Public Service Broadcasting

David Hendy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781350306561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Challenging the opinion that public service broadcasting is a thing of the past, David Hendy explains its importance in the present – and in the future. Written by a leading expert in the field, this book explores the development of public service broadcasting, outlining the key debates and issues, while situating them within wider cultural contexts. Hendy uses media history to consider the outlook for broadcasters such as the BBC, and other networks and stations around the world. He analyzes how these institutions shape society, culture, and politics, focusing on how key ethical and cultural values - such as enlightenment, impartiality, service, choice, and trust – have been constantly reinvented to ensure that broadcasting can carry on being a public 'good' as well as a commercial product. Clear, concise, and contemporary, Public Service Broadcasting is invaluable reading for all students of media and broadcasting, and for anyone interested in a strand of media that has had - and continues to have - an enormous social and cultural impact, not only in Britain, but across the globe.

1

Enlightenment: First Principles, Deep Origins

Public service broadcasting had its formal, institutional birth in the early 1920s. But its sudden arrival in the years between the two world wars makes little sense unless we trace its deeper origins in the late nineteenth century and the years either side of the First World War. The individual men and women who went on to shape early broadcasting – people such as the Italian-born but British-based wireless entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi, or the head of the Radio Corporation of America, David Sarnoff or the founding father of the BBC, John Reith – were all profoundly important. But their visions were shaped very much by larger social, cultural, political and technological forces. What, though, should our context be? How wide do we go? How far back in time do we glance?

Seaton, along with Briggs (1995), Scannell and Cardiff (1991), Crisell (2002) and Chignell (2011), in Britain, and others such as Douglas (1987) and Hilmes (1997) in America or Ross (2008) and Lacey (1996) in Germany, all point to the new conditions of mass culture, mass consumption and universal suffrage – all of which raised two pressing questions at the start of the 1920s: how to create an informed and cultured modern democracy; and how new kinds of mass media might help in that task. Current accounts also point to the rich tradition of Victorian paternalism that Reith’s generation could draw upon: that middle-class desire to improve the less fortunate. Yet surprisingly few authors have pointed to the First World War as an important influence, or to the wider cultural and intellectual anxieties about moral and mental decline which seeped into Western consciousness during this period. One aim of this chapter, therefore, is to bring these ‘neglected’ themes back into focus.

There is another, deeper-rooted concept which also helps us to make sense of all these disparate factors: the idea of Enlightenment – the idea that first emerged in seventeenth-century Europe, and which asserted the radical notion that both coercive inequality and avoidable ignorance could be banished if rationality could prevail. This was a notion that placed education – the cultivation of a reasoning, deliberative approach to human affairs – centre-stage. In doing so, it recognized two things. First, human beings were all capable of change. Second, this being the case, society would be a better place if we collectively and individually attempted to fulfil this capacity by becoming more reasoning. This was not a complacent assumption that the world would steadily improve. Rather, ‘it involved a sense of the possibility of constructing a future world that was different and thus the chance that it might be better’ (Garnham, 2000: 5). It is this emancipatory project that was woven deeply into the fabric of public service broadcasting during its foundational years.

Private Wireless, Public Ether

If we take enlightenment to be one of our foundational principles, our first task is to expel Guglielmo Marconi from any narrative account of the origins of public service broadcasting. His is the name still most commonly associated with the ‘invention’ of radio – or ‘wireless’ as it was more commonly called in Britain – during the last years of the nineteenth century. Even on a strictly technical level, this reputation is largely undeserved. It was, after all, not Marconi but the British physicist Oliver Lodge who, in 1894, first publicly demonstrated the transmission of Morse code signals through the air by means of electromagnetic waves. Marconi’s achievement over the years after 1896 was to collate or buy out the technical achievements of others such as Lodge, repackage them skilfully into marketable kits and then self-publicize his efforts (see Garratt, 2006; Lochte, 2000; Douglas, 1987; Crisell, 2002; Street, 2002). Nowhere did he think creatively about the new technology’s wider dimension, let alone about it serving as a social good. His focus was on ‘point-to-point’ communication between a single sender and a single receiver – someone, say, on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic wishing to contact a relative back home in New York, a government official in Whitehall wishing to communicate with an overseas envoy in Africa, an army general behind the lines in Flanders wanting to send orders to his men up at the trenches. Conceptually, this was merely a refinement of private telegraphy or telephony. Both the sender and the receiver paid for the transaction. Or, if they didn’t pay, they were certainly privileged participants in what we might call an early ad hoc ‘subscription’ service. The idea of signals freely radiating – signals broadcast across an entire region and thus potentially available to anyone – scared Marconi nearly out of his wits. His ambition was to establish, if possible, a global commercial monopoly in a ‘closed’ technology he claimed as his own. Between 1896 and the 1920s his role in radio was to suppress rival systems, try to drive competitors out of work and seek monopolistic deals with any government or military or commercial organization around the world – dubious or otherwise – which showed an interest in erecting new and more powerful chains of communication as a means of reinforcing control over land or people or goods (Headrick, 1992). It is instructive, for instance, to note that one of the Marconi Company’s magazines, Wireless World, groaned heavily with the language of power during these formative years. It spoke of wireless as part of the ‘arms race’ or a ‘branch of national service’ – something that might protect or enhance a country’s supremacy in the world. In short, what we might call ‘Marconi-ism’ promoted radio as a technology to supercharge the communicative efficacy of the state apparatus – and fill the coffers of a private company in the process (see Hendy, 2011, 2013).

