The Orf, Österreichischer Rundfunk (the Austrian “Rai”) has selected a group of experts and charged them with writing how they see the “Future of the public media service in the European Union”. Each state has thus been entrusted to the analytical care of an author and the overall interpretation is that of the alarm for the results of digitalization which “from transformation has become massive destructuring of the media economy and of their very perception”.
While public service journalists – we paraphrase from the report – are under attack by right-wing currents (who have never looked favorably on them as England itself teaches), public funding is revoked in doubt, governments abuse of power and the social media of global giants push public presence to irrelevance.
The collection of essays is full of interesting observations and some are indispensable for those who follow the subject for educational or professional needs, but having to reduce it to the essentials it seems to us that the work is marked by an excess and a lack.
An excess and a lack
The excess lies in the role attributed to public services which, encouraged to evolve as soon as possible by broadcasting extended mediality are also envisioned as means of containment and contrast of the parainformative blob that gushes forth from the internet.
The lack, however, seems to us to lie in the scarcity of references to the contemporary European Regulation for media freedom, the basic lines of which had been known for at least a year and, in particular, the very clear position regarding the assumption, defined as “basic”, of functional and editorial independence in qualifying the public service enterprise to be financed with taxpayers’ money.
In short, the impression is that the majority of experts seem to be taking that prescription of independence of complex and always dependent entities with a pinch of salt, if only because we will have to see what will have happened in just over a year’s time when, by law, it should be implemented.
On the other hand, nothing prevents us from spending pages and pages to relaunch the mission of public service in the field of digitalization and the destruction that has resulted from it and is still resulting from it. But precisely in this regard, the intention, although laudable, of contrasting quality with disinformation, risks overestimating the alternative potential of public services compared to the negative excessive power of the network that comes from deep roots of business models and the substantial deregulation of the last thirty years.
The damage of tech business
Of course, it must be accepted, and without making a drama out of it, that a certain part of the “informative negativity” of the Internet derives from the very structure of the network and of the web in particular, as a factor and catapult of the contents generated by the users from which comes (but that would also be its beauty) everything and its opposite.
Just as it is obvious that any exchange of communication from point to point ends up creating privileged relationships between Tizio and Caio compared to Mevio and Antonio (the so-called value and cognitive bubbles, self-referential and deaf to each other).
But at the source of systematic disinformation, conducted by centers of interest, marketing and by spies and manipulators of the democratic game, are the anonymous, multiple and robotic accounts, coordinated by the algorithms of the platforms. Which are designed to act as all the more scavengers the more the material inoculated online is effective in putting in the trenches and retaining the scroll and keyboard of the real user, profiled from time to time as a consumer or voter.
Not to mention that anonymity – enabled by account identification procedures that are ridiculous compared to those required to order a pizza or open a bank account – erases by the very fact the dimension of responsibility and makes it impossible to counterbalance it with public dispute or legal action, the only possible and concrete form of “moderation” of the contents of the network (other than the algorithmic hunt for expressions of hate, nudes, swear words).
So, if they want to act on the problem of disinformation, which exists beyond any imaginable measure, public services can already do so by exposing its real causes with their information power which, although battered, is still relevant among the ruling classes of the economy and politics.
Of course, it would be a matter of taking by the collar the overt and covert, strong and vindictive interests that have fattened the Internet for thirty years. Which will not happen and could never happen unless public services have truly become independent. Because structural conditioning comes before any effort of good will by any information operator with respect to the need for organic, stubborn and continuous actions supported by the entire body of public service companies, as elements proper to their mission.
Where to look
In short, we always return to the central question of the independence of public services and the more or less essential way in which this is proposed, one for each, in the 27 members of the Union.
As far as we know, also thanks to the analyzes collected by the Austrian service ORF, it seems to us that four groups can be distinguished in the 27 European public services:
1) Belgium and the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) with powerful communities of other languages that divide them from within. A condition that automatically prevents them from flying towards more ambitious industrial goals than realizing a decent solution of coexistence;
2) the Nordics (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, to which we add Iceland) who since the time of the Vikings have considered each other relatives and whose public services support each other in a dignified and effective way that almost resembles a condition of independence;
3) Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Malta, Cyprus, Ireland, Holland, Portugal, and, it goes without saying, Italy, where it will be difficult to detach public services from local politics that recognizes and finances them only as instruments of government;
4) France, Germany, Spain, which play their own game because they have strong private companies and public services that enjoy, if not formal independence, certainly strong margins of concrete autonomy thanks to the respect induced by the strategic objectives they pursue. The Spanish public service because it draws strength and market background not only from the Iberians, but also from the hundreds of millions of Hispanic-speaking people in Latin America and the United States. France because it has invested large public resources, both state and public service, in its audiovisual industry and must ensure its development prospects. Germany (integrated when necessary by Austrians and Swiss Germans) because it represents the European linguistic community richest in resources, public and private, so much so that it is a large one that however, in order to withstand the impact of the giants from across the Atlantic, must expand its “home” background to the entire continent (i.e. to that common European market of the media industry which the Regulation avowedly aims at).
It is clear that from now until the date (8 August 2025) when the Regulation prescribes that those companies transform from objects to subjects, we will not take our eyes off what will happen in those countries where the “Rai” have always been instruments of the kingdom and whose governments, we suspect, would never have wanted the European Regulation. But evidently they had no sayable words with which to oppose it. And it is on that absence of words that we count.
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