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University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol
Thursday 12th and Friday 13th July 2007
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Conference Programme - Abstracts
Panel 15: Public Service Broadcasting and Radio
Chair: Janet Jones
Regionalisation and decentralisation in British and German broadcasting
Christian Potschka, Loughborough University
broadcasting regionalisation, media policy, comparing media systems, comparing political systems, public service broadcasting
The aim of this paper is to evaluate British and German broadcasting policies towards the
regions. Regionalisation, as an important aspect of the wider concept of ‘public service’,
illustrates one of the key comparative dimensions between the diverging developments of
broadcasting policies in the two major European nations under study. Whereas the newly
established German broadcasting system after World War II drew heavily on the British
example, the most striking differences rest with the political systems as well as cultural
idiosyncrasies. The paper incorporates primary data gained from interviews with individuals
who played a major part, as politicians, civil servants, practitioners or executives in the
developments of the respective broadcasting policies in recent decades. Questions
addressed include
- the coherences between broadcasting regions and cultural regions,
- the commitment to regionalisation and decentralisation in policy and rhetoric
- the interdependencies between public service oriented and commercial broadcasting.
The stress is on particular key processes and events which determined transitions. The
paper concludes that the developments of regional broadcasting policies significantly depend
on the structure and formation of the state in its centralist or federalist modus operandi.
Furthermore it is striking that the coexistence of public service and private broadcasters in a
common market-environment necessarily promotes commodification. As the German case
shows regionalisation provides at least for a limited means to counter this process.
Oral history, community and vernacular radio
Ieuan Franklin, Bournemouth Media School
radio, orality, community, vernacular, archiving
Oral history and radio broadcasting are two disparate disciplines which have developed a mutually beneficial working relationship. Radio benefits greatly from the depth and diversity of 'real speech', and in turn provides an audience for the work of oral historians. Ideally, social history is thus both documented and disseminated back to the kind of communities from which it was collected.
Now that community radio has recently been established as a third-tier of broadcasting in the United Kingdom, there is further possibility for convergence, on a grass-roots level, between locally oriented, participatory forms of radio and oral history work. Licences have been awarded to stations which have demonstrated a commitment to the inclusion and involvement of the community at all levels of station activity, enshrining within the funding process the concept of 'social gain'.
Open source software now enables people to run a radio station from a single computer for free; this is the medium which Bertolt Brecht envisioned and advocated, in which listeners are organised as 'suppliers' rather than passive recipients of cultural utterances. Can we expect to witness a democratisation of radio in an age of unprecedented corporate consolidation? Shifts in regulation suggest community radio might be emancipated from its marginalisation by the commercial sector. If access to the airwaves is now more democratic, what provision is made for the preservation of community radio as vital local culture?
The development of community radio in Britain since 1997
Salvatore Scifo, University of Westminster/London
Metropolitan University
community media, radio studies, british broadcasting, new labour, media policy
The introduction of a Community Radio (CR) sector in British broadcasting succeeded after almost thirty years of campaigning by its practitioners and sector’s representative associations. Since September 2004 local communities are able to apply for five-year licenses and, so far, over one hundred stations have been licensed across the country.
Nevertheless, since CR has been a relatively late arrival in the UK, most of the conceptual thinking about CR – about its ethos, its value and purpose – has been forged in non-British contexts. Further, those in Britain who have long been involved in campaigning for CR have been profoundly influenced by this international context. Thus, there is a tension to be explored on the basis of seeing a movement shaped by international thinking and strategies being founded within a uniquely British context – and, moreover, being founded as a result, in the end, of a top-down political initiative propelled by broader social agendas.
Discussions emerging from theoretical perspectives on community media and previous empirical studies conducted in the UK, will be compared with findings emerging from this research, that uses a mix of qualitative methods to provide an insight on the developments in the sector in the last ten years: the study of three very diverse full-time community radio stations across the country, oral history methods and the analysis of relevant policy and regulatory documents to trace the events that have contributed to the introduction of the ‘third tier’ of broadcasting in the Britain.
Reducing the difference between citizens and consumers: a critical discourse analysis of the Communications White Paper 2000
Simon Dawes, Nottingham Trent University
citizen, consumer, public service broadcasting, critical discourse analysis, critical social theory
Arguing that much of critical social theory informed, media studies literature tends to oversimplify the development of broadcasting in the UK as a transition from a public service to a commercial market, the paper I propose will call for a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of the social and discursive changes to broadcasting regulation. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which argues that change is socially and discursively produced, I will demonstrate the processes by which the government has reconstructed the public service ethos and the relations between citizenship and consumerism. By conducting a CDA of the Communications White Paper 2000, my analysis focuses on the occurrences of the citizen- and consumer-signifiers, and through comparative analyses of the White Paper with earlier and later texts, I confirm the claim of critical social theorists that there has been a shift in the government’s conception of the public from citizens to consumers. However, by adopting a cross-disciplinary methodology to the analysis of the texts, the complex processes and tensions involved in this shift can be made manifest. More specifically, I examine the ways in which the consumer is reconstituted as an active agent with the ability to act collectively, while the citizen is reconstructed in increasingly individualistic (and passive) terms, and claim that, by extending the private preferences of a consumer to the public realm, and by addressing the representative rights of a citizen in private terms, the government effectively reduces the differences between public and private oppositions.
Panel 1: Imperialism and Globalisation
Panel 2: Online Citizens and Democracy
Panel 3: Television Audiences
Panel 4: Mediating Identity 1
Panel 5: Reporting the Conflict
Panel 6: Journalism and Social Responsibility
Panel 7: Sexual Representations in Cinema
Panel 8: Popular Culture
Panel 9: Still Image
Panel 10: Branding, Advertising and Corporate Cultures
Panel 11: Film and Theatre
Panel 12: Alternative Film
Panel 13: Feminism, Gender and Identity
Panel 14: Fan Culture and Online Audiences
Panel 15: Public Service Broadcasting and Radio
Panel 16: Design for Screen
Panel 17: Uses of Music and Sound in Film
Panel 18: Mediating Identity 2
Panel 19: Citizens, Interaction and the Public Interest
Note: Please be aware that the programme might be subject to changes. Please refer back to this page for a final programme overview nearer the conference. The final programme will also be communicated to delegates via email.
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