This is worth highlighting because it represents so vividly the antithesis of public service broadcasting as it would come to be defined by the late 1920s. Quite unintentionally, however, Marconi-ism made two important contributions to foundational thinking about how the new technology of wireless might, despite everything, become a social good. First, the nakedly aggressive nature of Marconi’s business enterprise provided an early warning of the dangers in one company achieving a commercial monopoly. Before the First World War, for example, the British government started lengthy negotiations with the Company over the building of an Imperial Wireless Chain of stations linking Britain with Egypt, Aden, India and South Africa. Marconi consistently sought to crush any rival bidders and secure exclusive contracts. In America, the federal government’s response was simply to create a rival private monopoly of its own – one that was at least fully ‘American’: the Radio Corporation of America, incorporated in 1919. British politicians dithered. But by the 1920s the political climate was broadly moving in favour of something closer to state control. The 1914–18 war had offered important lessons. With its heightened need for speedy communications in battle, the flood of wireless propaganda hurled into the airwaves seeking to influence newspaper reporting on both sides and its whipped-up anxiety over spying or the threat of invasions led by hundreds of radio-controlled aircraft, the war had everywhere intensified a feeling among politicians that wireless was a technology of national importance that should somehow be placed under national direction. Indeed, four years of war had demonstrated the effectiveness in general of centralized administrative control of utilities such as health, coal and food, in harnessing national resources.

By the opening of the 1920s, then, two rather different agendas reinforced each other. One was the ‘military-industrial’ urge to ensure tight central control of powerful technology. The other was a strengthening faith in the ability of experts and civil servants – the rising professional classes – to run affairs more effectively than market forces or the gentlemen-amateurs of the political elites (Curran and Seaton, 1997: 113–15). The former preferred some form of direct state control; the latter could point to the success of arm’s-length ‘public corporations’ such as those running forestry, water or electricity – bodies acting in the national interest but at one remove from the state.

The second of Marconi’s entirely unintended contributions to ensuring radio had a future as a social good rather than as a private scheme of enrichment was to stimulate interest in listening to wireless among hundreds – and, eventually, thousands – of ordinary people. These were the ‘wireless amateurs’ who sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic between the first decade of the twentieth century and the early 1920s: individuals who had realized that, whatever the commercial or military operators had envisaged about the privacy of their messages, signals radiated freely through the air, and could be hauled in from the electromagnetic realm by whoever was motivated enough to build simple receiving equipment in their homes or garden sheds.

This was, albeit briefly, a thriving subculture. By 1912, the New York Times estimated there were ‘several hundred thousand’ such operators in the United States (Douglas, 1987: 198). In Britain there were only a few hundred transmitting, but several thousand more were equipped to receive. One estimate of the number of amateur enthusiasts in pre-war Germany was 100,000 (Gilfillan, 2009: 36). The wireless scene was described as a craze; by 1918, like influenza, it was being likened to a pandemic.

Before war temporarily shut down all this activity, it established important possibilities for the future. Most obviously, an unforeseen but potentially huge public audience for wireless had been conceived – as had a market for the sale of homemade wireless ‘kits’. This raised the prospect of transmissions that were not just overheard by the public but actually made especially for them. It also showed that wireless could be thought of not just as a weapon or a revenue tool but as a source of domestic pleasure. As Douglas suggests, the wireless companies had unleashed forces they were struggling to control. Very quickly, in fact, ‘the concepts of corporate monopoly or military pre-emption seemed alien, mean-spirited, and completely unenforceable’ (1987: 194).

