Document Type

Article

Rights

This item is available under a Creative Commons License for non-commercial use only

Disciplines

Media and socio-cultural communication

Publication Details

Irish Studies Review, 15:3

Abstract

Public service broadcasters are centrally concerned with the making and remaking of the public, negotiating the bounds of publicness and generating place-specific publicity. In recent times the relationship between public broadcasting and public broadcasters, as dedicated institutions, has become problematic. Recent discussions regarding the potential distribution of public service licence fees and the desired institutional depth of European public broadcasters point to the overall ambiguity with which the form of an institutional presence for public service broadcasting (PSB) is now regarded. The debate regarding the necessity of maintaining an institutional presence for public broadcasting has been in gestation since the earliest days of cable and satellite. However, in the present circumstances, as we move towards a market-driven, international, digital broadcasting environment characterised by increasingly fragmented delivery and consumption patterns, the institutional design of public broadcasting and its place in a new policy settlement has been opened up for re-interpretation. The present essay will interrogate how this issue has been played out in the Irish context. As new legislation is developed to create the basis for a unified regulator for the broadcasting sector it is increasingly clear that another major reassessment of the institutional basis of the broadcasting sector in Ireland, and what configuration of institutions will best deliver PSB, cannot be far behind. The essay will consider the challenges of shaping institutional consonance in a new media landscape. It will then briefly consider how the question of institutional design has been dealt with historically in Irish broadcasting, explore the values implicit in its legislative status, recount recent moves towards the repositioning of the public broadcaster, RTE´ , in an emerging policy settlement and evaluate potential developments within this settlement.

Download

Share

COinS