Lecture 7 - Public Media

After our all too short Easter holidays it was time to drag myself back to University and get back to work. Fortunately enough the only class I had to attend was a JOUR1111 lecture. This lecture on Public Media was a continuation from the prior Commercial Media. Public Media and Commercial Media are very contrasting to one another and summed up by a quote by Nigel Milan when he stated "the difference between commercial broadcasting and public broadcasting is the difference between consumers and citizens." It is Public Media's  mission to serve or engage the public.

The most notable aspect of Public Media is that the profits go back to the company in contrast to Commercial Media where the money made is presented to the shareholders. As there are no shareholders in Public Media then this issue is erased. Public Media is made for the people by the people and focuses more on what is important over what might be interesting. In Australia we have two sources of Public Media in the form of radio and television broadcast from SBS and ABC.  

ABC was founded in 1929 as a "nation building project." Since this time the ABC has grown to successfully  have four television channels and numerous radio channels. ABC's television channels are filled with excellent   Australian programs, my personal favourites being The Gruen Transfer, The Chasers War on Everything and Angry Boys. SBS was established in 1980 as a "multicultural" channel and was fully funded by the public. It was designed to multilingual and multicultural television and radio to inform, educate and entertain the community in order to reflect Australia's growing multicultural society. There are various other sources of Public Media across the globe, for example CBC and PBS in North America, BBC and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom and TVNZ in New Zealand. 

An essential component of Public Media is that it must have public value. As mentioned before Public Media focuses on what is important breaking news over what celebrities are eating for breakfast. This means that news stories presented by Public Media are often more researched, have more detail and are more reliable than stories presented by Commercial Media. According to BBC there are four components to public value, those being:

1. Embedding a public service ethos

2. Value for licence fee money

3. Weighing public value against market impact 

4. Public consultation 

Public Media has four major functions of nation building, national heritage, national identity and national conversations. Further proving how Public Media is focused on the people and it's culture. However there are a handful of issues relating to Public media. The main issue being that of funding. Public Media get some funding from the Australian government through tax money which shows they are owned by the Australian people. Nonetheless, Commercial Media organisations have been seen to be receiving funding from the Government also. This has caused controversy amongst those involved. 

After being shown the functions of Commercial Media and Public Media it is difficult to draw to the conclusion as to which is the better media type. Public Media is based on getting what matters across and is for the people of the nation where as Commercial Media is a business doing what it can to make money to keep its' audience entertained. Personally, I think that there is a good balance between the two in my life watching ABC for news (and some entertainment) and commercial stations for entertainment. In the end it is up to what personally the viewer appreciates.