Fighting a (Lost) Battle? An Analysis of 20 Years of Private Television Complaints against the Funding of Public Service Broadcasting

Abstract

The “story” of state aid and public service broadcasting (PSB) is most often told and researched in terms of Member States and public broadcasters facing European Commission investigations into the aid schemes in place for PSB (Donders, 2012; Moe, 2008; Ward, 2008). Private broadcasters are sporadically and briefly mentioned as those complaining against the fundinl of public broadcasting, forcing Member States “to shield public broadcast ing from the application of EC law” (Larouche, 2000: 338; see also Harrisor and Woods, 2007: 310). Leaving aside whether the oppositional portrayal o Member States and public broadcasters, united in their quest to defend pub lic values in an increasingly commercial media environment, fighting the neo-liberal European Commission (see, a.o., Bardoel and Vochteloo, 2009 Buckley et al., 2008; Holtz-Bacha, 2005; Moe, 2008) is accurate, one car observe that the role of private television companies in provoking many European investigations is under-researched. Scholarly debate is focused on questions of sovereignty, public broadcasters’ fight for survival and the lega technicalities of state aid decisions. Few things are said, however, about the interests of the complainants.KeywordsMember StateEuropean CommissionPublic ServicePublic BroadcasterPublic Service BroadcastingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.