Culture and Public Television: lack of definition or disinterest? the case of RTVA and Canal Sur 2

Abstract

Culture and public media have been traditionally associated since the cultural remit is quintessential to public service broadcasting, especially nowadays in a context of crisis when public service is permanently questioned. Even though the cultural remit is a feature that differentiates public from private media, and thus justifies its existence, a massive use of the term culture in legislation and corporate documents that establish how public service media operate is not materialized into actual cultural programming. In this text we focus on Radio y Televisión de Andalucía (RTVA) and its channel Canal Sur, by analyzing the use of the term culture in legislation related to it and in its Annual Reports. Besides, in this contribution we show a connection between the increase in the use of the term culture, its association with Canal Sur 2, and how this  channel  and  its  cultural  programming,  consequently,  have  been  eliminated,  despite  having  been defined by RTVA since the channel was created in 1998 as the paradigm of RTVA’s commitment to culture. We conclude that,  in this case, the cultural mission, the raison d’être of public service, is not translated into programming, which demonstrates the lack of commitment of RTVA to the aforementioned task.