Jean Seaton: A service the market could not deliver
From a speech by the Professor of Media History at Westminster University on public broadcasting
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.We've had this strange beast called public service broadcasting, which I would suggest has allowed us to have discussions about ourselves and programmes about ourselves and things that delight us and amuse us and are trivial and funny and all of those things in a way that the market itself would not have borne and would not have encouraged because some of those things have to fail, some of those arguments have to not work, some of those kinds of ways of addressing us can be very successful but you don't know they're going to be successful till they start. Public service broadcasting has pulled the range of programmes which we have had available.
It is not something that is neatly opposed to the market. Markets have their own internal life. There is no such thing as a pure market. In a sense, public service broadcasting has set up a particular kind of market in which people have still had to fight for audiences, they have still had to fight for revenue, they have still had to fight to attract your attention. They've just competed to make better programmes rather than competing to produce the cheapest possible programming for the largest possible audience.
I often think of us in Britain as the uneasy occupants of a housing estate on the edge of a global village, insecure in our new houses. We need diversity. We need programmes that address us as we really are, not as people have fantasies about us, and we need policies that address the reality of the broadcasting market situation. We do not need various ministerial fantasies, nor, indeed, technowobblers' fantasies about how the market might perhaps develop.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments