Airing the commercial option

It is a good time for the government to conduct a review of public service broadcasting in Hong Kong. The last such appraisal took place 20 years ago, in the context of a wider study of the broadcasting industry.

Few will see merit in equating public service broadcasting with government propaganda, even though any public broadcaster has the duty to inform and to educate, in order to raise the critical awareness of public affairs. How it can properly discharge its duty to be 'public' is perhaps more contentious.

Commercial broadcasters may focus too much on programmes that attract mass audiences and cater to popular tastes, in order to secure advertising income. Hence, the ratings game becomes the order of the day, and programmes with small audiences (the 'small masses') may be squeezed out or marginalised.

Only broadcasting supported by public funding can overcome such narrow market considerations. But, without market pressure, how can public broadcasters be made to use their resources efficiently and responsibly?

Another puzzle is that even public service broadcasters, in practice, cannot afford to focus only on 'small masses' broadcasting. It is easy to say that they should not compete with their commercial counterparts by entering the mass-audience market and producing programmes that aim at popularity ratings.

But in the current era of accountability for resources, even publicly funded programmes need to demonstrate their value for money, by playing the ratings game: ratings are often equated with value. Unless the government is prepared to adopt a different approach to evaluation, the public broadcaster is still caught in a no-win situation. Public broadcasters in European countries commonly aim their programming at the whole community. Although Hong Kong is not a nation, there is still a case for maintaining a strong public service broadcaster, to promote a strong sense of citizenship that is vital to social cohesion.

Such a broadcaster cannot be sustained without government support on behalf of the community. Yet the government should not dictate how it operates.