27. 09. 2010

JOINT STANDS ON INSTITUTIONS OF REGIONAL PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING

After the fourth round table dedicated to drafting the Media Strategy, held on September 23, 2010 in Belgrade, ANEM, IJAS (NUNS), IJAV (NDNV) and Local Press harmonized the joint stands on the recommendation from the Media Study related to the establishing of the Institutions of regional public service broadcasting, which were publicly presented at the fifth round table on September 27, 2010 in Belgrade.

Joint stands on the Institutions of regional public service broadcasting

Recommendations from the Media Study specify establishment of institutions of regional public service broadcasting. We believe that such model is unacceptable for the following reasons:

• It requires establishment of new institutions of public service broadcasting at the time when the performance of the existing institutions of public service broadcasting is unsatisfactory;
• It requires that the newly formed institutions of public service broadcasting be financed by the TV fee, which due to low rate of collection cannot even guarantee stable financing of the existing institutions of public service broadcasting;
• It envisages that new regional institutions of public service broadcasting will be built from stations that should have been privatized (as required by law) not later than December 31, 2007, and whose licenses should have been revoked by the Republic Broadcasting Agency if they remained non-privatized after that deadline. These stations still have their licenses today only because the state has not acted in accordance with its own laws, which sends a wrong message on enforcement of laws in Serbia.
• It is problematic from the viewpoint of constitutional guarantee of maintenance of the achieved level of human rights: the right to freedom of expression, the freedom of entrepreneurship, the right to equal legal position in the market, the rights acquired by investment of capital in accordance with law, and the property rights of commercial media owners.

Our alternative proposal for regional and local broadcasting is as follows:

1)         It is necessary to immediately complete - with an established deadline - the privatization of media outlets that are still publicly owned.

2)        The problem of too many broadcasters compared to what the market is able to sustain should not be solved by forming new regional institutions of public service broadcasting nor by a new nationalization, but by implementing measures that would stimulate consolidation of the market, and mergers and fusions in the media market.

3)        The lack of high-quality programs for regional and local communities and other programs that are usually considered a part of public service broadcasting, can be solved by stipulating mandatory production and airing of such programs (as a necessary condition for issuance of licenses) by local and regional commercial stations. In return, such stations should have a guaranteed access to cable systems (must carry), lower license fees, guaranteed usage of frequencies i.e. access to multiplex, financial support for high-quality programs and protection from unfair competition, whether by pirate stations or by non-privatized public media companies financed in a way that constitutes illegal state's assistance.

4)        It is necessary to introduce efficient mechanisms of control of state assistance in order to prevent the state (in a widest possible sense, i.e. including local self-governments and public companies) from influencing the competition in the media market by channeling subsidies, i.e. marketing budgets, to media outlets owned by the state (the "friendly media").

5)        Implementation of these measures, together with the measures intended to regulate the system of state co-financing of media projects and the system of state support to development of the media sector, could create necessary conditions for functioning of the media market in Serbia, in which investors would have an interest to participate in media privatization and in which media privatization could be successful.