Abstract
Public Interest and Democracy in the Age of Digital Broadcsting
Youngchul Yoon
(Professor, Dept. of Communication, Yonsei Univ.)
One of the most controversial issues in the digital broadcasting policy debate is to find effective ways of realizing public interest in the rapidly shifting broadcasting environment in which the number of channels will be almost limitless. In line with the general trends of privatization and deregulation, digital broadcasters prefer market-oriented policy proposals designed for making profit even in the early stage of digital broadcasting. They welcomes the idea of consumer sovereignty because it goes well with the market logic. Even the concept of public interest is redefined as an aggregated interests of consumers whose preferences are satisfied by the selection of channels.
However, those who put an emphasis on the democratic role of broadcasting take a rather different view. They acknowledge the necessity of content regulation even in the age of digital broadcasting. In this view, digital broadcasters are asked to reflect the interests of undeserved or unserved public by broadcasting programs on children, elderly people, disabled, politics, education and disaster warning. Diversity is the key concept for public interest obligation because informed citizens should be exposed to diverse perspectives on various public issues.
In this context, this explores policy alternatives for maintaining digital public forum from the perspective of deliberative democracy. In doing so, I will critically review the relevance of policy proposals based on the idea of consumer sovereignty. Discussion will be centered on the effectiveness of pay-or-play policy which would replace the traditional regulatory approach with a marketplace model. This study suggests that the pay-or-play policy where broadcasters are given to a choice between paying a share of revenue and maintaining the existing practice of public interest obligations, would result in broadcasters dropping all public interest-oriented programming. It was also argued that the principle of "must carry" would be still valid in the age of digital broadcasting.
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