Parliamentary television channels - new ways of informing the public

The discussion about how to improve public awareness of parliamentary work has begun to place much greater emphasis on television’s significance as a medium. Furthermore, since the early 1990s there has been a growing trend for television coverage to go beyond reporting by journalists and also enable viewers to follow events “live” as they are actually happening. This approach to parliamentary news has been taken up and further developed by many parliamentary television channels. Not least thanks to the rapid technical advances that have been made and the spread of digital technology, Europe now has 14 parliamentary television channels (source: European Parliament, 2005) – among them Parliamentary Television of the German Bundestag. The European Parliament too transmits debates and committee meetings live on the Internet from Strasbourg and Brussels ( www.europarl.eu.int).

 

Varying organisational and legal forms

The model for the parliamentary television services in Europe is the US current affairs channel C-SPAN ( www.c-span.org), which has been broadcasting debates and committee meetings from the US Congress live since 1979. The various parliamentary television channels in Europe are highly diverse, both organisationally and in terms of their legal foundations. Essentially, there are three different basic forms of organisation:

• parliamentary television channels that are embedded in public television systems;
• parliamentary television channels that are operated by national parliaments with the aid of external service providers; and
• parliamentary television channels that are operated by private enterprises.

 

Parliamentary reporting on PHOENIX

Parliamentary Television of the German Bundestag is operated by the German Bundestag in cooperation with an external service provider. In Germany, the special events and documentaries channel PHOENIX (www.phoenix.de), a subsidiary of the two German public broadcasting networks, ARD and ZDF, also broadcasts live debates and committee meetings from the German Bundestag – although sometimes in an edited form and not always at full length, depending on the latest political developments. Parliamentary Television of the German Bundestag supplies its visual materials to PHOENIX free of charge, just as it does to other TV corporations and parliamentary broadcasting services.

Productions with other parliamentary television channels

Since 2003, Parliamentary Television of the German Bundestag has been collaborating closely with LCP-AN (La chaîne parlamentaire de l'Assemblée Nationale, www.lcpan.fr), one of the two French parliamentary television channels. Apart from exchanging visual materials, the two broadcasting services produce bilingual programmes that are shown on both channels when important parliametary events take place.