On October 11, a large-scale study was presented in Brussels on the topic of “Television Across Europe: Regulation, Policy and Independence.” The research had been conducted over a period of two years by the Open Society Institute’s EU Monitoring and Advocacy Program (EUMAP). Within the space of nearly 2,000 pages, the study examines the development of television in 12 European countries, including European Union member states, candidate members, and potential candidates: from Great Britain to Turkey, and Romania to France. It provides a detailed analysis of the distribution of television programming, and makes some concrete recommendations for actions to be taken by national governments, international organizations and all sorts of other interested parties. Weeks after its release, in Bulgaria the debate continues, with regard to what kind of television we watch.
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or the majority of Europeans, television is still their main source of information, despite the dynamic emergence of new technologies. At the same time, a trend can be can be seen among public television operators on a European-wide scale: that of their compromising the quality of their programming in the interest of competition with commercial stations. This tendency is advancing in the face of ongoing attempts by governments and political parties to maintain their control over the public electronic media, and is accompanied by developments in the process of media consolidation by private capital in television stations (some of which have clear political aims and orientations). All of this poses a serious threat to the fundamental role played by television as a pillar of democracy. This is even more so in the case of countries in transition, where the public electronic media have somehow not yet managed to find the most appropriate path towards meeting the high expectations of their audiences. The study makes it clear that on the European level in general, market mechanisms in and of themselves cannot and should not determine the future of the public electronic media. The dualistic system, presupposing the existence of public and commercial operators, is an essential element of democracy, and an important part of European political and cultural identity. In this sense, the issue of media-regulating agencies comes to the forefront; in addition to being fully independent institutions, they should have sufficient resources and powers to be able to observe the performance of the operators, as well as the degree to which they comply with legislative and licensing requirements. In keeping with this, expectations towards the public electronic media continue to lie in the direction of establishing a mechanism for guaranteeing the transparency of their income, and most of all with regard to the ways in which they use their public funding. At the same time, their programming should be geared towards full correlation with their public obligations. With regard to commercial operators, there is also
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the matter of the transparency of media ownership, as well as that of the deepening process of the debasement of content and tabloidy nature of their news programming. And as far as the issue of minorities and ethnic groups, and how they are reflected on television, the study’s conclusions - and this is at the Europeanwide level - categorically indicate that operators still have a social obligation to answer to, since they only present a picture that is stingy, one-sided, and not especially interesting to their audiences, while still leaning too heavily towards traditional stereotypes, negative attitudes and speculation. So where does Bulgaria fall in these processes and trends? The answer is more than obvious, when one examines the facts: there is an imperfect regulatory framework for the media and even more problems associated with its enforcement, a public television network that is still struggling to find its true programming mission, in order to respond to the needs of society, a high degree of non-transparency regarding media ownership and severe monopolization of the market on the part of certain players, a high level of television programming with similar content, a paucity of investigative journalism, and an almost total lack of programming for minority ethnic groups. In practice, the only exceptions to that last tendency are the Turkish-language programming on Bulgarian National Radio (BNR), a tenminute daily bulletin on Bulgarian National Television (BNT, broadcast at 5:00 pm, so it has an exceptionally low viewership), weekly programs on the Rhodope TV station in Kurdzhali, which try to reach the Turkish population of the region, and the local ROMA TV station in Vidin, which provides news and feature stories for residents of the Roma neighbourhood Nov Put. All of this clearly leads to the conclusion that the reflection of ethnic differences, of ·the other,” is still an element that is alien to Bulgarian radio and television stations. Even more worrying is the fact that in their present form, the severe limitation in the amount of air time, editorial content and quality of such programming
EVISION WE WATCH prevents it from attracting either the mass or specific target audiences. A more in-depth presentation of different ethnic groups and their everyday concerns and problems has given way completely to sensationalism or the mold fashioned by the institutions that deal with them. So it is not surprising that the modern editorial principles that are ever-increasingly being applied in other types of programming - those of impartiality, independence, accuracy and pluralism of points of view - are simply missing from these programs. The electronic media still fail to understand the ethnic minority groups, members of which, as a rule, are not represented on the stations’ editorial teams. And the widely-applied idea of arranging specialized programming for those groups practically dooms the entire notion of reflecting ethnic differences to failure. Instead of being present as an integral part of mainstream programming, addressing the fundamental issues of the day in Bulgarian society in which these matters are of primary importance - specialized programming automatically relegates them to remaining unseen by viewers, and to being equally alien to the general audience (naive, thoughtless and clichÊd) and to representatives of the groups themselves, both as a means of presenting the problem and as a means of expression. The conclusions, applicable to both the European-wide as well as the narrow Bulgarian context, suggest the opinion that the approach should probably be in the direction of documentary presentation of issues of ethnic differences. To that end, the regulatory stratum should try to find sensible quotas (and budgets, for that matter) for air time to be devoted to those issues. And while public operators should have such quotas imposed as part of their fundamental obligations, a special system of bonuses also needs to be instituted for
the privately-owned electronic media (such as lower licensing fees or additional advertising time per hour), who must take on an editorial obligation to reflect such issues. A discussion and presentation of the Bulgarian report on the state of television in Bulgaria, including the ways in which the public and private electronic media present matters of ethnic differences, is scheduled for 9 December 2005. The author of the report is Assya Kavrukova, a media lawyer and program director of the Open Society Institute in Sofia. The study’s editor (the Bulgarian one, as well as that on the overall situation of television in Europe) is Danail Danov, a director of practical training programs for journalists and the program director of the Center for Media Development in Sofia. Danail DANOV