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Chapter Three
Broadcast Media Policy, Broadcast Property and
the Social Contract
This chapter draws upon theories of public policy and regulation in order to
understand Australian broadcast media as operating within a policy system, with a
distinctive political economy, institutional framework, policy culture and policy
discourse. The concepts of policy communities and policy discourse are
developed in this chapter, as ways of understanding the origins, scope and limits
of policy activism. It is argued that the nature of regulatory authority in Australian
broadcasting has revolved around an implicit social contract between
commercial broadcasters, regulatory agencies, and activist and public interest
groups, whereby industry protection and the safeguarding of broadcast property
has, over time, been exchanged for a commitment to affirmative programming
initiatives, particularly in the areas of Australian content and childrens
programming.
The concept of policy activism, or activism in the policy process, draws
attention to the fluidity of interactions between policy insiders and outsiders,
as well as the ways in which dominant policy discourses and the nature of policy
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communities have set limits to structural change through such interventions. It is
apparent, to take one example, that policy activism has been more possible in
Australia in policy areas concerning media content, where regulatory agencies
have had significant autonomy from government, than those in the area of media
ownership, which have been more strongly driven by the relevant Minister and by
Cabinet. It has also perhaps been the case that implicit support for the
maintenance of oligopolistic media markets may underpin activist approaches to
content regulation, presenting new challenges when there is a dynamic of
cumulative structural, technological and regulatory change.
Broadcast Media, Regulation and the State
Policy institutions have a central role in the development of media as cultural
forms. They regulate the ownership, production and distribution of mass-
circulation media, and seek to manage cultural practices in order to direct media
conduct towards particular goals such as those associated with citizenship.
Regulation of the media of communication is, as James Michael has observed, as
old as blood feuds over insults, and as classic an issue as deciding whose turn
it is to use the talking drum or the rams horn (Michael 1990: 40). The media of
mass communication generate particular concerns for regulation because, as
James Donald notes:
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The modern media produce and police publics, and modes of behaviour
appropriate to public participation, and in that sense themselves constitute
a technique of regulation. From this point of view, most discussions about
media regulation appear to be concerned with the second order regulation
of the conditions necessary for the effective creation and maintenance of
publics and citizens through the media. (Donald 1998: 221)
Broadcast media, as the pre-eminent mass medium of communications in
the twentieth century, have attracted particularly extensive forms of governmental
regulation. Reasons for such extensive regulation have included: concerns about
their potential impact on children and other vulnerable individuals; the ability to
use such media for citizen-formation and the development of a national cultural
identity; and the implied right of public participation and involvement associated
with the distinctive nature of broadcast spectrum as both a common cultural
resource and a particular form of property (cf. Bennett 1982). There has also been
significant regulation of broadcasting in order to achieve what Philip Schlesinger
terms communicative boundary maintenance (Schlesinger 1991b: 162), which
has included local content regulations, controls over foreign ownership of media,
and the sponsoring of both public broadcasters and domestic audiovisual
production in order to develop national culture and cultural diversity.
In the Australian context, media policy has been directed as much towards
the creation of national cultural infrastructures that can be subsequently protected
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as towards the protection of existing cultural industries and practices. This is
indicative of a broadcast media structure that, in terms of Anthony Smiths (1989)
three approaches to guaranteeing the public interest in broadcasting (discussed in
Chapter One), is based upon a dual broadcasting system, with a dominant
commercial sector and a state-funded national broadcaster. In a country that is
Anglophone, relatively affluent, has strong cultural ties to the United States and
Britain, and has a dominant commercial sector, support for distinctive national
cultural forms and institutions swims against the tide of dominant market logics to
some degree, and thus requires significant state subvention.
Compared with other forms of media, such as print, radio and film,
broadcast television has been subject to relatively high levels of government
intervention. One reason for this is constitutional. Section 51 (v) of the
Constitution of Australia gives the Commonwealth powers over postal,
telegraphic, telephonic and other like services, which has been interpreted as
giving the federal government the power to regulate broadcast media, whereas
powers relating to print media reside with the states. Government intervention in
the commercial broadcast television marketplace in Australia has, since 1956,
been observed in four areas, as shown in Table 3.1:
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Table 3.1
Government Regulation of Commercial Broadcasting
AREA OF
GOVERNMENT
REGULATION
POLICY GOALS POLICY
INSTRUMENTS
Control of Entry Planned development ofbroadcasting services
Ensuring station viability and
system stability
Licensing of commercial
broadcasters
Limits on station numbers
Ownership and Control Limiting concentration ofmedia power
Australian control of
broadcasting services
Responsiveness to local
communities
Limits on concentration of
ownership
Limits on cross-media
ownership
Limits on foreign ownership
Local ownership requirementsContent Promoting Australian national
culture
Promoting local programproduction
Providing opportunities for
local producers
Catering to specialist
audiences (eg. children)
Australian content standards
Childrens programming
standardsQuota requirements for
program types (eg. local
drama, documentary)
Program Standards Ensuring fair, accurate andresponsible coverage of
matters of public interest
Respecting community
standardsProtection of children from
harmful material
Program classification
standards
Advertising standards
Time restrictions on program
contentRequirements for news and
current affairs programs
While such regulation of commercial broadcast media appears extensive,
it must again be noted that, in contrast to publicly funded cultural institutions such
as public museums or educational institutions, the capacity of policy institutions
to guide the possibility of conduct of broadcast media towards pro-social ends
has, in practice, always been significantly constrained by two factors. One has
been the private ownership of broadcast media institutions, and the circumscribed
capacity of the state to control the uses of private property. The second has been
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the cross-border distributive capabilities of broadcast media as cultural
technologies, and their tendencies to uncouple the fit between polity and
culture within a national space that has frequently been the goal of governmental
regulation of cultural institutions and textual forms.
