Public TV No More Plays a Role
This thesis was expressed by a Latvian media expert Jānis Juzefovičs who participated in a three-day (October 6-8) conference in Yerevan entitled “What Future for Democracy and Civil Society?” organized by the Open Society Foundations-Armenia.
The focus of Jānis’s report “Decreasing audience: the future of post-soviet public broadcasters in digital environment” was the fact that over 20 years after the collapse of communism, public TV and radio broadcasters of Central and Eastern European countries have not managed to transfer the idea of state broadcaster to public, and till today, the overwhelming majority of the society accept public TV and radio as part of the government as it was in the Soviet times.
Besides, as a result of digitalization, public broadcasters will have to face new challenges, and funds allotted to public TV and radio from the state budget become groundless.
Jānis Juzefovičs, a teacher of Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, in his PhD work suggests a thesis that the idea to disseminate information of social importance can be preserved but not necessarily through public TV and radio.