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Dr. Florian Oberhuber
Quality Profile
Public media are under increased pressure, and not only in Austria. On the one hand, this is not new. For example, Margaret Thatcher had already sought to abolish the license fee and finance the BBC from advertising instead. As communications scholar Christoph Neuberger argues, the constant critical questioning of its legitimacy is part of the essence of public broadcasting: "As a broadcasting service committed to society, it must face up to public criticism, register the claims made there, take up suggestions and legitimize itself by demonstrating its performance."
As will be shown below, the "quality profiles" created by ORF in 2011 can be understood as a form of productive institutionalization of a quality discourse as a reflection instance and control instrument. For all ORF media and program areas, they disclose general and genre-specific mission values and thus make quality accessible to systematic evaluation and discussion.
On the other hand, the social context has changed since the introduction of the quality profiles in 2011. Political and social polarization processes led to damage to the democratic discourse that makes it possible to reach an understanding about the tasks and quality of public broadcasting. In order to strengthen this discourse again, the future of ORF should be put up for discussion as broadly and openly as possible.
For more than three decades, there has been a systematic discussion in the German-speaking world about quality in public broadcasting and the role of the audience in this context. Audience acceptance and target group adequacy, according to the established thesis, are constitutive for quality. Quality can only be effective and socially relevant if the content offered is received, understood and processed by the recipients. Quality in public broadcasting is therefore impossible without the audience. The audience must therefore be taken seriously not only in its role as a user, but also as a stakeholder, and must be included in the efforts to achieve quality.
At ORF, quality assurance is legally and institutionally anchored as a system for ensuring the fulfillment of the core mission and, in addition to program structure analysis and continuous, qualitative and representative surveys, includes the ORF quality profiles instrument developed in 2011. The ORF quality profiles are not created at the program level, but for program categories and define a catalog of general mission values as well as genre-specific characteristics that relate to the different conditions and requirements of working practice in the individual program categories. The claim is to make the understanding of quality anchored in the editorial offices explicit and to communicate it publicly. ORF sees the development of these quality profiles as part of ongoing quality management and thus as a continuous process that includes regular evaluation using audience research methods as well as optimization measures for the programs.
The conceptual framework of the quality profiles is provided by ORF's 18 public value categories, from which a broad concept of quality is derived that goes beyond established standards of quality journalism to encompass additional requirements, such as media diversity or the medium's diverse democratic political functions. Concrete characteristics and satisfaction with individual programs, on the other hand, are not part of the quality profiles, which clearly positions them as an instrument of public service quality assurance, not market research.
For more than three decades, there has been a systematic discussion in the German-speaking world about quality in public broadcasting and the role of the audience in this context. Audience acceptance and target group adequacy, according to the established thesis, are constitutive for quality. Quality can only be effective and socially relevant if the content offered is received, understood and processed by the recipients. Quality in public broadcasting is therefore impossible without the audience. The audience must therefore be taken seriously not only in its role as a user, but also as a stakeholder, and must be included in the efforts to achieve quality.
At ORF, quality assurance is legally and institutionally anchored as a system for ensuring the fulfillment of the core mission and, in addition to program structure analysis and continuous, qualitative and representative surveys, includes the ORF quality profiles instrument developed in 2011. The ORF quality profiles are not created at the program level, but for program categories and define a catalog of general mission values as well as genre-specific characteristics that relate to the different conditions and requirements of working practice in the individual program categories. The claim is to make the understanding of quality anchored in the editorial offices explicit and to communicate it publicly. ORF sees the development of these quality profiles as part of ongoing quality management and thus as a continuous process that includes regular evaluation using audience research methods as well as optimization measures for the programs.
The conceptual framework of the quality profiles is provided by ORF's 18 public value categories, from which a broad concept of quality is derived that goes beyond established standards of quality journalism to encompass additional requirements, such as media diversity or the medium's diverse democratic political functions. Concrete characteristics and satisfaction with individual programs, on the other hand, are not part of the quality profiles, which clearly positions them as an instrument of public service quality assurance, not market research.
However, the Böckenförde theorem, according to which the liberal state lives on preconditions that it cannot guarantee itself, can also be applied to public broadcasting. One of these prerequisites is the willingness of a society - or of the relevant stakeholders - to engage in a discourse oriented toward the common good, with key concepts such as quality and public value. It is precisely this space of democratic understanding that has come under pressure since the establishment of the quality profiles as a result of political and social polarization processes. It is based on the basic democratic trust of all actors in each other's good will. Where this basic trust gives way to a perception of the others as enemies, discourse comes to a standstill, because the arguments and facts of the other side are basically no longer recognized: The discussion about the public sphere gives way to a power struggle for control over the media and the public sphere. Erosion processes in the democratic sphere are empirically evident, among other things, in the numerous comparative rankings on democracy, which attest that Austria has taken significant steps backward in recent years, for example, with respect to a lack of transparency in government action, the influence of financially powerful groups on legislation, corruption and media freedom. With regard to political culture, major representative studies such as the Austrian Democracy Monitor conducted by SORA researcher Martina Zandonella reveal a massive loss of trust. In the Democracy Monitor 2022, for example, satisfaction with the political system fell to just 34% - a drop of 30 percentage points compared with the start of the survey in 2018. Behind this is the experience of devaluation and exclusion in the bottom third of society, and in the middle third the impression that privileged groups use the political system for their own interests.
These losses of trust go beyond political institutions. Jakob-Moritz Eberl, for example, uses data from the Austrian Corona Panel to show that parts of the population have also withdrawn their trust in the scientific community and scientific knowledge. For example, about a quarter of the population is of the opinion (September 2021) that one should rely more on common sense and less on scientific studies. The media are also affected by a general criticism of whitewashing, and in the Democracy Monitor 2022, a majority of 59 percent agree with the statement that "politics and the media are in cahoots."
This change in the social framework also challenges the safeguarding of public service media quality. For, as Neuberger notes, the "substantial clarification of public service expectations" is the indispensable basis for any operational quality management. In other words, sitting out and "business as usual" are dangerous strategies. On the contrary, the broader and more open the debate about the legitimacy of public broadcasting is, the more likely it is to be countered by an imminent erosion of its legitimacy. The traditional mass media are losing trust because they are not open enough or responsive enough to society, as communications scholar Otried Jarren put it, and he would like to see a broad debate on the future of public broadcasting in Germany. After all, public service media need corresponding guiding principles. And these can only emerge from social discourse.
In view of the partly polarized political elites, the public and citizens are important allies against the undermining of public broadcasting oriented toward the common good. ORF should therefore open up further and promote spaces for discourse, interaction and participation wherever possible. Proximity and involvement strengthen trust. Citizens' councils and citizen science provide possible ideas for this. Transparency, integrity and equal opportunity for representation regardless of income and formal education should be essential guidelines.
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From quality profile to "quality check"
To ensure that the insights gained in ORF quality assurance are also taken into account in daily production practice, ORF has developed an additional measure to ensure that criticism and changes in expectations are also incorporated into future programming. The ORF "Quality Check" is a workshop lasting several hours that is conducted with (in each case) one of ORF's main program-producing departments. The editors and program staff are presented with the latest results of the ongoing ORF quality assurance process.
ORF quality assurance, in particular the evaluation of the respective quality profile. The goal is to discuss the ongoing media production in a participatory process, to conduct a critical self-reflection and to derive concrete conclusions and, if necessary, objectives for future quality media production on the basis of a strengths/weaknesses analysis. In the process, external experts and colleagues from other ORF media are brought in for critical consideration and in-depth analysis of particular aspects and current challenges.
