Despite their shortcomings, they remain the only kind of broadcaster that can fulfill the commitments that all European governments have made to respect cultural pluralism and diversity, and the media rights of minority groups. Yet public service broadcasters take their shape and ehots from the states and societies that sustain them. So what happens when there is no single public to serve? Or, perhaps more accurately, when factional elites prevent publicly-funded broadcasters from even trying to serve a single public? Can public service broadcasting ever help to convert ethnic division into ethnic difference?

 

These are the kinds of questions that underlie Divided They Fall: Public service broadcasting in multiethnic states. Media experts from Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Switzerland describe their public broadcasting models and practices. In the introduction, the editors argue that public service broadcasting has a choice: it can either underwrite ethno-cultural differences, by confirming audiences in their static sense of ethnic belonging, or it can air these differences by exposing those differences to debate, with all the risks that this may entail.