It is tempting to see in the amateur wireless boom a prototype of public broadcasting that was truly democratic and participatory – a fragile, creative flowering that would be horribly crushed by the big ‘top-down’ corporations and networks that emerged in the 1920s. And indeed several writers have suggested that these ‘early sparks’ carved out a ‘space of experimental possibility’ (Squier, 2003: 6–35; Gilfillan, 2009:36). We can even point to some striking parallels with our own century’s ‘Web 2.0’ revolution. Rather like today’s Internet users – not just consuming the distributed media products of big broadcasting organizations, but busy creating online blogs, uploading ‘homemade’ videos or nurturing our own social communities on Facebook – the early wireless amateurs were apparently resisting regulation or censorship and creating an exciting electronic free-for-all without hierarchy or centre. This, though, relies on a largely mythical version of broadcasting’s origins. Wireless, with its mysterious signals and voices travelling unseen through the air, undoubtedly captured the public imagination well before organized broadcasting appeared. But the creative and ethical vision of most amateur enthusiasts was strictly limited. They distinguished fiercely, for example, between ‘irresponsible’ amateurs and ‘genuine’ experimenters. The former, those who broadcast anything that took their fancy or who maybe took pleasure in hearing such material for its own sake, needed to be disciplined or perhaps excluded from the airwaves altogether. The proper role of the amateur was not to listen or enjoy: it was to pursue the manly task of perfecting technology through a laborious process of test transmissions. What exactly such technology was ultimately for scarcely mattered. This was ‘participatory’ media, to be sure. But it had a distinctly authoritarian and narrow-minded edge (Hendy, 2013).

In the end the wireless amateur’s efforts to ‘own’ this new technology proved irrelevant. For just as Marconi had failed to restrict radio to a means of private point-to-point communication, the amateurs, in turn, were unable to suppress the intrinsically democratic nature of their own transmissions. A larger audience had been created, and it could not be un-created. Moreover, what made wireless so magical – so powerful – was precisely that it was, in principle, accessible to all. The key to this notion of accessibility was the ether itself, a centuries-old concept of a mysterious, all-encompassing but invisible medium that pervaded all things – that became, in effect, a ‘connecting medium’ binding together and making coherent what would otherwise be a chaos of individual elements. That its actual existence was now being disproved by Einstein’s new physics of relativity scarcely mattered. It somehow suggested the underlying unity of human existence. This, in turn, linked the new technology with some of the most utopian thinking of the age. Here, by implication, was an infinitely extendable, shareable resource, a medium for spreading ideas far and wide, for transcending physical and political barriers, for uniting the hitherto disunited. After the carnage of the First World War, it was the kind of resource that seemed more necessary than ever.

This, no doubt, was why, at the League of Nations’ first assembly in Geneva during November 1920, a small ad hoc wireless station was set up. The man running it, Arthur Burrows, had managed a news service during the war and experienced just enough of the frontline to become a lifelong pacifist. ‘Wireless’, he said soon afterwards, now had a purpose: to be a tool for disarmament, to ‘alter for the better the social life of the people and international relations’, to ‘assist the progress of civilization’, to provide a platform open to a variety of views but, above all, to ‘spread throughout the world a doctrine of common sense’ (BBC WAC, 1923). Similarly, in a new magazine which first appears in 1922, the Broadcaster, we start to find articles extolling radio’s ability to ‘make for the gaiety of nations and introduce a humanizing note when scattered peoples are brought into closer contact’ (Broadcaster, August and September 1922). So a profound shift had taken place by the early 1920s. Radio had evolved from its conceptual birth in the 1890s as a tool for private, linear communication into something freely radiated and bracingly public. Just as important, there were people who’d found for it an ethical purpose. Utopian ideas once attached to the nineteenth century’s ether had been bequeathed to the modern ‘electromagnetic spectrum’. This spectrum – which, in most people’s minds, was identical to the very air in which it operated – felt as if it were public property. As such, it wasn’t just a shareable resource: it also created a collective sensibility, or what in 1935 two American social psychologists would call a ‘consciousness of kind’ (Cantril and Allport, 1935: 18).

In 1920, the question of how precisely this ‘consciousness of kind’ might be harnessed was yet to be settled. The libertarian rhetoric of the wireless amateurs still argued for an ether populated by thousands of ‘micro’-broadcasters. They assumed ordinary people would be as interested in transmitting as in receiving, and that the content was almost incidental. But, as Arthur Burrows and the Broadcaster magazine showed, there were plenty of people at ease with the notion that, while the ether itself had no centre and no hierarchy, broadcasting could be something done by others for us: that it might become, very consciously, a meaningful, substantive one-way communicative act – a gift, as it were, offered to all, with no demand for reciprocation and with the hope that in the process ordinary life might be made more interesting, more peaceful and more pleasurable.

