ISSN: 1329-878X

International Issues in Media Regulation No 95 May 2000 Order form Abstracts

Contents

Abstracts

INTERNATIONAL ISSUES IN MEDIA REGULATION

Introduction: Normalising Media Regulation? - Tom O'Regan
Digitisation, international agreements, converging services, proliferating platforms and the prospects of additional services are all affecting the conduct of media regulation worldwide, transforming the ways media regulation is considered and debated by scholars, activists and players alike. In these circumstances, the range of institutions concerned with media regulation has expanded. Important policy innovations are just as likely to be recommended by the Productivity Commission in its inquiry into broadcasting regulation or the High Court in its decision to count New Zealand content as Australian content as they are to be made by relevant departments and authorities with carriage for broadcasting regulation. These new circumstances, which can also be seen in the various European Union directives affecting national broadcasting systems in Europe, can be viewed as part of a wider challenge to normalise media regulation. While normalisation of the media industries is by no means assured, what has happened is that the cultures within which media regulation is discussed and debated are changing profoundly.

It's later than you think: The Productivity Commission's broadcasting inquiry and beyond - Julian Thomas
The central argument of the Productivity Commission's final report on broadcasting is that Australian media policy requires substantial renovation if it is to deal effectively with new communications technologies. This article discusses the application of this argument to several important aspects of the inquiry: spectrum allocation and pricing, digital television policy, ownership and control, and local content regulation. Finally, it provides a brief comment on media coverage of the inquiry and notes factors which may work in favour of policy reform.

W(h)ither media influence? - Stuart Cunningham and Angela Romano
During 1999-2000, the Productivity Commission's inquiry into Broadcasting, together with the ABA's 'cash for comment' inquiry, painted the old shibboleth of media influence in a new light. Influence has been a central term in government media regulation, but the term has rarely been interrogated from first principles in the policy domain. Assumptions have been made about the greater influence of television compared with radio, in spite of ongoing controversy centring around the cash for comment inquiry that has spotlighted both the power of talkback radio kings and their potential to misuse it. Policy-makers and politicians have also been overly optimistic about the potential of new media forms to ameliorate concentration of influence in the hands of media oligopolies. After examining the complex flows of influence within and between media organisations, this paper lists several recommendations for future directions in research on the subject.

Silent talking: Indigenous media policy and the Productivity Commission - Michael Meadows
The recent Productivity Commission inquiry into Broadcasting in Australia has acknowledged the important place of Indigenous production in the national mediascape. The inquiry's draft report recommended changes to the Broadcasting Services Act which take into account some aspects of the kind of cultural production going on now in the Indigenous media sector across Australia. However, while there have been some significant changes suggested, acknowledgement of the broader cultural importance of the sector and its potential remain unaddressed. Acknowledgement of the special place of Indigenous languages and cultures in the Broadcasting Services Act, for example, remains elusive to national policy-makers.

Media ownership in the digital age: An economic perspective - Allan Brown
The restrictions on ownership in the Australian broadcasting legislation reflect the recognition that the media industries are more than mere producers of consumer goods and services; instead, the nature of their output gives them a more fundamental influence on society. It is claimed by some that the arrival of the new media technologies, especially digitalisation and the Internet, has undermined the rationale for the current restrictions on media ownership. This claim is based on the assumption that the new technologies will bring about a significant increase in the number of media outlets, and that the restrictions established for the 'old' media will become unnecessary, ineffective and/or irrelevant. This paper points out, however, that there are divergent views concerning the implications of the new technologies for the structure and ownership of the media, and that it would be premature to remove restrictions on media ownership. In the short term at least, any liberalisation of the concentration or cross-media restrictions is more likely to bring about greater ownership consolidation with adverse consequences for media diversity and the health of democracy in Australia.

The reconfiguration of culture post-Project Blue Sky: Culture as a 'service' in broadcasting law - Marett Leiboff
International agreements or treaties can have profound impacts on the interpretation of domestic law. The effect that such agreements can have in the cultural context was made apparent in the 1998 High Court decision in the Project Blue Sky case. The issue of Australia's involvement in the audiovisual sector's current renegotiation of the GATS, as well as the desire for the present government to limit the impact of Project Blue Sky to New Zealand only, indicates the wider policy issues concerning this decision. However, what is not explicated is the way that the meaning of 'services' in law in the cultural sector will tend to negate any specifically cultural target adopted within policy questions. The question must then be asked whether or not the law must always view the cultural as 'just another service industry' because of the particularly 'service' basis of the sector.

