Mass media: Broadcasting

.Types of organization of broadcasting systems
This section is concerned with the various different approaches to the organization of the broadcast media, which differ from country-to-country. Broadly speaking, it has until recently been conventional to distinguish three forms of organization:

.The American ('free market') Model
- a 'market-oriented' model. This is the archetypal capitalist or 'free market' organization of the media. Their main purpose is to make money. To make money, they have to maximise their advertising revenue. To do that, they have to maximise their ratings. To do that, they have to give the public what they want. This is why the American broadcast media are often criticised by Europeans for producing 'rubbish', cheap programmes which attract large audiences - games shows, chat shows, soaps and 'infotainment' such as the Oprah Winfrey show. The government has no control of broadcast content and places few restrictions on the operation of the broadcast media. This is therefore referred to as an unregulated or deregulated broadcasting system.

.The European ('state-regulated', 'social responsibility' or 'public service') Model
- allowing for variations from one country to another, a form of organization where there is careful state regulation of the broadcast media. With variations from one country to another, national governments will have little direct control over editorial content. They will, however, set a legislative framework within which the broadcasters must operate. For example, broadcasters may be required to ensure 'impartiality' in their coverage of current affairs, they may be required to ensure that certain kinds of material are not broadcast when young children are likely to be watching, and so on.
In the UK, the legal framework for independent broadcasting companies is set out in the Broadcasting Act 1990,which, in addition to requiring the development and operation of a range of policies (e.g. the Family Viewing Policy ('9 o'clock watershed'), policy on showing hypnotism, policy on showing violence etc.), also provides for the existence of the ITC, the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, and the Broadcasting Complaints Commission Broadcasting Standards Council.

Typically, the requirements of the broadcast media will be much more stringent than those of the press. In Great Britain, for example, there is clearly no requirement that the press should be impartial in their coverage of current affairs, unlike broadcasters.

Such systems of regulation tend to skew broadcast content away from what it would be in a straightforward free-market system towards what is variously referred to as 'quality broadcasting', 'a social responsibility model', or (especially in the UK) 'public service broadcasting'.

.The Eastern bloc (or 'Soviet') Model
- since the Eastern (or 'Communist') bloc and the Soviet Union no longer exist, this is now a somewhat outdated term. It refers to a system in which the state exercises much more direct control of the actual editorial content of programmes than in Western European countries. Although the Eastern bloc no longer exists, so-called Communist countries such as North Korea and the People's Republic of China still exert this very tight control of the broadcast media, as do other similarly totalitarian countries such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Posted by: Mohsenifar
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