IN PLURAL AND DIVIDED SOCIETIES

1. Public service broadcasting: an ideal-typical history National broadcasters take their shape and ethos from the states that sustain them. As they emerged between the two World Wars and after 1945, these broadcasters were intended to strengthen the existing political order by serving the dominant concept of national identity. Over several decades, the idea of 'public service broadcasting ' emerged from beneath this stiff, authoritarian cloak to become one of Western Europe's more recent gifts to civilisation. Entrusted with public funds to produce television and radio programmes that meet the communication needs and interests of citizens in a democracy, public service broadcasters should operate at arm's-length from government, even while government ultimately controls their funding and often appoints their directors and- indirectly- their governors. Self-evidently, this sort of broadcasting is based on the belief that public space for communication should be extensively regulated, not dominated by market forces, and that the rights at stake should not be reserved for the producers alone, but also held by the consumers, i.e., ordinary citizens. "Touched with a sense of the whole as well as the parts, possessing a sense of responsibility to a public as well as a private interest",1 public service broadcastin