Regulation - what regulation? Cultural diversity and local content in New Zealand television - Geoff Lealand
The radical restructuring of New Zealand broadcasting (television in particular), beginning in the late 1980s and accelerating during the 1990s, is probably without peer in the rest of the world. This article backgrounds the origins of such changes, and traces the consequences (both positive and negative) which shaped, and continue to shape, the role and imperatives of television in New Zealand. But the discussion also takes account of more looming changes, with the 1999 election win of the Labour-Alliance and its declared intentions to reorient television towards more public-service objectives.

European media regulation: The increasing importance of the supranational - Heather Field
Media regulation in Europe is examined with respect to the increasing importance of the 'supranational' in the shape of the EU. This supranational influence is found to be increasingly important for the audiovisual sector, but to a much lesser extent for the print media. There have been two major 'prongs' to policy at the supranational level. The first of these is the Television Without Frontiers directive which has established European content requirements, as yet on a voluntary basis in the EU itself, but as mandatory requirements for the applicant countries for membership in Central and Eastern Europe. The second is the MEDIA program of subsidisation for training, pre-production and other activities in the audiovisual sector. The policy area is one which has been strongly fought over between 'protectionists' such as France, the European Commission and the European Parliament on one side, and the more market and trade-oriented United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands, as well as the United States export lobby, on the other. Protection of culture is put forward as a major justification for regulation and subsidisation of the audiovisual sector and industry, with enthusiasm for this diminishing from north to south but being strongest in France.

The end of the press subsidies 'experiment' in Sweden? Susan Forde
Debates about media ownership concentration have continued in Australia over the past half-century, and particularly in the last decade since Murdoch's News Ltd took over the Herald and Weekly Times group of newspapers in 1986-87. At the time, and at the subsequent 1991 Lee print media inquiry, the press subsidies system operating in Sweden received some attention from researchers and policy-makers alike as a possible solution to further increases in media ownership concentration in Australia. In light of recent inquiries into media ownership in Australia, particularly the Productivity Commission, it is now timely to consider Sweden's approach to media policy in the late 1990s. In particular, this paper will focus on the 1999 report by the Media Concentration Group in Sweden, which examined issues such as the future of print and broadcast legislation, and the impact of convergence on media policy. As Sweden - and indeed the Scandinavian region - has long held one of the most diverse media ownership environments in the Western world, their future policy directions may provide some options for Australian media policy researchers and policy-makers.

Battling the commercialisation of the Swedish mediasphere - Kent Svensson and Lelia Green
The regulation of national broadcasting is a forum for the official expression of a country's media priorities. Sweden has consistently attempted to prevent foreign broadcasters from establishing themselves in the Swedish mediasphere. Subsequently, wherever a non-Swedish broadcaster has demonstrated market demand for a media product not available in Sweden, the government has attempted to create a Swedish equivalent to meet public demand and prevent the loss of audience share to non-Swedish broadcasters.

This dynamic is especially clear in terms of the introduction of commercial broadcasting. Sweden was the last country in Western Europe to license a commercial television station, in 1992. This case study addresses the accommodation of the historically socialist government to the demands for commercial broadcasting, and the policy debates which informed these deliberations. It is argued that one reason for the Swedish government resisting commercial television was an opposition to the country's further integration within global capitalism, regardless of the fact that Swedish technology has helped the expansion of transnational broadcasting systems.

Notes towards a political history of the Internet 1950-1983 - Thomas Streeter
Starting from the premise that communication regulation can be made up of informal shared systems of human belief, action and habit, this paper explores the informal political belief systems that helped regulate the Internet during its gestation, before 1984. The article focuses on the odd fact that a decentralised communication system with a strikingly libertarian ethos was created within a military-oriented research and development enterprise famous for its hierarchical, authoritarian culture and organisation. Broadly, my argument is that the larger framework of Internet development was 'corporate liberal' - that is, based on the theory that non-profit structures are necessary for advanced forms of experimental technological innovation, but that practical implementation is then best left to the private sector. Within that larger framework, however, a shift in the cultural habits and values within the community of computer scientists between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, partly under the influence of the Vietnam War-era counterculture, allowed a distinctive vision of computer communication to take hold: computer communication as a horizontal form of collaboration. This cultural shift then helps explain how a technological system born in the heart of the military-industrial complex came to embody distinctly non-military values.

