Conclusion To Part Two_phd_terry Flew

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Conclusion to Part Two

Part Two of this thesis had tracked both continuity and change in Australian broadcast media policy from the 1970s to the 1990s. The major continuity has involved the institutional framework and policy settlement that has been termed the ‘social contract’ in this thesis. The ‘social contract’ is an arrangement whereby the public nature of the airwaves provides the formal basis for state regulation of broadcaster conduct, and the highly profitable nature of the television industry and its oligopolistic market structure provide the substantive basis on which surplus profits can be redistributed to ‘pro-social’ forms of programming, most notably in the areas of Australian content and children’s programming. This has given those groups concerned with this regulatory quid pro quo, such as representatives of the Australian media production industries, a strong interest in regulations which guarantee a share for locally produced content in the domestic market. This has been aligned to cultural nationalist discourses which propose that, as the most popular cultural medium, television has a significant role in representing the nation to its people through its program content. Through measures such as Australian content regulations, the amount of Australian programming on the commercial broadcasting networks has grown significantly from the 1960s to the present, despite Australia having a broadcast media system which, on the basis of linguistic and cultural proximity to the United States and Britain, the world’s leading exporters of audiovisual content, is among the most trade-exposed nations in the world in the area of broadcast television.

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The late 1980s saw two important shifts in the dominant discourses of Australian public policy, which were to have important impacts upon the conduct of broadcast media regulation and the capacity of media reformers to participate in the media policy process. First, with the creation of the Department of Transport and Communications (DOTAC) as a ‘mega-department’ in 1987, broadcasting policy was increasingly a subset of wider policies of microeconomic reform, aimed at making all Australian industries, particularly those that were involved in the provision of basic infrastructure to other sectors of the economy and had been subject to high levels of public ownership and/or state regulation, more responsive to the commercial marketplace. The second important shift in broadcast media policy in the 1990s is the growing importance of economic analysis to policy discourse in Australia. While such a shift is often attributed to a uniquely Australian contamination of the policy process by ‘economic rationalism’, it can in fact be seen as indicative of global trends towards ‘neoliberal’ or ‘post-Fordist’ modes of governance, whereby the will to ‘govern without governing society’ (Rose 1996: 61) achieves new forms of expression through the extension of principles of economy upon the practice of government.

The development of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 through DOTAC is illustrative of many of these elements, particularly in the desire for ‘light touch’ regulation and ‘regulation by exception’, where the role of regulatory agencies is shifted from one of being detailed monitors of the conduct of existing industry

81 participants to being informed forward planners of regulatory conduct in the context of continuous change as a result of new technologies, new services, and new types of industry participant. New forms of regulation would also need to address the globalisation of media as a service industry, where the long-standing assumption that broadcasters operated within a defined and regulated national space would be challenged by the capacity of new delivery technologies, such as cable and satellite, to deliver audiovisual materials across the boundaries defined by nation-states.

The outcomes of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 reveal a far more mixed picture. One clear consequence of the change in legislation, policy discourse and institutional practices in the 1990s was that the scope for public interest and media advocacy groups to be involved in policy became considerably more attenuated and discretionary. While liberal-pluralist models of the policy process saw such involvement as providing a necessary source of countervailing power in the context of industry concentration, the emergent neo-liberal approaches saw such involvement as symptomatic of a sector where limits upon the full functioning of markets had led to the emergence of interest-group coalitions, and a ‘political market’ that operated to the detriment of consumer interests. The claim that interest groups could or should ‘speak for’ media audiences was thus increasingly questioned by government agencies.

82 It is less apparent, however, that the new regulatory regime promoted greater competition in broadcasting, or indeed that it depoliticised and simplified regulatory processes. The period from 1992 to 1998 saw commercial broadcasters, and particularly the capital city networks, earn profits that were well above national averages, and barriers to entry for new competitors remained under Section 28 of the Broadcasting Services Act, which prevented the operation of more than three commercial broadcasters in a licence area, despite the lack of transparency in the relationship between such economic protection and the realisation of public interest outcomes. Further, the establishment of pay television, which constituted the principal competitor to commercial broadcasting in this period, was delayed by failings in the policy process. The ABA’s emphasis on co-regulation and more discretionary dealings with the commercial broadcasters, while welcomed in the sector itself, has also been subject to criticism, particularly in the wake of the ‘cash-for-comment’ scandal in commercial radio, and the failure of self-regulatory codes to prevent such unethical practices from developing. Finally, the political manoeuvrings around censorship and program classification do not point to a depoliticisation of this potentially contentious area of media content regulation; rather, what has emerged is conflict within government, between those who see the implications of media diversification as necessitating a certain degree of ‘letting go’ of control in this area, and those who see this as requiring intensified efforts to morally manage populations through regulating access to problematic forms of media content.

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