In broadcasting, the choice of motive is inescapable: power or profit. As Lyman Bryson notes, anyone who tries to escape this two-way choice by asking "Why shouldn't a mass medium be controlled by public interest?" is bound to say by whom the public interest is to be defined & this leaves him in the hands of government officials as before.

Profit can be concealed behind entertainment & power can be hidden behind dullness. Dullness is the ideal disguise. It makes power tolerable, even acceptable. This doctrine needs no enunciation or proclamation: it's an understood law of government operation.

Any government-owned medium becomes consciously an instrument of power. DIES is essentially a political instrument disguised as an educational & entertainment agency. But its power & dullness must coexist & compete with Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which aims toward pleasure. Competition between them blurs these differences (competition breeds similarity, not diversity) & each seeks to invade the domain of the other. But differences still exist. To appreciate these differences, one need only imagine the role DIES would play if it enjoyed a monopoly.

ABC is also a government agency, but an expatriate one, answering primarily to itself. Both by background & role, ABC is far more professional & far more hospitable to talent than DIES. DIES's amateurism arises not from any limitations of staff, but as an inevitable condition of its role as a political instrument. In 1969, it regularly delayed broadcasting any criticism of government policy until the government had prepared a rebuttal - a rebuttal usually given more weight than the criticism.

The current two-agency system of broadcasting strikes me as ideal. I see no merit, least of all financial, in proposals to fuse these services. Nor do I see any merit in the current trend toward duplicating services, especially when the desirability of radically changing the acoustic environment of New Guinea seems unclear.

The problem: to maintain the existing agencies, furthering differences between them, while trying to prevent competition from making them alike.

Of course, these suggestions are made on the assumption & hope that political independence in Papua & New Guinea will not witness the abolition of ABC & DIES. If, however, the new political leaders use radio as a nationalized weapon to attack expatriates and as a political weapon to eliminate rivals, none of my suggestions are meaningful.