A late start and inconsistent international support have dogged attempts to reform Bosnia's public broadcasting system 'from the outside'.
By Daniel Lindvall in Stockholm (Balkan Insight, 5 Feb 06)

Reinventing public broadcasting in Bosnia and Hercegovina has been one of the most cumbersome tasks the international community has undertaken.
It has also been much criticised, mainly as a result of the sluggish pace of the reforms, the poor quality of much of the broadcasting and the financial plight of the broadcasters.

Much of the criticism is exaggerated. Today, public broadcasters in Bosnia are fairly independent and are more impartial than most print media. And a legal framework is in place that envisages further reintegration of the various broadcasters. There is also a nationwide channel that almost all Bosnians can tune into.

These are impressive achievements when one recalls the condition of Bosnian broadcasters immediately after the 1992 to 1995 war.

But problems remain. There has still been no proper unification of the ethnically divided public broadcasting system, and this has prevented it from playing the role it deserved in reintegrating the country.

The three ethnic groups still watch, read and listen to media along ethnic lines and the largest Bosnian Croat party, acting on complaints that the broadcasters are effectively divided between the Bosniaks and the Serbs, is fighting for a separate channel in Croatian language.

Reform of the public broadcasting system in a war-torn country was never going to be easy. The system's legitimacy, and its financial survival, depend not only on the enthusiasm of the politicians but also on the response of the viewers who pay for the broadcasting. Therefore, initiatives to suspend entity-based broadcasters and establish a nationwide broadcaster have not been seen as viable.

In effect, the Madrid Peace Implementation Council in 1998 gave the prime responsibility for broadcasting to Bosnia and Herzegovina's two entities, the Republika Srpska, RS, and the Federation.

The international community's efforts were accordingly directed to the then existing broadcasters, which were to become proper entity-based public service channels, while cross-entity broadcasting was to be offered by the Open Broadcasting Network, OBN, comprising various private broadcasters.

But it was only in 2002, when PBS BiH was established, that Bosnia received a nationwide public broadcaster. Broadcasting on a countrywide frequency did not commence until August 2004.

This late start to the nationwide project was to some extent down to the inconsistency of the international community. Europeans and Americans were allegedly divided over whether to throw their weight behind private or public broadcasting.

This conflict should, however, not be exaggerated, as the international community from an early stage committed itself to establishing public broadcasters in accordance with European models.

But it must be conceded that only puny efforts were made to unify the system. Not until 2002, when a BBC consultancy group was engaged, was an all-encompassing model presented for a unified public broadcasting system.

This BBC team drafted a "restructuring plan", outlining the basic principles of the forthcoming legal structure. The management of the broadcasters adopted the plan in April 2004.

The basic principle was a technical solution, whereby production and transmission tasks would be taken away from the broadcasters and undertaken by a common enterprise, called "the Corporation".

Entity-based broadcasting services would retain editorial independence but would purchase all technical services from the new Corporation or private producers. Thus an internal market would be established and an intimate relationship between the broadcasters would naturally be developed.

By leaving programming to the entity broadcasters and coordination of technical issues to the common body, it was hoped that the aspects of centralisation and reintegration in the scheme would be rendered less politically fraught.

However, this model was just a bit too clever for its own good, and when it came to the implementation of the technical issues, the international community proved less interested than some hoped.

The direct political engagement gradually faded after mid-2002, by which time the essential laws had been imposed. When the BBC consultancy team found the management of the broadcasters uninterested in implementing their reforms, they received no major assistance from the big international actors.

At the same time, the broadcasters at state and entity level were developing in different directions. While the RS broadcaster downsized, the Federation and state PBS BiH grew and became entangled in a growing financial crisis.

When the BBC team left in mid-2004, the natural integration of these three dissimilar companies did not look very realistic.

In addition, when the nationwide channel, BHTV1, began to broadcast in 2004, it received only modest technical support. This project was of utmost importance for the whole system, as the law envisaged it receiving half the total revenues of the system and it was, therefore, most sensitive to the approval of viewers.

However, BHTV1 was developed on a very weak budget and unfortunately
its editorial policy was emphatically Sarajevo-orientated, giving Banja Luka, for example, only a peripheral role. It both failed to compete with newer private alternatives and was rather disliked in the RS.

The root problem with the entire model introduced in Bosnia and Herzegovina was that it was an alien product, devised by international experts. Local broadcasters acquired only a limited sense of ownership. Internally it was also criticised, because it required staff reductions and because the technical arrangement was said to be too complex.

Following the withdrawal of the BBC team, no internal actors stepped in to replace them and further develop the system. The international community became virtual bystanders.

Reform of public broadcasting was one of the outstanding issues facing Bosnia in the European Commission's 2003 Feasibility Study, and thus the international community became closely involved in the process of adopting new PBS laws.

However, the broadcasters were never properly prepared for the implementation of the laws that the EC had requested.

The final result of the internationally supervised reform of public broadcasting in Bosnia has yet to be seen and judged.

But its prospects would have been better if the model of internal reform and integration had been introduced much earlier - and if it had won a more wholehearted approval from the local authorities.

When all the new PBS laws are adopted, the system is no longer an experiment but a fact of life. In the coming year or two, this international exercise in media reforms will face its toughest test.

Daniel Lindvall is a PhD student at the Baltic and East European Graduate School in Stockholm. In 2005 he was responsible for public broadcasting reform in the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Source: Balkan Investigative Reporting Network