LARSEN: NRK focuses on its importance for sustaining the Norwegian language, while SVT focuses on its importance for providing the Swedish public with a high-quality offering.

Legitimation strategies of public service broadcasters: the divergent rhetoric in Norway and Sweden
Hakon Larsen
Media Culture Society 2010 32: 267
DOI: 10.1177/0163443709355610
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Abstracts

Public service broadcasting (PSB), a specific way of organizing broadcast media with a mission to 'inform, educate and entertain' (SOU, 2005:1: 50), was particularly influential in the 20th century.

As the media environment is now characterized by convergence, digitalization, globalization and audience fragmentation, many are questioning PSB's role in the 21st century.

This article looks at the national PSB institutions in Norway and Sweden, Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK) and Sveriges Television (SVT), and asks how they are coping with these challenges: how do the national broadcasters in Norway and Sweden regard the PSB mission and legitimate their position in today's media environment?

How do they relate to the classical PSB features of enlightenment and democracy? How do they approach the public?

The analysis is based on interviews, institutional documents and the CEOs public appearances to debate PSB. Differences and similarities are explained and interpreted in light of social, cultural and historical variations within the two countries, which have much in common in this respect (Sejersted, 2005).


Conclusions

As we have seen in this article, both NRK and SVT base the argument for their continued importance on their unique position in the international media market. 

They differ, however, in that NRK focuses on its importance for sustaining the Norwegian language, while SVT focuses on its importance for providing the Swedish public with a high-quality offering. Furthermore, the NRK bases its self-image on the shift from a PSB to a PSM institution (Lowe and Bardoel, 2007) to a greater degree than SVT. The latter still bases its rhetoric on its dedication to serving the democracy and enlightening the people, while NRK focuses on being a high-quality content deliverer in a digital media environment. The enlightenment aspect of PSB is today understood, by both institutions, as being a provider of a diverse and easily accessible offer related to both the content and the medium. The paternalistic attitude is abandoned for an attitude where the public is considered to be interested in looking up information on its own. The enlightenment ambition is thus adapted to the current media environment.

The differences in the institutions' rhetoric can be related to cultural and intellectual traditions in the two countries, the institutions' support among the people and the politicians, organizational differences and the different levels of aspiration. SVT seems to be in need of justifying its existence to a higher degree than NRK, and in so doing it relates to the national repertoire in Sweden, activating a somewhat philosophical and abstract rhetoric relating its mission to democratic and humanistic values. Since NRK does not have the same need to justify its existence, and the cultural repertoire in Norway is more down to earth and pragmatic, the focus is more on technical aspects of NRK's future in its publicly communicated institutional reflexivity.