliminating the concession fee for private local radio operators and allowing national radio licenses.

It isn’t a lobbying campaign, wrote SR Director-General Mats Svegfors and Deputy Director-General Cilla Benkö in Medievarlden (April 8). The meetings they had with MP’s were but “public discourse on matters of common concern.” Mr. Beckman and Mr. Bohlin are, they complained, “effectively asking us to shut up.”

“Public service (broadcasting) will serve journalistic ethics instead of, as it is ultimately with commercial media, serving economic ethics,” they argued, invoking the time-worn divide. Faced with funding questions from legislators public broadcasters have, figuratively, invoked the specter of Rupert Murdoch turning their media into tabloid hell. Until recently, that fear has been quite effective.

The row continued: “We do not know why Mr. Svegfors and Ms Benkö are so angry,” wrote Mr. Beckman and Mr. Bohlin in the same publication (April 11). The MPs suggested the SR executives might be insulting journalists of private television TV4 as well as those working for private local radio. They noted that local newspaper publishers have been critical of competition from SR websites. “Do you have any understanding of the criticisms that come from other media companies in Sweden,” they asked.

The SR executives fired back, also in Medievarlden (April 12), saying they, too, believe the concession fees paid by private local radio are unfair. Saying they didn’t understand the MPs policy on public broadcasting the debate ended, for now, with the rhetorical:  “Is the demand for a 'level playing field’ between commercial radio and public service (broadcasting) other than to simply dismantle the public service?”

The most recent TNS-SIFO radio audience survey (November-December 2010) showed SR’s market share 68.2%, up from 66.5% one year on. Private local radio’s market share fell to 26.2% from 26.6%.

In December Culture Minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth tightened rules on new ventures for Swedish public broadcasting, generally in line with European Commission decisions. “Through radio and television (license) fees (public broadcasting has) stable and secure funding,” she said in a statement (December 16, 2010), “while competing in a market where other companies have to survive on a commercial basis. All State aid is, of course, a distortion, which can be justified as long as companies keep their activities within the framework of their mission. But distortion of the market must not be disproportionate.”

SR DG Mats Svegfors called the new rules “devastating of the organizations’ creativity.”

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