162 | Mass Media and Historical Change
representatives were responsible for its supervision, and its financing via licens-
ing fees was to guarantee its independence from the state. The actual running
of this system, however, turned out to be varied. While in Britain the BBC
was in point of fact quite independent, the governments of France and Italy in
particular exerted a great deal of influence, as did the major political parties in
Germany, albeit to a lesser degree. Even in a far country like India, this system
of public television was in place, but subject to especially powerful financial
and administrative state control (Shrivastava 2005: 14f.). In the Netherlands,
the same ‘pillared’ structure was applied as in radio: Liberals, Socialists, Cath-
olics and Protestants all had their own broadcasting stations but their produc-
tions were aired on shared programming.
The political consequences of these organisational forms can be discussed
only hypothetically to date. In Italy, television probably helped to buttress
the decades-long dominance of the Christian Democrats, just as in France
it promoted a patriotic policy under Charles de Gaulle. Some have argued
that in the Netherlands television facilitated the erosion of those strongly
separated political and religious milieus, which had thus far been character-
istic of the Dutch society, because shared reception allowed these groups to
watch the others’ programmes and thus succumb to a kind of generalised
relativism (Bignell and Fickers 2008: 20). Similarly, it is likely that the pro-
portional representation of political parties turned German television into
a ‘consensus maker’, although affinity for one party or another might have
varied depending on who was holding the government majority at the time.
In south-western Europe, dictatorships made use of state television to adver-
tise their achievements. Thus the Portuguese dictator Marcello Caetano
utilised the programme Family Talks to address the people. On the whole,
however, television seems to have been apolitical and entertaining in its ori-
entation, even during the Spanish and Portuguese dictatorships. Of course,
the ‘perfect world’ presented on television most probably intensified people’s
desire to experience it in reality. This probably paved the way, at least in
the long term, for an inner rejection of these regimes, as also happened in
Eastern Europe.
Television can also be studied as a component of international politics and
Cold War diplomacy (cf. e.g. Schwoch 2009: 3). Here the media served as a
vehicle for both debate and trans-border exchanges between the blocs. From
the 1950s, the Cold War led to the formation of two international broadcast-
ing organisations in Europe – in the West the European Broadcasting Union
(EBU), and in the East the ‘Organisation International de Radiodiffusion et
Télévision’ (OIRT) (cf. Zeller 1999) – although these subsequently merged in
- The intention of both was to promote common programming and the
exchange of programme material, and to create a European identity in the West
or a Socialistic one in the East. Both achieved these objectives only in part;