Australian Broadcast Media as a Policy System
Policies toward broadcast media in Australia occur within a wider policy system.
The concept of a policy system, as developed by Considine, implies some level
of concerted action across a known field, as well as groups of actors engaged in
continuing, interdependent activity (Considine 1994: 22). Participation in such a
policy system does not imply high levels of agreement about what is being done,
nor great and detailed knowledge on the part of participants. Rather, the
minimum requirement for continuing participation on the part of actors is some
level of shared resource dependency, or their shared reliance on the set of
services which they system provides (Considine 1994: 22).
Conceiving of broadcast media as part of a policy system provides a useful
mid-level approach to understanding the centrality of policy to the development
of the Australian broadcast media system, while allowing policy processes to be
linked to wider historical, social and political relations and developments. It
allows for detailed empirical analysis of what Miller and Rose (1992) refer to as
the governmental technologies of state administration as well as their underlying
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political rationalities. At the same time, it allows policy to be viewed not just as a
series of decisions and programs, but as the continuing work done by groups of
policy actors who use available public institutions to articulate and express the
things they value (Considine 1994: 4). The concept of a policy settlement,
outlined in Chapter One, aims to combine these distinctive elements of the
Australian broadcast media policy system.
According to Mark Considine, a policy system can be seen as having four
related elements: political economy, policy institutions, policy culture, and policy
actors, as shown in Figure 3.1
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Figure 3.1
Elements of a Policy System
Policy Institutions
Policy
Culture
PoliticalEconomy
Policy Actors
Source: Considine 1994: 9.
The first two elements of this policy system - political economy and policy
institutions - are held to be primarily related to the material dimension of policy,
or the allocation of social resources, while policy culture is primarily associated
with the intellectual dimension, or with ideas, values and discourses. A policy
actor is defined by the terms developed by Hindess (1987), and discussed in
Chapter One, as an individual or collective agent that has reasons for and interests
in taking action, and is capable of assessing situations and reaching decisions
about appropriate forms of action. Such forms of agency will primarily take an
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institutional form, but it is important to distinguish those agents - primarily non-
governmental - that participate in policy processes on the basis of their interests,
and those - primarily governmental - policy institutions whose role is to assess
and adjudicate on the claims of competing policy agents and interest claims.
Political Economy of Policy Systems
The political economy of a policy system can be defined at two levels. First,
political economy can be defined as the institutional and structural forms through
which social collaboration is organised in order to meet the material, cultural and
symbolic needs of a society. A second level of definition, which follows from the
first, is the particular configuration of social roles and relationships through which
the production, distribution and consumption of resources to meet such material,
cultural and symbolic needs are organised (Mosco 1995; Garnham 1997).
Considine proposes that four elements need to be examined in any political
economy of policy:
1. Provision: relations between producers and consumers;
2. Association: links within each producer/provider and consumer/user
group;
3. Intervention: the roles of public agencies;
4. Organisation: prevailing techniques and forms to organise relations
between producers, consumers and government.
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In each of these areas, we can observe distinctive elements of commercial
free-to-air broadcast television as a policy system. First, in the area of provision,
free-to-air television programming has possessed strong public good elements,
as well as being a private commodity. The public good aspects of the commodity
include:
1. The broadcasting signal not being destroyed in an individual act of
consumption, so consumption by one person does not affect the access of
others (non-rivalry);
2. The broadcasting signal being simultaneously sent to all sites of
consumption capable of picking up the signal (non-excludability);
3. The near-zero marginal costs of both consumption and distribution;
4. The costs of production not being directly related to the number of
viewers.
All of these factors point to a situation where the price of individual broadcasting
signals should be zero, since the marginal cost of sending them to each household
is virtually zero. This is the basis of the provision of television programs on a
free-to-air basis (Owen et al., 1974; Collins et al., 1988; Picard, 1989). In an
environment where consumers are unlikely to pay directly for the provision of
television programming, two broad options for its financing present themselves:
public financing through the taxation system; and revenue acquired through the
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sale of advertising time. There is thus an homology between the cultural and the
economic rationales for the existence of dual-system broadcasting, with a
taxpayer-funded public sector dedicated to specialist or minority programming,
and an advertiser-financed commercial sector committed to majority
programming.
A second feature of the political economy of the broadcast media sector is
that it possesses strong tendencies towards the organisation of
producer/distributor interests, and very weak tendencies towards the organisation
of consumer/user interests. Commercial free-to-air broadcasting has been
characterised by oligopolistic market structures, where a small number of large
organisations operate within a given broadcasting market, and the barriers to entry
for new competitors are high. Reasons for the prevalence of oligopoly in
commercial free-to-air broadcasting include: restrictions upon access to the
electromagnetic spectrum for broadcasting signals; government licensing
procedures, which regulate entry into the broadcasting industry; and the existence
of economies of scale and scope, on both the cost side (simultaneous transmission
into many markets) and revenue side (ability to offer advertisers the largest
possible audience), with benefits accruing to the largest networks in both
production and distribution (Litman 1990).
