Brussels, 03/07/2009 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission's new communication on the public funding of public broadcasting (see EUROPE 9934) has broadly been welcomed by public and private broadcasters but some wanted greater clarity on the monitoring of public service broadcasting.
“We congratulate the Commission for having come up with a balanced and workable text,” said Ross Biggam, Director General of the Association of Commercial Television in Europe (ACT). Public broadcasters, which were always opposed to ACT in the past, also welcomed the new report.
Both sides are unhappy with the report's measures for independent regulators in each member state. The setting up of an independent regulator to ensure that public broadcasters respect the rules is compulsory but the European Commission has not set out exactly what it means by “regulator” and “independent”. It will therefore be for the member states to decide whether the bodies connected with broadcasters, like the BBC Trust in the United Kingdom, are independent. Biggam commented that it would have been useful for other details to have been retained, referring to the definition of “independent regulator” that was removed from the final version of the communication. UER, on the other hand (Union of European Radio and Television) “regrets the introduction of a single mechanism for the assessment of new services,” in the words of its chair, Jean-Paul Philippot, who would have preferred the member states to have been free to decide on their own regulation and whether or not to have a regulator.
The communication gives details of the market evaluations a public broadcaster must carry out before launching new initiatives. Faced with resistance from the smallest member states, the Commission included a derogation for broadcasts with smaller audiences. A new Dutch radio programme, for example, would no longer have to make such a detailed market examination as that required of an online television programme in the English language.
The communication aims to reconcile the functioning of public service broadcasting with the demands of a free media market, replacing the 2001 report designed with the same aims but an update of which was required due to the constant flux in the broadcasting industry under pressure from technological progress. Public broadcasting is competing with new media and small and/or regional news companies. This is recognised by the new communication, which foresees an impact assessment before any new moves are made. “This will help to clarify issues beforehand and might thus lead to fewer actions being taken to Brussels,” commented Tobias Schmid, deputy president of RTL Television Germany. Impact assessments are already carried out before public broadcasting projects are launched and similar systems are being introduced in Austria, Flanders (Belgium) and Ireland. (C.D./transl.fl)