Public Service Broadcast - Secondary Research

A public service announcement (PSA) or community service announcement (CSA) is an advertisement broadcast on radio or television, for the public interest. PSAs are intended to modify public attitudes by raising awareness about specific issues.

Public broadcasting includes radio, television and other electronic media outlets that receive some or all of their funding from the public. Public broadcasters may receive their funding from individuals through voluntary donations, a specific charge such as a television licence fee, or as direct funding by the state.
Public broadcasting may be nationally or locally operated, depending on the country and the station. In some countries, public broadcasting is run by a single organization (such as the BBC in the UK and the Austrailian Broadcasting Cooperation in Australia), broadcasting national and regional radio and television services. Other countries have multiple public broadcasting organizations operating regionally (such as the ARD stations in Germany) or in different languages. In the United States, public broadcasting stations are always locally licensed, but range from stations that mostly broadcast programming from national networks such as the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), to stations that broadcast content of local interest.

In 1985, the UK Broadcasting Research Unit (1981–1991) defined public service broadcasting as involving:

1. Geographic universality — The stations' broadcasts are available nationwide, with no exception. Generally, the "nationwide" criterion is satisfied by either having member stations across the country (as is the case with PBS) or, as is the case with most other public broadcasters around the world, the broadcaster's use of sufficient transmitters to broadcast nationwide (as with ABC Radio National across Australia).
2. Catering for all interests and tastes — as exemplified by the BBC's range of minority channels (BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 3)
3. Catering for minorities — much as above, but with racial and linguistic minorities. (for example S4C in Wales, BBC Asian Network, Radio-Canada, and Australia's multicultural Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)).
4. Concern for national identity and community — this essentially means that the stations mostly part-commission programmes from within the country, even if more expensive than importing shows.
5. Detachment from vested interests and government in which programming is impartial, and the broadcaster is not be subject to control by advertisers or government. Even when a broadcast medium is removed from corporate and government interests, critics argue that it may nonetheless have a bias towards the values of certain groups, such as the middle class, the politics of the incumbent government, or in the case of partially or wholly commercially funded networks, the advertisers.
6. One broadcasting system to be directly funded by the corpus of users — For example, the licence fee in the case of the BBC, or member stations asking for donations in the case of PBS/NPR.
7. Competition in good programming rather than numbers — quality is the prime concern with a true public service broadcaster. Of course, in practice, ratings wars are rarely concerned with quality, although that may depend on how "quality" is defined.
8. Guidelines to liberate programme-makers and not restrict them — in the UK, guidelines, and not laws, govern what a programme-maker can and cannot do, although these guidelines can be backed up by hefty penalties.

Not all of these points apply to public broadcasting in other countries.