Interest Groups in Public Service Media Governance

During the past ten years public service media organizations have experienced increasing demands for transparency, audience participation and public engagement. In response to this a number of reformed regulatory structures and audience-engagement measures were implemented. Drawing on interviews and archival materials, this contribution adopts a media-governance perspective in order to investigate two German civil society interest groups that emerged out of discontent with the scope of these reforms: Ständige Publikumskonferenz and Initiative Publikumsrat. The two groups are compared to the British civil society interest group Voice of the Listener and Viewer (VLV). The paper investigates whether certain factors that led to the successful institutionalization of the VLV in British media governance could also be applied to the German context. It is argued that the domestic regulatory frameworks differ strikingly. Furthermore, the conditions in the 1980s, when the VLV was founded, are very different from today’s networked society. Still, to some extent the VLV can serve as a role model for the young German interest groups.