Internet regulation in Singapore: A policy/ing discourse - Terence Lee and David Birch
Little has been written critically about Singapore's approach towards Internet regulation and policy/ing. This paper therefore seeks to disambiguate the social, cultural and political aspects of Internet regulation in Singapore. We provide an analysis of Singapore's Internet content regulation, and an update of the information (technology) scene in Singapore, including its converging broadcasting, (tele)communications and media areas, all of which impact upon 'Internet policy'. We begin with an introduction to Singapore's policy-making style and an up-to-date account of Singapore's information aims and agendas. We then explore the ideology behind Singapore's Internet policy, especially censorship of content, and examine what is known as the 'light-touch' regulatory framework. We conclude that media conservatism is likely to continue in Singapore despite recent moves that would appear to 'open up' Singapore society.

Public journalism and ethics - Ian Richards
Although it has been hailed as the salvation of American journalism, public journalism poses many dilemmas. While the most immediate of these arise from its definitional imprecision, some of the most significant are in the area of journalism ethics. Some of the problems emerge from public journalism's disregard of traditional notions of journalistic objectivity, others from the inherent conflict between serving the public and serving the market. At the same time, the public journalism movement has yet to confront the fact that ethical debates in journalism have generally been constructed around the individual, thereby ignoring the reality that most ethical problems originate at the level of ownership and management. While it is too soon to determine just how well public journalism will adapt to Australian conditions, it is clear that it has a long way to go before it justifies the extravagant claims that have been made in its name.

New media in the 'new museums': Much technology, little historiography - Patrick Hughes
New communications technologies offer museum curators opportunities to create exhibitions that are 'open' to diverse interpretations and are 'democratic' in privileging no particular interpretation. However, a fascination with the new forms of exhibition that communications technologies offer can distract us from the fact that they inevitably represent a particular view of the past. Reconsidering the collection of articles titled 'Museums and New Media' (Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, no. 89) highlights the need to assert the primacy of historiography over the technologies of its representation.

Reconciliation, restoration and guilt: The politics of apologies - Mary R. Power
Current media emphasis recognises that politicians' apologies are powerful tools in the process of reconciliation with those who see themselves the victims of government policies. Through apologies, blame is managed, minorities are reconciled, lingering guilt is assuaged and the image of a government is restored. In this paper, Prime Minister Howard's refusal to apologise on behalf of the Australian government for the harm done to Aboriginal people, as described in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Bringing Them Home report, is analysed in the light of theoretical writing about apologies and the effects of apologies by President Young-Sam Kim of Korea and President Clinton of the United States.

Hacking the democratic mainframe: The Melissa virus and transgressive computing - Kirsty Best and Jeff Lewis
As with many of the other 45 000 computer viruses operating across the globe, the Melissa virus constitutes a significant threat to organisational processes. There are two major readings of the Melissa virus's social and political implications - one rejecting its subversive intent, the other celebrating it. In either case, these readings reflect the inadequacy of current theorisations of the relationship between computer networked communication, organisational theory and democracy. A fuller understanding of this relationship, and in particular the culture of hacking, is needed to mediate significant tensions within contemporary culture and politics.

Australian masculinity on the road - Philip Butterss
In an Australia where the old images of masculinity are no longer serviceable, the road provides an ideal site for films wishing to explore ways of being a man at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, True Love and Chaos, Doing Time for Patsy Cline and Kiss or Kill critique or destabilise traditional models of masculinity, and use the road as a space where masculinity is free to change. However, as Pamela Robertson (1997: 271) has pointed out, the road movie is 'a genre obsessed with home'. The closure of all four films involves establishing a new form of home, and in doing so demonstrates how difficult it is to reintegrate credibly the changes experienced on the road into a domestic unit that is fulfilling for all its members.

The black and white divide: More like a thin grey line Jacqui Ewart
The gap between newspaper advertising and editorial sections is narrowing. Whereas once newspaper editorial departments operated semi-independently of advertising, the divisions between these areas are no longer as clear as they once were. As the boundaries between news and advertising-driven information blur, journalistic independence and news sense are subsumed in favour of the commercial imperatives that increasingly threaten to overwhelm all sections of newspapers. Metropolitan and regional journalists in Australia are experiencing what could be the beginning of the end of editorial independence. The experiences of the regional journalists interviewed for this paper provide a timely warning about the threatened end of editorial independence and the increasing commercial pressures which journalists face.