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ICA TRACKING NUMBER: ICA-19-10026
Introduction
As the European media landscape shifted from one dominated by public service
broadcasting to one (increasingly) dominated by commercial broadcasting, the impact of this
shift upon news programming emerged as a point of concern. During the 1980s and 1990s, a
great deal of scholarly literature was published on the impact of market liberalization on the
performance of public service and commercial news organizations. The arguments made in
the ‘public service versus commercial’ debate were straightforward. In commercial
television, the drive for increased advertising revenue leads to the ‘dumbing down’ of the
final news product, with infotainment, MTV-style editing and sensationalism the inevitable
result of audience-chasing. Public service broadcasters, on the other hand, do not have to
chase audiences because they are funded through license-fees or taxation, and so their news
programs tend to be more serious, thoughtful and in-depth. While there has been a significant
volume of research indicating that many commercial news organizations do indeed march to
the beat of the advertising drum (e.g. McManus, 1994; McChesney, 1999; Herman &
Chomsky, 1988; Bagdikian, 2000; Altschull, 1995), this simple cause (advertising) and effect
(light news) model of the political economy of news overlooks a number of factors impacting
the selection of stories within commercial and public service news organizations.
In his analysis of Norwegian public service and commercial news, Helland (1995: 2)
wrote:
‘A central issue on the debate on news production in public service and
commercial broadcast corporations has been the degree to which different
ways of organizing the broadcasting activities impinge on, or influence, the
application, production and presentation of television news programmes.
About this there are many arguments, but there have been very few empirical
studies that have compared public service with commercial television news
production.’
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Convention