Since the cost of reaching each additional audience member (actual or
potential) is virtually zero, the stations which reach the largest possible audience
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will, all else being equal, be the most profitable. This in turn has led to the
commercial television industry tending to aim for the largest possible audience at
any time by broadcasting programs which are excessively similar to those being
screened by their competitors (Neuman 1991). While such an arrangement does
not constitute formal collusion, it implies a similarity of conduct and performance
among competitors. By contrast, the direct consumers of free-to-air broadcast
television are almost infinitely dispersed, and the likelihood of them exercising
collective agency in broadcast markets is virtually zero, as the costs of exit or
switching from one broadcasting service to another, or from television viewing to
another social activity are virtually zero. In a structural environment characterised
by significant concentration of broadcast television sellers and almost total
dispersal of buyers, and with high barriers to entry, neo-classical industry
economics predicts minimal product differentiation, low pressures to cost
minimisation and high levels of network profitability (Flew 1993).
An important consequence of these features of the broadcasting market is
that, due to the high social, political and cultural significance attached to
broadcast media, and the low level of market power and capacity for intervention
on the part of its audiences, governments will often actively intervene on behalf of
a wider community or public interest, or in the interests of particular sections of
the community such as children. Further, governments may also feel inclined to
rebalance the political marketplace in which policy processes between broadcast
media networks and other participants are negotiated, rather than simply acting as
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the passive arbiter of competing interests. They may do this by actively
supporting the capacity of policy actors to remain involved, such as those
representing children, ethnic minorities, local producers or the public interest. It
is also important to note that governments intervene in the overall Australian
broadcasting system in two principal ways: they regulate the commercial sector
and they fund public broadcasters such as the ABC and the SBS. This means that
some government policy objectives, such as achieving cultural diversity in
programming, coverage of events of local significance, educational programming,
and providing an Australian perspective on international events, have been
primarily the responsibility of public broadcasters rather than regulatory goals
towards the commercial sector.
Policy Institutions and Policy Culture
Policy institutions can be understood at two levels. First, they exist as formal
structures for making and enforcing rules in a particular policy domain. In the
field of broadcasting in Australia, regulation and policy-making has been a federal
government responsibility, derived from the Commonwealths powers under
Section 51(v) of the Constitution. Institutional responsibility has typically been
divided between a Department responsible for technical aspects of broadcasting
and communication and directly accountable to the relevant Minister, and a
regulatory authority whose members are appointed by the Minister, but which
possesses an arms length relationship to the government of the day. Second,
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policy institutions can be understood as informal rules and procedures that
structure conduct (Scott 1995: 26). It was observed in Chapter One that a
condition of existence for social institutions is shared social and cognitive
conventions among a group, and that institutions in turn confer identities upon
individuals. While sociological work on institutions has tended to focus on non-
government forms such as corporations, trade unions and professional
associations, the forms of such institutions are in practice shaped by the formal
policy and regulatory institutions of government. One reason for this mutually
reinforcing relationship is that the state, both as actor and institutional structure,
tends to create particular governance regimes, notably through the capacity to
create, maintain, enforce and transform arrangements concerning property rights
(Campbell and Lindberg 1990).
Policy institutions maintain themselves through the development ofpolicy
cultures. Considine defines policy cultures as complex structures for political
learning and memory, which exist within policy systems and are made up of
characteristic values, preferences and habits of interaction (Considine 1994: 47).
Considine proposes that these can be traced through the existence of shared sets
of values, assumptions, categories, customs and conventions, languages and forms
of naming. Christina Spurgeon (1997) has provided a detailed account of the
policy culture that has prevailed in institutions shaping Australian
communications policy in the 1980s and 1990s. Spurgeon argues that dominant
communications policy discourses in this period combined an understanding of
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communications-as-transmission with a strong belief in the promises for the
future predicted by the advocates of digital technology. As a result, Spurgeon
argues that key policy agents divided the policy problems of Australian
communications into first-order problems, concerning the promotion of new
markets and digital technologies, and second-order problems, such as
information quality, equitable access and social regulation of communications
power. The consequence has been the development of a dichotomy between
technical and social problems, with resolution of the former commonly
presented as the condition for resolving the latter.
Policy Communities and Policy Discourse
The concept of policy communities, or policy networks, describes the informal
and semi-formal linkages between individuals and groups in the same policy
system (Considine 1994: 103), and the resulting dependency relationships that
emerge between both organisations and individuals who are in frequent contact
with one another in particular policy areas (Atkinson and Coleman 1992: 157). A
policy community tends to be a fairly small group of policy agents, both within
and outside of government, who are able to influence policy outcomes through
their ability to establish the rules of the game surrounding a policy domain, in
terms of control over access to resources, and through a shared set of values and
beliefs on a policy issue which set the agenda for debate on that issue. Stability in
a policy community is generated both by the ability to sustain a value consensus,
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developments in the policy field. Noting that policy-making is not simply a goal-
oriented activity but also constitutes a mode of thought, he argues that the key to
understanding which arguments prevail in broadcast media policy lies not in the
prohibition of certain types of argument, but in recognition of the discursive rules
which determine whether ones arguments make sense to others, and what sense
others make of them (Streeter 1996: 116). This interpretative community
possesses a range of forms of discourse (eg. those of academics, policy-makers
and lobbyists), political positions within the community (eg. over the virtues of
competitive markets, or the nature and significance of the public interest as a
guiding concept for regulation), and can shift in its dominant positions (eg.
attitudes towards new technologies, or barriers to entry for new competitors) over
time. What remains are a series of discursive rules which stabilise meanings over
time for an otherwise diverse set of policy institutions and agents. Such rules are,
for insiders in the policy community, like water to fish; so much a part of the
environment as to be invisible (Streeter 1996: 148).
