CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

            Background to the study

The advent of multiparty democracy in Ghana brought with it the liberalisation of the media. Until the 1990s, broadcasting in Ghana had been a monopoly of the public service broadcaster, the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC). It was argued by Ferguson (1990), that the public service role of GBC was necessary and critical like many other African countries, to bring development, foster unity and promote national culture. According to Ferguson (1990), radio and television requires the use of a public resource, the frequency spectrum; and hence should attract licensing and regulation, both of which necessitates restricted entry. Flowing from Ferguson’s argument, a restricted entry in the media space initially created broadcasting monopoly for the state while at the same time raising funding issues.

The term ‘public service broadcasting’ is a borrowed term from the European broadcasting corporations. Public service broadcasting corporations were set up as licence fee funded monopolies in the inter-world war period. Broadcasting institutions, therefore, attempted to bring into being, a culture of a shared life to the people (Mpofu, 1999).

They broadcast materials that portrayed a sense of oneness to the populace. In Europe, a key feature of public service broadcasting is the predominance of public funding over commercial advertising and sponsorship. Licence fees and government grants are the main form of government funding. Public funding is considered therefore as the means critical to the ability of the public broadcasting service to produce a diversity of programming, not driven by advertisers according to Mpofu (1999).

In Ghana, like other West African countries, funding for the operations of public service broadcasters came from direct government grants. After independence, this far exceeded licence fees because of the deliberate increase in government spending. In the immediate post independent Ghana, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah provided large sums of government funding to the Ghana Broadcasting Service to be used as a political and developmental tool and to transmit broadcasts by African liberation movements across the continent (Mbaine, 2003). This formed the basis of the role of the GBC over the years.

            Broadcasting Systems

Over the years, there have been numerous debates on the peculiar characteristics or definition of the broadcasting systems inherited by most nationalist regimes from their colonial masters. In all these debates, four models of broadcasting was identified by Rumphorst (2003) and these are state, government, public and public service broadcasting systems.

Rumphorst (2003) defined them as indicted following. State broadcasting is controlled by the state and represents state interests. It is funded (at least in part) from the public purse and usually independent of the government of the day. Government broadcasting, however, is controlled by the government of the day and represents the viewpoint of the executive. It is at least partly funded with public money.

Public broadcasting on the one hand, is owned by the public and is thus accountable to the masses. It is also funded, at least partly, with public funds. Public service broadcasting, on the other hand, has a mandate to broadcast content that is in the public interest. A public service broadcaster need not be publicly owned – privately owned broadcasters may have such a role but a public broadcaster should always have a public service remit.