There is a wide range of different types of private broadcaster - from giant multinational corporations run by some of the richest and most politically powerful men in the world to small, local FM stations. The category is artificial, since what divides them is as great as what unites them.
What they do have in common, however, is that they are owned by private interests - usually a company that seeks to make a profit, though sometimes a non-profit making trust. In most cases, broadcasting will be under the terms of a licence granted on a periodic basis by a public authority. How prescriptive or restrictive are the terms of that licence will also vary. Sometimes a broadcasting licence will expressly prohibit the broadcasting of news. This is the case with the licence granted to the South African multinational M-Net, for example. M-Net is happy to provide pure entertainment channels, so elections, with their turmoil and debate, pass it by entirely.42
More often, a broadcasting licence will lay down certain terms under which news or current affairs can be broadcast. Sometimes this will include prescriptions as to what election coverage should be carried. There may also be an explicit public service component to the licence - for example, obliging the licensee to carry public education programmes.
How important private broadcasting stations are as an information source for voters is a question that cannot be answered separately from the role of the public broadcaster. In the United States, at one extreme, public broadcasting plays a minimal role, so voters derive a very large part of their election information from private broadcasters. Paradoxically, a country like Tanzania, where television has only been introduced in very recent times, private commercial television has much greater weight than the public broadcaster. (This contrasts with most African countries where state television still dominates - and indeed with Zanzibar, the one part of Tanzania where television has existed for a long time.)43
Private television is the fastest growing sector of the media in many parts of the world - not only in Western Europe, where it made a comparatively late start, but also Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In many cases the owners of private broadcasting stations have explicit political and electoral ambitions. The clearest example is of Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, whose broadcasting stations successfully promoted his ambition to become his country's Prime Minister. A similar phenomenon can be seen in many countries of Latin America, as well as Russia.