One of the most important discursive rules is the distinction made between
politics and policy. Policy-making is defined as a neutral, calm, reasoned,
carefully moderated process, in contrast to the contaminated domain of politics.
Such a contrast leads to leading to complaints about the interference of
political concerns with policy making, and to calls for replacing a chaotic
political process with a rational policy process (Streeter 1996: 125). Another
discursive rule is the importance attached to expertise. Expertise provides the
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dividing line that distinguishes the subjective arguments of broadcasters,
lobbyists and other hired guns, from the objective positions of regulators,
policy analysts and academic contributors to the policy process. It also
distinguishes the policy insiders from the outsiders, most notably critics of the
economic structure of commercial broadcasting. The idea that discussion of
underlying systemic structures is off limits to broadcast media policy debates
provides a central unspoken discursive rule, allowing broadcast media policy to
remain, as Robert McChesney describes it, a realm for experts, not for politics
in the broad sense of governance in a democratic society (McChesney 1993:
128).
Policy Activism
Policy activism refers to the capacity of motivated policy actors to transform
policy systems and policy outcomes through active and strategic engagement with
policy processes. It is perhaps worth distinguishing three forms of policy
activism. First, there are policy entrepreneurs, or those within government
institutions, who seek to develop and implement innovative approaches to the
creation, design and implementation of policies (Roberts and King 1991). Such
policy entrepreneurship may arise from the failure of existing approaches, new
policy demands with a change of government, or new requirements for a policy
agency (eg. that it become more self-reliant in funding). In broadcasting in the
United States, such policy entrepreneurs emerged around cable television in the
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1970s, as the FCC Cable Bureau competed for policy influence within the FCC,
as a high-profile representative of cable interests and as a conduit for new
thinking within the agency (Horwitz 1989: 252-253).
Second, there are professional or practitioner forms of policy activism,
where professional policy analysts seek greater involvement in policy
communities through the generation of forms of knowledge relevant to current
policy issues. The involvement of academics in the broadcast media policy
process provides various case studies in this form of involvement. This has the
role played by mass communications researchers in TV violence debates
(Rowland 1983); the debate among those in policy studies about policy advocacy
as distinct from value-free policy analysis (Forester 1993); the growing
participation of economists in areas which had not been strongly influenced by
economic forms of analysis, such as media and communications since the 1970s;
and the more recent advocacy of a policy orientation to cultural studies made by
those involved in the Australian cultural policy debates.
Finally, there is an understanding of policy activism, developed by
Yeatman (1998) and others, that is based upon explicitly normative orientation
towards community participation and an open-stakeholder conception of the
policy process. Such policy activism has the potential to blur the distinction
between policy insiders and outsiders, since one of the goals of a bureaucratic
policy activist is to bring advocates and activists from outside of government
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inside the policy-making process. In her account of the strategies of housing
policy activists in New South Wales in the 1970s and 1980s, Julie Nyland
observes that the boundaries between state agencies and the community-based
networks of civil society become increasingly porous and intermeshed as a result
of such policy activism:
Networks formed across the two sectors, linking activists in the
community sector with activists who had moved into the public sector ...
The picture is no longer a simple scenario of public policy makers locked
in policy combat with community activists. In between these protagonists
were the policy activists, who pursued policy reform across a range of
arenas, in collaboration with one another across the institutional
boundaries of public and community sectors. Using informal policy
networks, they burrowed deep into the policy-making processes and into
the very woodwork of the public sector. (Nyland 1998: 217)
Paul Dugdale refers to the hybrid policy activist-professional, who works
within government but has loyalties to something other than the requirements of
bureaucratic office ... [and] a substantive ethical attachment to the pursuit of their
work as bringing about some good (Dugdale 1998: 107). For Dugdale, the hybrid
policy activist-professional most effectively operates within a division of activist
labour, connecting with community-based activists, relevant professional
groupings, and the agencies of policy and government, while bringing their
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specialist knowledges to bear upon the policy process by being able to link
normative and ethical principles, policy discourses and operational programs.
Broadcasting Property, Regulatory Agencies and the Social
Contract in Broadcasting
Broadcasting as a cultural technology has always been deeply inscribed by legal
relations, and the forms of government policy that underwrite such legal relations.