Mass Culture and the Public Mind

The idea of broadcasting as a tool for improving modern life was, by itself, rather vague. What gave it coherence – indeed, a sense of urgency – was an anxiety among the upper middle and professional classes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century over the apparently sudden rise of ‘mass’ society, or, more specifically, ‘mass’ culture. Since the 1880s, industrialization across the Western world had created a growing working-class population. Poverty remained widespread. But wages were rising, and even a modest surplus income within each family, once aggregated, created a market for goods and services sizeable enough to be worth cultivating. A lower middle class of clerks, salespeople and shop assistants was also expanding fast. For both groups, too, there was more free time: Saturdays and Bank Holidays off, labour-saving devices on sale everywhere, an organized leisure industry of seaside holidays, spectator sports, popular newspapers, cheap books, department stores, music halls and cinemas (Searle, 2004: 107–15, 530–70). For those privileged few who had long had access to art and leisure, the key question was this: did such cultural democratization mean progress – or did more mean worse?

Their worry was not so much with popular taste: after all, that had always been dismissed as vulgar. It was with ‘mass culture’ – the moderately aspirational tastes of a newly literate public ‘craving instruction and entertainment more than cultivation’ (Gildea, 2008: 390–1). This was a public that might, for example, enjoy a little light classical music, or buy cheap reprints of the classics. Yet culture wasn’t supposed to be mass produced like this. It was supposed to be elevated, rare, noble, pure, exquisite, enduring, moral, transcendent – in short, something for the few, since, of course, only the few were deemed capable of appreciating these qualities. For someone such as George Gissing, the author of New Grub Street (1891), culture was being sullied – dragged down into a branch of trade by the demands of the ‘quarter-educated’ (Searle, 2004: 572).

The response to this imagined degradation generally took one of two forms. The first, for those with most contempt for the masses, was to erect new barriers between their own versions of culture and those they saw as crassly commercial and dangerously standardized. They embraced and promoted the avant-garde: dissonant music, non-realist novels, abstract paintings. This was ‘coterie art with a vengeance’, and the more difficult it was to appreciate, the better (Searle, 2004: 577; Carey, 1992). The second response came from those who believed that the masses – though usually showing regrettable taste – were at least capable of refinement. They believed mass culture shouldn’t be ignored: it should be improved. This passion for bettering the lot of those below had deep roots. It contained a mix of Christian charity, middle-class altruism and nineteenth-century socialism. And in its various forms it was precisely this second response – this idea of service – which was later ‘grafted onto broadcasting in its formative period’ (Scannell, 2000: 55).

Historians have pointed to one articulation of this Victorian-era paternalism more than any other, because of the profound influence it had on cultural debates for years to come – in Britain, at least: Matthew Arnold’s 1869 essay, Culture and Anarchy. This short book, reprinted many times over, combined a fairly traditional interpretation of culture with a more radical proposal for its direction and use. Like many of his contemporaries Arnold was worried by the mob, convinced it was never more than a hair’s breadth away from open revolt. But he detected a wider crisis. There was, he said, a self-indulgent tendency among all classes to do as one pleased: to do rather than to think; to be what one was rather than to strive to be better. The toiling masses – ‘raw and half-developed’ – could hardly help themselves (Arnold, 1875: 94). Yet the aristocracy were just as busy indulging their own pleasures, while the middle classes and the ‘rising’ working class were ‘Philistines’: stiff-necked, lacking curiosity, self-satisfied. Anarchy beckoned – or, in the ruling classes’ overreaction to the threat of anarchy, autocracy. A road to salvation, however, lay with culture. Arnold defined this, not as something which belonged to the elite, nor as ‘a mere thing for its own sake’. Culture was ‘the study of perfection’, a pursuit of wisdom and beauty – or, as Arnold liked to put it, of ‘sweetness and light’ (15–16, 20–1). Anyone engaged in this pursuit would transcend their base insti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Why Public Service Broadcasting?
• 1. Enlightenment: First Principles, Deep Origins
• 2. Democracy: Politics, Public Opinion and Debate
• 3. Cultivation: Broadcasting Culture
• 4. Service: The Ethos of the Broadcasters
• 5. Choice: Responding to Competition
• 6. Trust: Public Service in the New Media World
• Conclusion
• References
• Index