MEDIA MATTERS
Need for debate
SEVANTI NINAN
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In the 10 years that Prasar Bharati has been in existence, none of the basic questions regarding public service broadcasting has been resolved.
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Photo: S. Subramanium
Where do they stand? DD employees staging a protest.
Isn’t it amazing that in a sector — information, media, communication — which has been defined by change over the past 17 years, the debate on Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) has evolved so little? And indeed, the institution itse
lf has evolved so little? In the 10 years since Prasar Bharati came into existence in 1997, none of the basics has been resolved: how we will ensure its financial viability, whether its employees should be government servants or not, how will we safeguard its autonomy regardless of its financing, what sort of programmes should its viewers see.
Over the past couple of weeks the idea of a tax on television sets to finance Prasar Bharati has been floated again, and then was vigorously disowned a few days ago by Priyaranjan Das Munshi, after it stirred up some debate. A little before that the government let it be known that the time has come to take a final decision on what to do with Prasar Bharati staff, should they belong to the government or become employees of the corporation? It is a decision that has only been pending for 10 years.
Changing focus
With Prasar Bharati remaining an unresolved mess rather than developing institutional strengths, it is hardly surprising that nobody has had the time to raise their sights and consider the future. The debate in the media world has moved on from discussing public service broadcasting to debating the evolution of PSP, or Public Service Purpose, and public service content ( http://www.openmedianetwork.org.uk/anewapproach/default.htm). When societies have a mix of commercial, public service and community broadcasting catering to them, when media is rapidly moving beyond conventional TV to Internet-based interactivity and personal publishing, to enshrine one clunky public service broadcaster as the answer to the future is both unimaginative and short-sighted. Public service content will come from many sources including community radio which the government has recently permitted, but which seems to excite the ministerial imagination not at all.
And public service broadcasters too can be multifarious — when we bang on about the BBC, we forget that the United Kingdom has plurality in its public service broadcasting tradition, which only serves to strengthen the idea. There is the BBC, Channel Four and ITV and all of them have different patterns of financing.
Historically, PSB had an objective — to inform, educate, entertain, etc. In an unequal society such as ours, which has the information rich and information poor, these objectives remain relevant. A more eloquent definition of PSB’s objective came from long time BBC broadcaster Sir Huw Wheldon who defined the purpose of public service broadcasting as being “to make the good popular and the popular good”. By this definition, what Doordarshan churns out fails spectacularly. Its virtuous programming has remained fossilised in style and concept since the early 1980s, its prime time entertainment, aiming to be popular, is simply a poor man’s Star Plus or Sony, take your pick.
Will simply transferring the staff from government employee status to bona fide corporation employees do the trick? Does the sensibility that will create quality broadcasting exist in government today when broadcasters who were worth hiring from the public broadcaster have been hired by others? Unlikely. Just as it takes a complete change of management culture for an airport like Delhi or Cochin to look and smell different, it is going to take people with a different mindset to re-imagine the possibilities of public service broadcasting.
As for news, DD News shines today not because it is independent, but because it spares us the excesses of the supposedly independent commercial news channels. That its managers seek to copy the way commercial TV anchors look and sound only demonstrates that there is nobody in Prasar Bharati with the confidence and conviction to give Doordarshan its own distinctive persona.
Refreshingly different
In the last few months, BBC Entertainment has surfaced on Tata Sky’s DTH bouquet and watching it can be instructive. Simply by changing the source of funding, our public service broadcasting institutions will never develop the capacity to lampoon institutions the way the BBC does: their bureaucracy, their church, their secret service, their media, their politicians. Forget Doordarshan, will our private entertainment channels spoof our religious institutions, Hindu, Muslim Christian? Will they be allowed to? What the BBC puts out is derived from the society it is rooted in.
The public service broadcasters in the U.K. run quality children’s channels. Do ours? That is as good a test as any of whether the government cares about its people or only about pandering to a mix of government and popular demands, such as prioritising government news and telecasting big ticket cricket events.
We need more concerned debate. Instead of sms polls on whether the TV owner should pay for Doordarshan, we need to discuss far more what sort of public service content we need, and how it can evolve.
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