Thomas Streeter (1995) has argued that television is never simply a technology; it
is a set of social relations and practices constructed in myriad ways by law and
politics, with the result being that television, as technology and cultural form, is a
legal inscription on technology. The regulation of private access to the spectrum,
and the nature and conditions of access to spectrum space, establish broadcasting
stations as a combination of a particular channel with a particular transmitting
facility, legally constituted and protected with a federally issued licence (Streeter
1996: 221). For Streeter, broadcast licences are soft property, as they are both
public and private property, and neither a thing nor a natural condition of human
existence, but is rather a shifting, flexible bundle of rights, a set of contingent
political decisions about who gets what in what circumstances (Streeter 1996:
207). Broadcasting is an area where, as a result of the fundamentally social nature
of the service, in terms of how it is distributed through commonly held spectrum
and received as a freely available public good, the capacity of state agencies to
determine the legal and institutional arrangements and conditions for the
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allocation of property rights is central to the conduct of broadcasters as
institutional agents. 1
One of the features of broadcasting policy is that its history appears as one
of regulatory agencies and other institutional interests moving between
cooperation and competition, government interference and private initiative
(Streeter 1996: 165). This is not simply a reflection of shifting political fortunes,
but rather a manifestation of the inherently intertwined nature of the private and
the social, the marketplace and government, in broadcast property and the rights
to its use. Rejecting the public/private dichotomy, Streeter argues, with reference
to the US experience:
Broadcast policy is best understood, not as government regulation, but
as the mix of public and private social arrangements that undergird market
relations. And those private and public social arrangements are usefully
approached through the question of property creation. The category of
property is the point where private and public most clearly and forcefully
intersect. Property is a kind of nexus of culture, economics, ideology and
state power. (Streeter 1996: 166)
It was noted in Chapter Two that the public nature of the airwaves has
provided media reformers with some powerful rhetorical tools with which to
engage commercial broadcasters. Likewise, the origins of regulatory agencies in
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the need for distinctive governmental apparatuses to oversee the uses of private
power for social ends has given them, historically, the potential capacity to
constrain the economic power of corporations deriving from control over property
rights. While establishment of these agencies involved, in theory, a formal
reduction in the scope of freedoms of private property, in practice regulatory
agencies have tended to interpret their mandates conservatively, and to be more
protective than confrontational towards the industries they regulate.
Horwitz (1989) has observed how regulatory agencies have developed a
form of soft legalism or bureaucratism, possessing the formal apparatuses and
capacities to enforce decisions as formal legal institutions, but tending in their
everyday conduct towards a practice that has ensured mutually satisfactory
outcomes between contending institutional agents. Horwitz proposes that
regulatory agencies are involved in two particular elaborations of the political
power of government. First, regulatory agencies combine legislative, executive
and judicial functions, but are restricted in their domain of activity and their
ability to initiate broader changes. Second, the operation of these agencies
occurred on the basis of a more informal mode of rule making than formal legal
institutions, with the agencies undertaking conduct that is more open-ended and
discretionary in their dealings with contending parties that have operated within
their domain of activity.
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The conduct of all regulatory agencies has been shaped by the
combination of the vague and open-ended legislative mandates which established
their existence, the need to adopt quasi-judicial procedures to manage the
problems of discretion, and the practical emphasis upon bargaining with
interested parties as a way of minimising the costs, forms of conflict and lack of
flexibility which arise from more formal, legalistic procedures. The value of
bargaining is that it provides a relatively low-cost and informal means to resolve
conflicts, but with outcomes, given the quasi-legal status of regulatory agencies,
that have the force of law. The cost, from the point of view of those seeking to
reform regulatory conduct, is that such an approach tends in practice to maintain
existing policy communities and dominant interests in the regulated sectors.
Horwitz locates three phases in the development of national regulatory
agencies in the United States, with organisations such as the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) being part of the second era or New Deal
industry-specific regulatory agencies established in the 1930s and 1940s.2 The
Federal Communications Commission (FCC), established in 1934, was
established primarily to develop guidelines for utilisation of the electromagnetic
spectrum, and to formulate substantive guidelines for what would constitute
broadcasting in the public interest. In a manner characteristic of agencies set up in
this period, the FCC promoted co-operative relations between government and
broadcasters, promoting a rationalisation of competition as a tradeoff for the
establishment of mechanisms to ensure that such industries serviced particular
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public interest goals. The resulting social contractwas one where the nature of
the airwaves as common property subsequently allocated to private interests
necessitated that the broadcast trustee ... had to fulfill certain affirmative
obligations (Horwitz 1989: 13). These affirmative obligations characteristically
included a commitment to childrens programming, coverage of matters of public
importance, and coverage of events of local or community significance. In the
Australian context, adherence to Australian content regulations would also be a
central part of such a social contract.
Understanding its principal obligation as being to protect broadcast service
to the public, and working with a broad but vague mandate and in a context of
strong countervailing forces to its authority (the courts, the broadcast networks,
the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech and the Congress), the FCC
consistently adopted a pragmatic and conservative approach to regulation. In
relation to spectrum allocation, it ensured de facto protection of existing
broadcasters and broadcast services while, in relation to licensee behaviour, it
made various, largely ineffectual attempts, to influence licensee behaviour and
programming decisions by broad, ultimately unenforceable policy statements and
by means of indirect, subtle threats or regulation by raised eyebrow
(Horwitz 1989: 156). In his six-country study of broadcast regulation, Wolfgang
Hoffman-Riem reached similar conclusions about the conduct of broadcasting
regulatory agencies, observing that their regulatory conservatism arose in part
from the concern that the use of formal sanctions, rather than soft regulation, or
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regulation through informal negotiation with interested parties, would be seen as
inappropriate intrusions upon freedom of speech:
As time passes, supervisory authorities increasingly tend to align
themselves with the broadcasting industrys interests in the success of their
operations. They also contribute to maintaining the status quo - or deviate
from it only gradually. As a result, once broadcasters have been licensed,
their interest in a renewal of the license is usually satisfied the
supervisory bodies, when in doubt, play their part in supporting the
incumbent rather than a competing applicant. (Hoffman-Reim 1996: 326-
327)
The overall effect of such a regulatory orientation has been to create
barriers to participation for those who seek reform to existing regulatory
arrangements. This has most notably included public interest and other advocacy
groups on the one hand, and potential new competitors on the other. This
commitment to a regulatory status quo in broadcasting, that has exchanged
industry protection and the safeguarding of broadcast property for a commitment
to affirmative or pro-social forms of programming, has not gone unchallenged.
