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Last week's seminar with Professor James Curran has been eloquently covered here. Here's a quick summary for those of you who weren't there: Curran, along with colleagues in the US, Finland and Denmark, has examined the content of TV news and newspapers and categorised it according to whether it is "hard news" or "soft news", "domestic" or "foreign". His research team has also analysed levels of knowledge about hard, soft, foreign and domestic news among news audiences in the UK, US, Finland and Denmark. Basically, the results are not very flattering for the US - US TV in particular. US TV news is predominantly aboud domestic affairs and soft news (lots of celebrity news), and this is to some extent reflected in the levels of political knowledge among audiences. To simplify: US audiences may know who Britney Spears is, but they have no idea what the Kyoto Treaty is. UK, Danish and Finnish audiences score much higher on the political knowledge-scale. Curran was quick to point out that this is not only a "media effect" but that many other factors are at play. One of the factors (which actually is a "media factor") was the influence attributed to public service TV: nations that has a strong tradition of public service television (as well as well-resourced public service broadcasting) seem to do better in terms of keeping the news audience informed. Thus, Curran was very critical of trends towards deregulation of broadcasting in Europe and the rise of ratings-driven television within public service organisations (who are, of course, now competing with commercial channels screening more entertainment content). This became the starting point of a discussion where Reuters Fellow Richard Danbury presented the dilemma facing public broadcasters as the "broccoli or custard" problem. It goes like this: public broadcasters have a mandate to get audiences to eat the broccoli, i.e. news, current affairs and public information. However, these programmes don't go down very well with audiences (when Swedish public service TV launched a second TV channel in 1970, they meant to transform the first [and previously only] channel into a channel focused on public information, only this didn't work to well as audiences switched over to the new channel at the first sight of public information programming on the first channel), and in a competitive environment public broadcasters feel they have to serve custard (i.e. entertainment) instead simply to get the audiences in and thereby justifying their own existence. Some people in public service broadcasting are now proponents of what could be termed the "broccoli and custard" strategy, which is essentially to continue to produce high quality entertainment/custard in the hopes of getting the audience to also eat the news/broccoli (there is some empirical support from other countries that this might work). Other people support a "broccoli on one plate, custard on another" (that's my own development of the metaphor), i.e. a US-style model with a niche public service channel that carries only broccoli (but then does not reach a wider audience but essentially an audience that is already pretty well-informed) alongside niche custard channels. You see the problem? Of course, this is only a problem if you think it's really important to eat your broccoli. Why should anyone but me decide what to eat? If I want to gorge myself on custard, that's my business. However, here's a further point, drawing from the work of some Swedish colleagues (Professor Kent Asp - see him speak on a completely different subject here - and Dr Anna Maria Jönsson): it seems like the existence of a strong public service broadcaster not only helps keep people informed through its own programming, but the public service broadcaster also acts as an influence on commercial broadcasters by setting the standard (of news as well as entertainment). Research shows that when broadcasting was deregulated in Sweden and commerical broadcasters entered the marked, the public service broadcaster was first quick to adopt the formats and techniques of the commercial broadcasters' news, i.e. more striking images, more soft news etc. However, this change was short-term: in the long term, public service broadcasters gradually changed their news back and the commercial broadcasters followed. I.e. the presence of a strong public service broadcaster created more "serious" commercial news as well. Public service first served custard, but then went back to serving broccoli - and the commercial broadcasters started serving broccoli as well! Good news. If you like broccoli.