Hallvard Moe: Public Broadcasters, the Internet, and Democracy. Comparing Policy and Exploring Public Service Media Online

Abstract

This thesis is a study of public service broadcasting facing a digital media system. Its focus is on internet services since the mid-1990s. With a comparative design, the thesis discusses how public service broadcasters seized opportunities and handled challenges related to the internet, and how national and supranational regulatory regimes and policy actors coped with public service broadcasting venturing online. I concentrate on publicly owned former monopolists, assessing four such institutions in three states: the British BBC, Norway’s NRK, and the ARD and the ZDF in Germany. I argue that traditional practices of media policy do not suddenly change in the digital era. Rather, settings for public service are to a large extent still defined within well-established frameworks, and dependent on the conditioned legacies of each state’s political culture. Discussing similarities and differences in the development of the institutions’ inter- net activities, and their corresponding national regulation s, I find the de- velopment characterized by ad hoc solutions. This also applies to the EU policy regime, built on a competition law-logic. With the latter regime, I argue, we are incapable of grasping the autonomous democratic func- tions of public broadcasters’ online services. Moreover, the regime pro- vides insufficient space to play out national differences. The thesis goes on to explore the democratic functions of public broadcasting institutions in an online environment. With a founding in normative public sphere theory, I contend that there is a potential in on- line communication not only for dialogue, but also for dissemination. Both communicative forms should be utilized by public service actors in ways that consistently counter processes of enclosure and balkanization in the public sphere. On this basis, I develop a scheme for public service media online. By scrutinizing marginal parts of the cases’ internet activities I lastly explore this scheme, and the limits of public broadcast- ers’ publicly funded online offers. Thereby, I aim to revitalize discussions about the functions of public service as a media policy tool in the digital era. In my view, public service media remain relevant. The thesis sub- stantiates why, and outlines how