In Britain the government responded to perceived public concerns of this kind by establishing a Broadcasting Standards Council, on a prestatutory basis in 1988 and as a statutory body under the Broadcasting Act of 1990. Its remit covered the portrayal in television and radio programs and in advertising of violence, sexual conduct, and matters of taste and decency. This was broadened when the Broadcasting Act of 1996 merged the Council with a Broadcasting Complaints Commission, which, since its statutory establishment in 1982, had considered complaints arising from alleged unfairness toward people appearing in or dealt with in programs, or from alleged invasions of privacy. The new body was called the Broadcasting Standards Commission (BSC).

The Broadcasting Act of 1996 confers three main tasks on the BSC: (1) to draw up, and from time to time review, codes giving guidance on the principles to be observed, and practices to be followed, relating to standards, fairness, and privacy, which it is the duty of all broadcasting organizations and other regulatory bodies to “reflect” (not adopt) in their own codes and program guidelines; the most recent version of the commission’s codes was published in 1998; (2) to consider and adjudicate upon complaints about programs for violation of the principles concerned; (3) to monitor programs, commission research, and issue reports in the areas of its remit.

The BSC is not an instrument of censorship, for it has no authority to consider programs before transmission. Since its findings are essentially subjective judgments (not determinations of fact within a framework of law), neither is it a judicial body. Any viewer or listener may make a complaint about the portrayal of violence, sex, or other issues of taste and decency (including bad language), but only those individuals with a direct interest in a broadcast may complain of unfair treatment or an unwarranted invasion of privacy. For the latter, the commissioners always study written exchanges of evidence and may hold a hearing with both the complainant and broadcaster present.

The BSC’s powers are relatively limited. It may require broadcasters to supply tapes of programs and statements in response to complaints about them. It publishes its findings in a monthly Complaints Bulletin (which is widely reported in the press), and in serious cases it may require the offending broadcaster to do so on air or in print as well. The BSC is made up of 13 members, including a chair and deputy chair, appointed by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport. It is served by a staff of 21 full-time posts, including a director, deputy director, and research director, and had a budget of £1.9 million in 2000–01.

The Broadcasting Standards Commission’s role and approach may be summarized in five features. First, its remit is more wide-ranging than might be supposed. Although its Codes of Guidance cover the main areas of violence, sexuality, bad language, fairness, and privacy, they also deal with the stereotyping of women, men, the elderly, and ethnic minorities; disparaging treatments of the disabled and mentally ill; depictions of death, grief, bereavement, suicide, and disasters; and responsible presentations of alcohol, drugs, and smoking.

Second, the BSC’s “philosophy” of standards is not one-sidedly illiberal. It aims to balance the claims of creativity, investigative journalism, and explorations of contemporary reality against those of respect for audience sensitivities.

Third, the commission does not apply the simple precepts of a black-and-white morality. Its Codes of Guidance read more like standards for editorial responsibility than a set of proscriptions. Very little is ruled out per se, and most code provisions and complaints findings are couched in a spirit of context-sensitivity. Conditioning factors when standards are at issue may include the channel and the time of scheduling, the program genre and viewers’ expectations about what works in that genre tend to present, likely audience composition at the time of broadcast, whether advance warnings of sensitive material have been given, and the role of such material in the overall flow of the story or report. Among the contextual influences, much weight is given to a 9:00 P.M. “watershed,” before which nothing that is unsuitable for children should be shown and after which it is acceptable to move to a more adult type of material. But even after 9:00 P.M., carte blanche is not envisaged, and broadcasters are expected to move only gradually into more challenging waters. The main conditioning factor when an infringement of privacy is considered is whether such an invasion was justified by an overriding public interest in disclosure of the information concerned.

Fourth, although the BSC has had to deal with an increasing volume of complaints (rising in the case of standards from 512 in 1990–91 to 1,473 in 1993–94; 2,032 in 1994–95; and 3,123 in 2000–01, plus 80 complaints in that last year about fairness and privacy), its approach has not been draconian. In 2000–01, for example, 21 percent of fairness and privacy complaints and only 10 percent of standards complaints were upheld (compared with about 20 percent in the mid-1990s).

Fifth, aware that community standards are not fixed, the Broadcasting Standards Commission has largely based its work on an understanding of the broad limits and tolerances of British public opinion, including how these are evolving. To that end, it consulted a large number of organizations when drawing up its Codes of Guidance. Its members periodically travel on “road shows” to meet diverse groups in different parts of the country, exchanging views on broadcasting standards. Above all, it has commissioned and published the results of a great deal of high-quality, often-cited, and well-regarded research.

This research has included broad surveys over time of both program content and audience attitudes in the key remit areas. The results have drawn attention to the diversity of public opinion about the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable treatments of violence, sex, and other matters and have done justice to the complexity of people’s views. This has supported the commission’s emphasis on “context” when dealing with complaints. Other projects have included a review of research findings on violence and pornography effects; an inquiry into the future of children’s television; an international review of approaches to media education; a study of delinquents’ media-use patterns; in-depth studies of interpretations of screened violence by women, men, and victims of actual violence, the portrayal of ethnic minorities, perspectives on the portrayal of disabilities by both disabled and able-bodied viewers, and public attitudes to broadcasting regulation; as well as a several-sided examination of how the producers of “reality” programs and talk shows secure consent from and treat “ordinary” members of the public appearing in them. In recent years, much of the BSC’s research has been cosponsored with other regulators, including a large-scale investigation of children’s uses of the television screen in the new media environment. It also commissioned an independent analysis of the representativeness of those who submit complaints to it, suggesting that the complainants came from a relatively broad spectrum of the audience.

In its early days, critics objected to the role of this body on one of three grounds: for inducing caution among broadcasters; for imposing “fuddy-duddy” restrictions on a medium of expanding diversity and choice; and for a confusing overlap of jurisdiction with other regulators, particularly the Independent Television Commission (ITC), which has its own codes and procedures for handling complaints. The first two objections are rarely voiced nowadays, however, and the third will be met when both the BSC and the ITC are incorporated into the government’s proposed new, integrated broadcasting and communications regulator, Office for Communications (OFCOM), along with the other three regulatory bodies (Oftel, the Radio Authority, and the Radiocommunications Agency). OFCOM was scheduled to be operational by the end of 2003.