Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity: European Regulatory and Governance Frameworks

By virtue of their core philosophy, mandate and typical status in most countries, public service broadcasters (PSBs) are ideally suited to act as vectors for the promotion of cultural diversity. They are equally well-suited to provide shared forums in which a range of different cultures can interact, be explored and, indeed, contested. Notwithstanding the difficulties involved in defining the notion of cultural diversity, various promotional strategies may viably be employed by PSBs. Such strategies include the safeguarding of access for discrete cultural groups to editorial, production and other structures and processes. They could also include measures to ensure that programming and other related services targeting culturally diverse audiences correspond to the audiences’ actual needs and preferences – in qualitative and quantitative terms. In doing so, relevant approaches should seek to balance the needs and preferences of discrete societal groups against the needs and preferences of a more complex societal whole.   
The emergence of new technological and communicative possibilities and paradigms has prompted conceptual and terminological shifts within the European audio-visual sector. PSBs are nowadays expected to operate across an array of technological platforms in order to perpetuate their traditional position of prominence in a rapidly changing and already highly diversified mediascape. This is evidenced by an increasing tendency to frame relevant regulatory discussions in terms of public service media (as opposed to broadcasting in the traditional sense of the word), value(s) and governance.
The existing European regulatory framework for public service broadcasting/media is extensive and spans legal and policy instruments emanating primarily from the European Union and the Council of Europe, but also including standard-setting measures from other intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) such as UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and, to a lesser extent, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Even within the European Union and the Council of Europe, differences of focus and emphasis may readily be detected across the most salient instruments. They engage with the issues highlighted in the preceding paragraphs to varying extents.
The principal aim of this chapter is to present a panorama of regulatory instruments applicable at the European level and to assess their overall coherence. The significance of selected examples of divergence in the broader regulatory approach will be explained and evaluated accordingly.