The viewership of public service media in post communist countries of the so-called Eastern Bloc is steadily declining. The need for their support brings about a question about the future of PSB model. The shape of public service remit differs across the selected countries of the Visegrád Group despite the former similarities. This study is trying to provide the reader with a solid comparison of the evolution of public service broadcasting from 4 points of view: regulation, politicization, viewer's attractiveness and sources of funding. The analysis should shed some light into the discussion of future role of PSBs in post-communist democracies. The first part of this thesis is focused on the history of former Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland with stress on the broadcasting media and their regulation until 1989. It is followed with the key part analyzing the establishment of dual system, transformation of state-owned media into public service broadcasters and the setting up of the first democratic broadcasting laws. Next chapter describes the current state of European broadcasting regulation and its impact on member states' broadcasters. The closing part evaluates the major differences in compared public service media and provides possible implications for further development of PSBs.

This thesis combines histories of the implementation of ABC Online (the website of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia's largest national Public Service Broadcaster) with the political philosophies of Foucault, and of Deleuze and Guattari. Following the Deleuzian argument that institutions of enclosure are in crisis because they exist in between diagrams of the disciplinary and control societies, the thesis tests each of the Foucauldian diagrams of discipline, governmentality and control against the ABC as Public Service Broadcaster. It explores issues such as which ABC strategies belong to which diagram, and the ways in which changes in communications technologies altered governing rationales of these diagrams at the ABC. The thesis uses the implementation of ABC Online to explore the idea of the ABC in the late 1990s as operating in between social diagrams. One way of examining this 'in between-ness' is to use the Public Service Broadcasting idea as an instance of arboreal thinking and the internet idea as rhizomic. The thesis employs that model to argue that Public Service Broadcasting as it is practised is not merely an arboreal assemblage, and that actual implementations of the internet are more than merely rhizomic assemblages. The thesis details some of the earliest relations between broadcasting and the internet at the ABC, and describes the relations between rhizomic and arboreal images of the ABC at particular sites and in various discourses. This examination concludes that both ways of imagining the ABC - the arboreal and the rhizomic - have been essential to the success of ABC Online. While the position of the ABC in between social diagrams caused a sense of crisis, ABC Online was in fact successful largely because of its position in between social diagrams. Not only was ABC Online remarkably successful in its first five years, but it was successful in ways which could not be accommodated in such documents as the ABC Charter. The public silences of ABC Online both allowed it to thrive, and conversely supported arboreal stratified ways of defending the ABC. Defences of the ABC that used arboreal thinking as a rhetorical strategy continued to dominate public discussion of the ABC, despite the successes of contrary examples in practice. One such example was the successful implementation of Radio Australia Online at a time when the Mansfield Review sought to limit the scope of the ABC to domestic free-to-air broadcasting. When some ABC Online practices were publicised in relation to the proposed Telstra deal, the resultant controversy concentrated on the non-commercial/commercial boundary at the ABC. The controversy also highlighted fears that the Online environment may alter the ethical relations between the ABC and its publics. In particular, the ethical goals of independence and integrity were perceived as being under threat in the World Wide Web environment. These goals were further problematised within the organisation by the demands of interactive subsites. These subsites demonstrated an altered ethical relation between the ABC and its user in the online environment of the control society.