In the United States, consumer, environmental and public interest advocacy
groups sought from the 1960s to control corporate prerogative and, seeing the
regulatory agencies as captured by their corporate clients, engaged in policy
activism through a combination of legal activism and demands for legislative
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change. In doing so, they were encouraged by the sporadic regulatory activism of
the FCC during this period, particularly when Newton Minow was Chair (1961-
63) and put forward his famous Vast Wasteland critique of US commercial
television (Krasnow and Longley 1984: 43-52). At the same time, the so-called
Chicago School of economic analysis emerged, with its critique of regulatory
behaviour as a form of cartel management, that transferred wealth and power
from disorganised interests such as consumers, to organised interests in industry
and government. In the United States, technological change would promote a shift
towards a new form of policy discourse, where cable TV in particular promoted
the emergence of a new political alliance, that included the cable TV industry,
professional groups, policy-makers (particularly the FCC Cable Bureau), and
liberal-progressive advocacy groups, who advocated cable television as the
solution to a diverse range of problems in broadcasting, ranging from lack of
competition to lack of community access (Streeter 1983).
Broadcast Media Policy, Debate Cultures and Cultural Criticism:
Academic Debate Cultures and Australian Content Regulations
The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the role that intellectuals and
cultural critics have played in the development of broadcast media policy in
Australia, particularly as this has been reflected in debates about Australian
content regulations for commercial regulation, and their relationship to wider
analyses of Australian culture. Broadcast media policy constitutes a site where a
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diverse range of forms of institutional and personal agency are brought together,
and where a series of distinctive debate cultures both coexist and compete for
political influence. A central element of participation in these policy processes is
the capacity for translation of ideas and values, or the ability to link political
rationalities and ethical-moral concerns that arise from within particular
institutional formations and actor networks with the technologies of government
that form the basis of policy. The work of translation, when successful,
establishes a mutuality between what is desirable and what can be made possible
through the calculated activities of political forces (Miller and Rose 1992: 184),
or, in Michel Callons terms, enables the expression in ones own language what
others say and want, why they act in the way they do and how they associate with
each other (Callon 1986: 203).
For cultural critics, there is an ongoing danger of presenting administrative
or bureaucratic rationality as only one side of a full moral personality, with the
other side being represented by the humanist intellectual or social critic. What
results is a tendency to present the ethical persona of the social critic as morally
superior to that of the bureaucrat, with the result being, as Ian Hunter has argued,
that the marginality of the critical intellectual to the processes of bureaucratic
government is converted into ethical prestige (Hunter 1993/94: 101). This
claim to ethical authority exists in spite of its inability to be translated into
proposals that can meaningfully shape the development of social institutions (cf.
Hunter 1994). Moreover, the dominance of various forms of grand theory, such
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as Marxism and structuralism, has often meant that mundane technical issues of
regulation, policy formation and institutional management are frequently
subordinated to structural assumptions about the nature of class and other
interests.3 Tom ORegan has also noted that instances of policy failure, which are
often quoted as evidence of the inability of policy-makers to overcome their moral
narrowness and technicist leanings, may in fact be a part of the ongoing
development of governance, where policy failure contains within it the
expectation of policy improvement:
The ongoing activities of Australian governments and critics recording and
publicising failures is an intrinsic part of government. Citing the failure of
government policy to secure its desired ends is part and parcel of
educating the public, enlisting its support, and legitimating new policy
directions. Its part of the tension between different parts of government,
which, in any democratic society, spills over into the public domain.
Without this information, and evidence to back it up, policy development
and change is not made in the full glare of publicity and accordingly
public consent is not forthcoming. (ORegan 1998: 6)
An important point that needs to be established is that intellectuals or
cultural critics are not to be found solely within the universities and other
educational institutions. Michel Foucault drew attention to the emergence of what
he termed specific intellectuals, and the new forms of connection between
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theory and political practice emerging between those engaged in a specific
relation to a localized form of power through their own conditions of life, work,
and professional practice (Foucault 1984: 72). Such a capability to engage in
activism through the policy process is a particular outcome of the growing
significance of expertise in modern forms of governance, identified by Terence
Johnson as involving a closer relationship between professional experts and
governmental strategies, related to the growing dependence of governments upon
the neutrality of expertise in rendering social realities governable (Johnson
1993: 151). It will be argued in the second part of this thesis that the period from
the early 1970s in Australia marks the emergence of such a network of specific
intellectuals concerned with broadcast media with the policy networks or policy
communities which are associated with the governance of Australian broadcast
media. Their relationship to these networks is partly a personal and institutional
one, but is also in part a discursive one, concerned with negotiating the shifting
terrain of policy language in this field in order to maximise political advantage.
