Article for a special international edition of “TEXTE” (published by Austrian Public Broadcasting Corporation‐ ORF) focusing on the role of public service media in the digital age, sent in February 2014 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Public service media in the digital age: the challenge of maintaining community in the face of the market Zrinjka Peruško 1 It is almost 25 years from the first democratic changes in Croatia. In this time, the public service broadcaster was the most frequently debated among media policy topics in the Croatian parliament, and the most frequently changed law among the media laws (11 times to date). This constant tinkering with the legal framework of the public service broadcaster is a symptom of dissatisfaction on the part of the political powers, but it has not necessarily improved the functioning and position of the Croatian Radio and Television. To the contrary, recent legislative changes have made the public service broadcaster more vulnerable to economic pressures and outside influences. In the following text I focus on legislative developments starting in 2010, preceding and following Croatia’s accession to EU, and their consequences for the position of public service media in the digital media space. After the 1990s marked by war and political pressures of Tuđman’s regime, the significant brightening in the following decade of the 2000s marked a positive trend for the increase of independence of the Croatian Radio and Television from the state and political powers. While in the 1990s the idea of public service media, aimed to provide a service to the citizens and not the state‐political field, was slow to be accepted even for the democratic parties of the then opposition (Peruško Čulek, 1999), the decade of 2000 started a positive trend of growing impartiality of political reporting (Stantić, 2003, Peruško, 2008). While the challenges of the pressures of the political field on the public service media were lessening, those of the market forces were increasing. Croatia was increasingly becoming influenced by the neo‐liberal economic trends, and television broadcasting saw the entrance of foreign companies in 2004; first RTL TV was granted the licence to broadcast on the national level, then the CME bought NOVA TV, the first commercial TV with a national coverage licence in Croatia. This immediately created pressure for the HRT, and while it provided the much expected pluralism of news reporting the audience attention started to be attracted by the new television offer. In terms of political pluralism, the commercial televisions provided the important challenge for the public service broadcaster and the (politically) independent media space, which could be counted upon to provide the most important political news. Here their 1 Professor Zrinjka Peruško is Chair and founder of the Centre for Media and Communication Research, Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Lepusiceva 6, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia. zperusko@fpzg.hr