“The content presented on the awarded frequency may contain traces of the original commitments.” — (anonymous document inspector)
Studying recent decisions of the media authority, I became curious to find out what motivates the Media Council in shaping the radio market. As a starting point, I looked at the information posted on the authority’s web site, but I soon found that some very essential data were missing, and that I would not be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together without inspecting documents.
To state the obvious, the assessment of frequency bids is based on the commitments undertaken by the bidders. It is just as plain to see that we cannot form an opinion about the well-foundedness of the evaluation and the reasons behind the decision — in other words, the legitimacy of the tender on the whole — unless the competing commitments have been disclosed and the evaluation criteria area known.
The law provides for the tendering process step by step, all the way to the execution of the contract. Theoretically at least, the process should be easy to follow, and the disclosure obligation applies not simply to the decision itself but to the explanation or justification of the decision as well. In a well-oiled system, the final decision concluding the tender should provide a clue for the outsider — be it an enthusiastic listener, a competitor, or a journalist — as to the nature of the content that will be aired on the given frequency and to the commitments undertaken by the preferred bidder.
In the wake of the decision, the commitments are incorporated in the contract between the authority and the winner, which sets forth the terms of exercising the entitlement. In other words, the contract should make it clear what the bidder pledged and therefore what the authority gave its blessing to. The procedural and substantive rules of tendering are far more minutely detailed in the new Media Act than in the former law. In practice, however, it seems that the situation has not changed materially in that the motives of decisions often remain just as obscure as they were in the past, and the rules are often followed formally at best, if at all. Under the circumstances of the media authority’s current practices, the tender decision and other publicly disclosed documents do not make it known what type of radio programming will be heard on the new frequency.
This information deficit is not remedied by the subsequent contract, because some very basic data of that contract are not posted on the authority’s web site. For instance, information withheld from disclosure include the amount of the broadcasting fee payable by the radio station and the nature of the local-type content undertaken. More than simply an issue of disclosure, this ambivalent situation is rooted in an ongoing legal dispute around the issue of public access to contracts executed by a public agency. (Standards has reported on the litigation a number of times.) During the summer, the first-instance court ruled that these contracts are subject to disclosure because the information contained therein constitute data of public interest rather than business secrets.
The tendering process, the substance and any amendment of the relevant contracts, and the supervision of contractual compliance and performance on the part of radio stations all amount to information without which it is impossible to monitor the operation of the authority in any meaningful way. Moreover, access to this information is crucial for concurrent market entities wishing to verify the legitimacy of their competitors’ terms of operation, as well as for future bidders in designing their market entry. Last but not least, access to this information is important for the public at large. Citizens should be clear about the evaluation criteria applied by the authority in allocating frequency resources to media providers who will ultimately serve the public, after all. Being in possession of relevant data is also a condition for audiences to actively shape the radio market through their well-informed preferences, rather than remaining passive receptors of whatever is on offer.
A case in point is Lánchíd Radio, which submitted bids to the new media authority and won five new local frequencies in the cities of Győr, Balatonfüred, Zalaegerszeg, and Székesfehérvár, complementing its existing frequency in Budapest. The compendium of tender decisions, available online from the Media Council’s web site, makes it clear that the station triumphed in the competition and was awarded these frequencies on its pledge to carry a large proportion of local-interest content. More specifically, Lánchíd committed to devote 50% of its air time during the day to “programming discussing, presenting, and aiding local public affairs and daily life.” This was all the authority would reveal on its own to the general public following the announcement of the tender result.
Having familiarized myself with the details of the tender and the contract — this time, the authority did authorize the inspection of the documents on its official premises — I found out that, in reality, the winner’s commitment implied much shorter air time. This is because Lánchíd Radio invariably submitted a bid whereby it would operate the local stations in a network with its main Budapest license. In this way, local-interest content is not really provided in half of the provider’s daytime programming, or nine hours a day, but only in two hours, which amounts to less than 10 percent of the total air time available in a day. To put it differently, Lánchíd was able to satisfy its 50% commitment with only two actual hours of programming, whereas another bidder proposing a genuinely local station would have to put in at least nine hours to achieve the same ratio. Not until one inspects the contract itself does it become apparent that the entity licensed for broadcasting is not a local station in the narrow sense of the word but an affiliate of a Budapest-based station.
A few months after the tenders had been declared closed, the Media Council issued two extremely laconic resolutions (Nos. 1217/2011 and 1716/2011) approving the extension of Lánchíd Radio’s license to the new frequencies outside the capital city — essentially the transformation of the network license into an expansion of range of reception. Under the revised contract, Lánchíd is now required to devote two hours of its daily air time to the four non-Budapest locations. In effect, this means that the station covers much of the Transdanubian region with the same program, and offers non-Budapest news two hours a day. The question arises: What were the considerations of media policy that motivated the Media Council’s decision to set up a kind of jigsaw puzzle radio? Equally important is the question whether and to what extent Lánchíd Radio really follows this model.
All of the above would not have been known without scrutinizing the tenders and the contracts in depth of detail. True enough, the information in question was ultimately available for inspection. The question is whether this level of transparency is really all one could expect from a responsible media authority today.
Fifteen years after the opening of the dualistic media market, it would seem reasonable to expect the authority to maintain freely accessible, easily managed records from which basic data relevant to the media market selection could be retrieved by anyone. Such a public database would go a long way toward ensuring the transparency of official decisions in connection with the media contracts by laying them bare for scrutiny and possible criticism. Without of course assuming that the media authority is uninterested in promoting transparency, it is fair to point out that such a public-access database does not exist at present.