An interesting case study in engagement by cultural critics with the media
policy process has occurred around the question of Australian content regulations
for commercial television. Early work by cultural intellectuals on this topic was
largely concerned with developing a critique of Australianness as a stable and
given cultural entity, analogous to the wider critique of cultural nationalism
developed by historians such as Richard White (White 1981). Nonetheless, others
have sought to associate such critiques with proposals to develop more effective
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policy instruments for the regulation of Australian content. Such a policy
orientation has in turn reflected three concerns. First, there is a recognition that,
whatever the mythic status of national cultural identity, cultural institutions
involved with the generation of ideas, images and symbolic forms associated with
a national culture have a material basis as part of the cultural industries, and there
are issues associated with the development of employment opportunities in these
industries (Sinclair 1996). Second, recognition that national cultures are what
Philip Schlesinger has described as sites of contestation in which competition
over definitions takes place (Schlesinger, 1991: 174) has meant that discourses of
nationing can take on a variety of political inflections, some of which are more
politically progressive and culturally inclusive than others.4 Third, and perhaps
most significantly in the Australian case, there is the condition of postcoloniality
faced by Australian cultural intellectuals, defined by Graeme Turner as a double
bind, where:
Postcolonial intellectuals may feel compromised when criticising their
own culture, because their criticism tends to align them with the coloniser;
alternatively, uncritical defence of their culture aligns them with the
chauvinistic nationalism so widely and variously used as a mechanism for
generating consensus on a delimited definition of the nation. (Turner 1992:
427)
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A policy turn in Australian media and cultural studies arose in part out of
the endeavors of Australian cultural intellectuals to negotiate an appropriate
analytical and political position of engagement, between what Turner has termed
the rock of an exclusionary and backward-looking cultural nationalism, and the
hard place of global circuits of cultural production and distribution. Such critics
sought to engage with the detail of Australian film and broadcast media policy,
and the conflicting and contradictory tendencies of policy formation. Such work is
open to criticism from left cultural critics for its complicity with nationalist
discourses (eg. Milner 1991), and from those within policy communities who
question whether the direct critical address of cultural nationalist arguments may
weaken the capacity to lobby governments and industry organisations (eg. Bailey
1994). The fact that such a detailed body of work has been undertaken in Australia
is also a reminder that the policy turn in Australian media and cultural studies
was only partly the product of critiques of cultural studies, but also arose out of
debates about the relationship between national culture and global media.
In an early study of Australian content on television, Tim Rowse and
Albert Moran argued that it is impossible to define Australian content in
television (Rowse and Moran 1984: 231). This is partly because nations such as
Australia are marked as much by the differences within their boundaries as by
similarities, and attempts to impose a unitary definition of Australian culture are
conservative and exclusionary. In spite of these concerns, Rowse and Moran
supported Australian content regulations for television, because they had the
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potential to create spaces for locally-produced TV content that presented more
critical perspectives on Australian society. In Arguing the Arts, Rowse elaborated
on this position, calling for a stripping back of the definition of Australianness in
publicly supported cultural activity, away from attempts at substantive cultural
definitions, to the point where Australianness should mean nothing more than
that a number of residents of Australia were employed in the making of it (Rowse
1985: 79).
In The Screening of Australia, Dermody and Jacka (1987) concluded that
the search for an Australian national cinema had proved, in the course of the
1970s, to have generated a conservative, aesthetically impoverished and culturally
regressive film culture, making films that audiences, both Australian and
international, no longer wanted to watch. In a later essay dealing with Australian
film of the mid-1980s, Jacka (1988) argued that there had been a commercial
turn in Australian cinema, which had seen a decisive blurring of distinctly
Australian cinema into an international film circuit, encouraged by systems of
feature film funding based upon tax deductions such as the 10BA scheme. In
asking whether such developments made Australian cinema an anachronistic
concept, Jacka drew attention to the ways in which arguments for public support
to Australian film and TV production had possessed considerable continuity over
time, in their combination of a realist aesthetic ... with a unitary conception of
Australia (Jacka 1988: 120). Awareness of the limitations of cultural nationalism
in a diverse, multicultural Australia did not diminish the likelihood of continued
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deployment of such arguments in policy debates, because they have both a strong
rhetorical effectiveness and are the easiest proposals to legislate for. What had
become apparent to Jacka, however, was that there was a widening gap between
cultural critique and cultural policy, as film and media policy activists found it
difficult to accommodate the growing body of academic commentary on the
socially constructed nature of Australian national culture, preferring instead to
redeploy the same rhetorical positions that were expressed throughout the 1960s
and 1970s, when the situation was profoundly different (Jacka 1988: 126).
Both Jacka and Rowse used a cultural industries rationale for supporting
industry assistance measures for Australian film and television, recognising that
the economic and employment arguments for government assistance to secure the
production of Australian content remained persuasive, even if the cultural
arguments underpinning them have become increasingly suspect. At the same
time, both envisaged that Australian film and television productions could emerge
that were not, as Jacka put it, associated with the nationalist, the populist, the
touristy (1988: 126). Instead, both Jacka and Rowse looked to a film and
television production sector that was local, not in a geographical sense, but was
rather grounded in a complex dialectic between national culture and everyday
experience in culturally diverse societies. Jacka and Rowse both sought to
promote the local as an alternative to the national, since the strategic value of
the local is that it functions as an empty signifier; unlike the national, it has no
pre-given form or content. Regulation for Australian content thus becomes a
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necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for developing a post-nationalist
response to the limitations of cultural nationalism, in the context of a global
economics of cultural production that threatens the viability of small national film
and audiovisual cultures.
There are two problems with these arguments. First, whatever their
limitations, discourses of national culture and cultural identity continue to provide
a foundation for the intervention of nation-states in the cultural sphere. It is
difficult to replace these arguments with variants of economic policy discourse,
such as strategic trade policy, since such discourses lack the rhetorical depth of
national culture discourses and their ability to inspire passion and commitment.
