This book offers an analysis of public service broadcasting (PSB) in European Countries that highlights the issues – both legal and not – currently facing PSB. Focusing particularly on the link between public TV and the political class, Giorgia Pavani offers an overview of the structure and governance of PSB from both a comparative and international viewpoint. The text is a useful research tool for those who want to study PSB from a viewpoint that goes beyond the legal perspective, and helps the reader to further understand the phenomenon of influence on public TV policy. By combining new comparative approaches in the studies of PSB with a detailed and updated analysis of International, European and comparative law, the result is an innovative and multidisciplinary volume that seeks to unpick the relationship between PSB and politics.

Few will deny that public service broadcasting?broadcasting that is controlled neither by the state nor by private media corporations?is an essential ingredient in modern democracy. But, as a number of initiatives in transition economies have shown, the inception and development of a strong public broadcasting system is a Herculean task that is easily sidetracked by politics or ideology, or stalled by lack of funding. Especially when state budgets are stretched, the expense is hard to justify. This collection of documents, comments, and cases brings all the major issues in public service broadcasting policy into focus and sets the problems to be addressed in sharp relief. It draws on white papers from NGOs and broadcasters, legislation from a wide range of countries (and a model law), accounts of public broadcasting efforts in transition states, analyses of evolving policy in established systems, government regulatory guidelines, and a great deal more. Among the matters touched upon are the following: the principles of public service broadcasting and their cultural and economic justification; limiting state interference; the place of public broadcasting in a multi-channel, ?market-driven? world; the appropriate mix of public and private revenues; objectivity and impartiality in broadcasting; how institutional structures can shape programming strategies; the use of competition law to adjust relations between public and private broadcasting; EU accession standards for public service broadcasting; and the impact of digital broadcasting. Broadcast professionals, students and teachers in communications and related fields, government officials interested in strengthening public service broadcasting and keeping pace with rapid developments?all will benefit enormously from this thoughtful and informative book. It will allow them to think well beyond the standard formulae about the function of public service broadcasting and its role in society.

Addresses a critical analysis of major media policies in the European Union and Council of Europe at the period of profound changes affecting both media environments and use, as well as the logic of media policy-making and reconfiguration of traditional regulatory models. The analytical problem-related approach seems to better reflect a media policy process as an interrelated part of European integration, formation of European citizenship, and exercise of communication rights within the European communicative space. The question of normative expectations is to be compared in this case with media policy rationales, mechanisms of implementation (transposing rules from EU to national levels), and outcomes.

This collection is the first of its kind on the topic of media development, and reflects on how advocacy groups, researchers, the international community and others can work to ensure that media can continue to serve as a force of democracy and development.

Takes a scholarly perspective aimed at creating debate about the role and function of public service broadcasting at a time that it is facing a variety of threats, from governments, and from commercialization of broadcasting. This book gives a global perspective on the state of public service broadcasting in the age of globalization.

The digital media environment with its multiplicity of platforms and new modes of content production, distribution and access has challenged the traditional model of public service broadcasting (PSB). This book explores whether and how PSB should adapt to reflect the conditions of the digital media environment, so that it can effectively and efficiently continue to serve its public mandate in an environment of technological complexity and change. It advances a future‐oriented model of Public Service Media, which is capable of matching an environment of governance and technological complexity and fluidity and which is not bound to certain national specificities.