Future Directions for SBS

Brisbane.
The next session at ANZCA 2009 is a panel session discussing the future role of public service broadcasting, focussing on Australia's multicultural broadcaster SBS. This is introduced by my colleague Terry Flew, who notes that SBS is a distinctively different type of public broadcaster, making a very specific contribution to multiculturalism and citizenship.

The first panellist to speak is Stuart Cunningham from the CCi. If SBS had to be invented today, he says, it wouldn't be - today's media environment is fundamentally different from that of the 1970s and 1980s from which it emerged, and today there is a plethora of media channels available to citizens. Additionally, the role of public broadcasters has changed fundamentally - the culture wars of the past decades render a government intervention for the development of a public broadcaster to promote multiculturalism inconceivable today. Protection and projection of public culture is no longer an unproblematic public goal.

And yet, SBS came under much less concerted attack from interested combattants than the major public broadcaster, the ABC, did. The ethnic communities themselves have been amongst the most ardent critics of SBS, which otherwise was able to sneak through outside the glare of the the spotlights. Paul Keating's Creative Nation policy in 1994 was a significant boost for SBS, not least with the creation of SBS Independent as a production arm; this was the only explicit Creative Nation programme even refunded under the incoming conservative Howard government.

So why does SBS survive and get refunded? This has a lot to do with the fantastic successes of SBS in the past; however, in the 2009 budget, the ABC received substantial new funds, while SBS didn't - the ABC has managed to reinvent itself as an innovative public media organisation, while SBS has yet to show its successes here (and additionally, SBS's more commercial nature may also be on the nose with the Labor left). There is an invitation to SBS here to recurse, to refocus on its multicultural roots as well as connect with the broader educational remit of public broadcasting. SBS's role in the revival of language abilities in Australia should not be underestimated here. SBS is somewhat like Tasmania here, Stuart suggests - a diverse microcosm of the wider Australia.

Bruce Maher Meagher, Director of Strategy and Communication at SBS, follows on from this, and notes that the relative shortfall in funding for SBS in the current triennial funding budget has perhaps a more prosaic explanation - as a result of the global financial crisis, funding was very critically reviewed, and much of the fat except for Labor election promises was cut (and two major commitments related to ABC funding for the ABC kids' channel and increased domestic drama production). This exacerbated the imbalance between ABC and SBS funding.

The problem with all of this, at any rate, is that the ABC increasingly becomes the default for public broadcasting, which is a cause for further reflection. There is less of a negative feeling towards SBS (because of commercials or any other factors) amongst politicians or citizens than simply indifference - and this needs to be addressed. Multiculturalism, too, is not clearly associated with current public or government agendas - and the Australian community is changing somewhat with the growing assimilation of third- and fourth-generation immigrants - the children of SBS's traditional constituency - into the general community. By contrast, SBS has failed to engage sufficiently with the new migrant groups so far.

So, SBS is at risk of marginalisation, though certainly not in crisis at the moment. It needs to engage with new media technologies, and is worth preserving for the best reasons of public service media - not least because it remains unique certainly in Australia, and arguably in the world. It is distinctive for its commitment to telling Australian stories (not least also through SBS Independent) - and there is a substantial opportunity to provide even more content in languages other than English both through radio and television broadcasting as well as through online means. This also needs to be connected with user-generated content on SBS sites as well as connections with established resources developed by the communities themselves. Connection with mobile streaming or government-provided resources (also noting that literacy may be a problem for some recent migrant communities).

Next up is Valerio Veo, also from SBS, who notes the move away from a one-to-many mass media model of communication towards niche media. SBS has never had any specific online funding and was late to move into the online space; it has established presences for minority groups and football fans, and is expanding this into other communities (especially food, cycling, and other current programming). There's an opportunity here for what Valerio calls collaborative journalism - not least by plugging into the existing communities which already have strong relations with SBS.

Smart news organisations embrace this change, while others fear it - but ultimately, the journalist must become a curator of news rather than simply a publisher of news. The current Iranian protests, and many others, provide an obvious example here, and SBS journalists now regularly check Twitter and other services for breaking news. This is undoubtedly a positive development for news media, Valerio says, and i also very well suited to current affairs programming, such as the forum-style programme Insight. User feedback also provides valuable new information, such as links to further resources about specific topics that are available on the Web.

Finally, we move on to Gay Hawkins, author of The SBS Story. She notes the current federal government inquiry into the future of public service media, and says that issues of cultural diversity and social inclusion are central to it. Australia's cultural diversity has become much more complex and much more pervasive, and public service media face particular expectations in this context. The example of SBS and its work especially in the context of citizenship remains singularly important here.

SBS has developed three different approaches to multiculturalism: ethno-multiculturalism, which began from a cultural maintenance framework and moved to social inclusion (and SBS worked to provide spaces for ethnic communities and to include them in wider societal debates); cosmopolitan multiculturalism, which leads the way for post-national understandings of citizenship (and SBS has shown how multiculturalism and migration underpin cosmopolitan perspectives, beyond simple ethnic communities); and popular multiculturalism, which has attracted much criticism but attempted to normalise diversity and showed that difference, not sameness, is where claims to citizenship begin. This has played out in a range of continually inventive and innovative content strategies.

However, SBS has been slow to understand that citizenship is also about participation, and about getting involved in debates around citizenship. Also, it has been slow to embrace online technologies (and the ABC stole the march in the meantime), due to its very limited funding for such initiatives - happily, it is catching up now.

But the ABC continues to have substantially more funding for its online strategies and initiatives, even in spite of the government's explicit support for the public broadcasters' role in enhancing social inclusion - the ABC now has all the resources to do this, but not the organisational culture required for it which SBS has in droves. A culture of whiteness still surrounds the ABC as an organisation, and there is a strong focus on the 'mainstream'. Against this, Gay argues, the mainstream is itself diverse - but the ABC doesn't see this, and struggles to pluralise the mainstream, while conversely, SBS struggles to mainstream pluralism. And there is a danger that both channels with hive off such strategies to their new, for now still lower-order, digital channels.

Technorati : ANZCA 2009, Australia, SBS, diversity, multiculturalism, policy, public broadcasting, television
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