Retrieving public service broadcasting: treading a fine line at TVNZ

When New Zealand led the world in its deregulation of broadcasting in the late 1980s, the publicly owned but commercially oriented Television New Zealand (TVNZ) became uniquely popular, attracting two-thirds of the national audience and returning substantial profit dividends to the government. However, in 1999, partly in response to concerns about quality, an incoming centre-left government decided to reverse the trend and reinstate public service values in television through a controversial charter. This article examines the three-year battle to establish the Charter in the mixed broadcasting sector and looks at the possibilities of success in New Zealand’s small market. TVNZ continues to rely on advertising funding and may have been assigned an impossible task, given the government’s commitment to supporting private creative industries combined with an arguably tardy response to the structural and funding challenges imposed by Charter obligations in the new configuration of state-owned television.