Second, the problem with championing the local is that its rhetorical strength of
vagueness and lack of proscription is a weakness when translated into the policy
domain, since the conditions of existence of local cultural production have only
been defined in apparent contrast to the national or regional. There is a know it
when you see it quality to the concept; as Jacka puts it, the local cannot be
legislated for; it will erupt unpredictably if spaces are created for it (Jacka 1988:
127). Such innovative local audiovisual product has material conditions of
existence in public policies which support initiatives that take place through
cultural institutions, such as film funding policies which support low-budget and
independent cinema, television content policies (particularly towards public or
non-commercial broadcasting), and in cultural policy discourses of access,
diversity, multiculturalism and innovation.
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Stuart Cunningham (1992a) used the debate about Australian content
regulations for commercial television to make a larger claim about the importance
of developing a policy dimension for Australian cultural and media studies.
Cunningham argued that, in policy terms, there was an important distinction to be
made between: (1) critiques of cultural nationalism which work within official
culture, demanding greater acknowledgment of pluralism, diversity and conflict in
constructions of the nation; and (2) approaches which reject the concept of
national culture as deeply reactionary, and which celebrate the devolution of the
nation-state through economic globalisation on the one hand, and the reassertion
of sub-cultural and community identities on the other. Cunningham argued that, at
least in the Australian context, the latter set of oppositions ignored the extent to
which rhetorics of national culture had constitued a condition of existence for the
establishment of national cultural infrastructures, which in turn have been the
basis for extension of more local and community-based cultural policy initiatives:
What [anti-nationalist] analyses ... overlook is that a rhetoric and
infrastructure for community cultural production, and its consequent
employment and economic multipliers, have emerged in Australia only
recently, and that these developments have been facilitated by initiatives
taken and arguments won at the level of national coordination, policy and
funding. National rhetorics, which may appear transparently ideological
to the social critics, are of recent vintage and are quite vulnerable to the
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stronger imperatives toward internationalisation which have a persuasive
technological and economic cachet. Without a national cultural
infrastructure, and a workable rhetoric to sustain it, the sources for
enlivening community, local, regional or ethnic cultural activity would be
impoverished. (Cunningham 1992a: 43).
The debate about Australian content regulations for commercial television
illustrated, for Cunningham, the tensions and misunderstandings which can arise
between the debate cultures of cultural criticism and cultural policy. Cultural
criticism was seen as being ideas-rich, characterised by practices of rigorous
scepticism and continuous textual innovation, whereas policy discourse was seen
as being ideas-thick, characterised by the strategic deployment of familiar
concepts and arguments as the basis for incremental change across a diverse range
of fields. As a result, Cunningham argued, cultural criticism frequently
misrecognises the distinctive functions which policy discourse performs, since
the rhetoric of policy tends to be so much grist to the critical mill (Cunningham
1992: 68-69).
An ongoing tension in Cunninghams work arose when considering its
implications for critical intellectual practice. Hawkins (1992) has argued that
Cunningham does not adequately address some of the dilemmas of intellectual
work applied to the policy field, such as the critiques of Australian cultural
nationalism as a discourse that is both politically conservative and no longer
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intellectually tenable. By contrast, Cunningham was saying that, whatever its
other limitations, the rhetoric of cultural nationalism retains strategic value in the
policy field. This may reflect the continuing gap between cultural critique and
cultural policy as much as it does a rapprochement between the two, which is
what Cunningham sought. It is also a reminder of the complexities and
ambiguities of intellectual work that responds to globalisation from semi-
peripheral or antipodean countries such as Australia, and the resulting
likelihood, as Turner describes it, of living with contradictions [and] occupying
positions that can be show to be less than consistent (Turner 1992: 427).
Conclusion
This chapter has undertaken a general overview of Australian broadcast
media policy as being formed within an overall policy system, characterised b: a
distinctive political economy, with strong tendencies towards industry
concentration, highly dispersed consumers, and significant public good
characteristics; a policy culture which has tended to give primacy to technologies
and structures over culture and content; and policy discourses that have often
placed wider questions about the social role of broadcasting off limits, as
compared to technical issues about the delivery of broadcasting services. At the
same time, the mixed nature of broadcast licences as soft property, with both
public good and commercial characteristics, has provided the scope for significant
forms of policy activism in the field, particularly when this has been accompanied
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by a commitment to institutional pluralism and open processes on the part of
regulatory agencies. Content regulations in their various forms have provided a
site for such engagements, which have included intellectuals and cultural critics as
well as the range of institutional and social agents who have a more ongoing
involvement with the broadcast media policy field.
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1 For a general discussion of this aspect of state capacity, see Campbell and Lindberg, 1990.2 The first, Progressive era of the early twentieth century, saw the establishment of agencies concerned primarily
with the construction of general and uniform rules for the conduct of behaviour by corporations in the marketplace, such asthe Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve System. The third, Great
Society, era of the 1960s and 1970s involves the establishment of agencies concerned with the promotion of public or
consumer interests, as well as a critique of existing regulatory agencies as being captured by producer or industry
interests.3 Alec Noves The Economics of Feasible Socialism (Nove 1983) relates this reluctance of the left to engage with
concrete questions of policy to certain assumptions in Marxist theory, most notably the belief that the increased materialabundance of advanced industrial capitalist societies would render processes of socialist planning simpler over time.
4 Tony Bennetts work on the changing nature of museums, from sites for the training of national populations tocontact zones involved with relations of reciprocal interaction with the different communities which comprise their
cultural hinterlands (Bennett 1998: 211), provides an example of such developments.