Public Service Media Interventions: Risk and the Market

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between Public Service Media (PSM) and the market through the lens of risk. Instead of approaching PSM’s market impact from a crowding-out perspective, we focus on how these organizations contribute to creating, shaping, and sustaining markets. We identify two key areas of risk that PSM organizations are actively negotiating and/or as part of a change to their remit and responsibilities: first, in creating and sustaining a supply base of indigenous content, and second, in contributing to innovation capacity. Whilst we don’t argue that all PSM organizations are engaging in these equally, or even delivering effectively on these agendas, we want to highlight the important contribution that PSM makes to creative economies and to economic and cultural activity within nation states more generally. The chapter concludes by arguing that by undermining the scale and funding of PSM their capacity to assume that risk is weakening, and that this will have implications for the entire marketplace.