While both are important parts of the current media landscape, public service broadcasters (PSB) and social media platforms have fundamentally aims and business models. PSBs aim to service the public, educating and informing as well as entertaining, rather than trying to make as much money as possible. Social media platforms on the hand tend to be for-profit enterprises, meaning that they are set up to create capital which most commonly comes from advertisers.
However, it has been argued that in order to stay current, PSBs must engage with social media on some level. The question is, in what ways can PSBs use social media without losing sight of their mission to serve the public free from bias? This is the major concern Dijck and Poell’s article.
They discuss the many ways PBSs have attempted to incorporate social media into their programming, such as a BBC program called Up for Hire that showed audience tweets on the bottom of the screen, assisting the program to engage the audience at home in the discussion.
This is a convention that we’re beginning to see more and more of. As soon as I read this example, I immediately thought of the ABC program, Q&A, which is probably one of the most obvious Australian example of the convention. The article discusses how the tweets must be filtered throughly in order to ensure there is an even share of viewpoints, so broadcaster doesn’t appear biased. This is something the ABC and Q&A have struggled with, as outlined in this Media Watch clip: Click for video and transcript
While both public and commercial broadcasters can have difficulties with social media, the fall-out can be more severe for PSBs like the ABC who are designed to present balanced political views. Whether the claims of bias are founded or not almost doesn’t matter, the criticism can still be damaging.
Referrences
- J. Van Dijck and T. Poell,‘Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and the Challenges of Social Media’,Television & New Media, 2015, Vol.16(2), pp.148-164