Public Service and Commercial Broadcasting in British TV Assignment

Public Service and Commercial Broadcasting in British TV - Assignment Example With the television industry required to turn digital and with increasing political interference, the role of PSB and its future has been under debate recently. While programmes such as Master Mind, Dr. Who, and Blue Peter have been hallmarks of PSB, there are certain episodes such as the Hutton Case that has cast PSB under a negative light. In this paper, an attempt has been made to understand the role of PSB in Britain and the controversy that surrounds it. The aim of the paper is to suggest ideas for the future of PSB and commercial broadcasting on British TV. British TV is unique in the sense that it is greatly dominated by public service broadcasting; a prime example of which is British Broadcasting Company (BBC). This corporation and others of its kind are funded by the government and the contents that they produce are thus controlled and scrutinized before being presented to the public (Scannell, n.d). In Britain, there are four principal broadcasters: BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Independent Television (ITV). BBC is the main provider of public service broadcasting and is funded by the government which uses a license fee from consumers to fund the operations of BBC (The House of Commons: Culture, Media, and Sports Committee, 2010). All of these broadcasters are controlled by Ofcom, an organization responsible for controlling and monitoring communications in Britain. Ofcom has placed a mandate on all broadcasters to provide public service broadcasting in order to earn their right of broadcasting in Britain under the IBA Act for Indepen dent Television and Royal Charter for the BBC (Negrine, 1994). Public service broadcasting in the UK serves four main important purposes. These being: to provide knowledge relating to current events to the public; increase the scope of informal learning and its interest in different fields including science, arts, and humanities; to bring into consideration the different perspectives to a story.