Published:
15-Jan-07
Italy's Communication Minister Paolo Gentiloni unveiled government plans to reform the governance and the funding of public broadcaster RAI.
According to the plan, unveiled last week, RAI group would be divided into two separate companies. The first one would produce two general-interest channels mainly financed by an increased licence fee and little or no advertising revenues. The second entity would broadcast a third, general-interest, channel solely supported by advertising.
Both companies would be governed by boards composed of personalities named by Parliament, in a governance scheme not far from that of the BBC. Today by contrast, the top management of the three RAI channels are appointed and revoked directly by the government, leading to endemic instability and suspicion of a lack of impartiality.
Public broadcasting performance would be assessed on a combination of a 'market performance index' (including viewing figures) and 'public value' and 'corporate reputation' indexes. Such performance assessment is already being implemented in the new 'service contract' for the 2007-2009 period.
Our take...
With this move, the centre-left government is first-of-all trying to tackle the endemic influence of politics into RAI's management and guarantee public channels more independence.
The government also suggests to give up the traditional half-half mix between advertising money and licence fee money, today applying equally to the three RAI channels.
It has been generally accepted across Western Europe that the 50-50 dual funding which sometimes results from political compromises is in fact the worst situation in terms of public value; indeed it does not enable a public broadcaster to differentiate from commercial competitors nor does it enable it to compete on the advertising market. The 50-50 mix is also questionable on the grounds of State aid and typically results in schizophrenic and erratic management. France, for example, partly acknowledged this fact by reducing advertising time on public channels six years ago so that the share of their revenues received from advertising decreased to around 30 per cent.
The right-wing opposition, led by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, opposes the proposal, and would rather privatise one of RAI's channels to concentrate public money on the two remaining ones. It also remains to be seen if the current government will be able to achieve the significant increase in the licence fee that such a financing model would require. A first, modest step was made in this direction as the cost of an annual TV licence was raised to €104 from €99.60 this year.
Italy,
