Integrating Ethnic Content into Public - Service Broadcasting - January 2023

For current purposes, we focus on four basic attributes of PSB: independence from government; a clear mandate to serve all of the people of the country; accountability to the people; and the provision of adequate funding to the entity to enable it to fulfil its public service mandate.5 The following sections of this Note address each of these issues briefly in turn. [...] Independence It is a fundamental attribute of public service broadcasters that they should operate in the overall public interest and serve the people of the country (or other jurisdiction that they cover), and not simply the interests of the government of the day. [...] For example, 73% of the funding for Switzerland’s public broadcaster is derived from the more populous and prosperous German-speaking regions of the country, but the public broadcasting services for these populations only receives 43% of the total public broadcasting budget. [...] For the language policy, for example, additional requirements are that it cover nine African languages that are widely spoken in South Africa and, for each, the policy should indicate the time to be allocated to it, the scheduling of programmes in that language, the range of content produced in that language and the amount of funding spent to generate that content. [...] The first is substantially increasing the allocation of support for public interest media and the second is reducing the short-term, national- interest driven status of much of the current bilateral support for public interest media in developing countries.