Broadcast Policy

"A history of Italian tv broadcasting in its vital but confuse shift from a state owned monopoly to a duopoly between private and public broadcasting. A period that ends with reality television and the coming of digital television.

La storia della televisione italiana nel suo confuso e vitale passaggio dal monopolio alla concorrenza, fino all'arrivo della reality tv e del digitale.
""

This article aims to critically examine how the unprecedented expansion of television industry in Bangladesh became possible over the past decade, and how the increasingly market-liberalization trend of this country constitutes the structure, content and process of news production amongst the TV channels. This is the first time South Asia has experienced the phenomenon of a TV media 'boom' in Bangladesh, in spite of the background of politically violent and prospective new democracy. However, the escalating commercialization is triggering a divide between the actual role of television and the potential role it could play in a progressive society. Since the government permitted private broadcasting satellite TV channels in 1997, a massive investment in the production and advertisement sector has been systematically facilitated by the dominant political and commercial elites of the country. The number of television networks has increased by 19 over last 11 years. In this perspective, this article traces the answers to the questions - why and how a country with $440 per capita GNP should need 19 television channels? What is the power-structure behind the abnormal growth of TV industry? Who invests and what are the sources of asset? Aiming what profit? What backing keeps these channels running? How are the owners’ political and business networks affecting the fate of news content? The paper also highlights a contradiction between the television industry of Bangladesh and the international economic powers. On the one hand, the reformation pressures from many donor agencies indirectly influenced the recent Caretaker government to eliminate corruption, and ensure an untroubled access for the international corporation’s investment and business. As a part of this operation, Ministry of Information has shut down several corrupt-licensed TV channels. On the other hand, this article explores, advertisement and investment supports from the translational corporations have ultimately encouraged the political tycoons to expand their television outlets, and now these channels have been used as local and global business-lobbying-corruption-powerhouse. Subsequently, this paper also argues with evidence that the alarming drift of corporate takeover of news-slots through 'Corporate-Branding' and 'advertiser-media-partnership' inexorably shapes the selection and production of news. Finally, an empirical analysis of this article reveals a power-exercise-web between government, corporations, media owners and newsmakers which is radically dividing the most popular mass media of Bangladesh and transforming it into a market-oriented class media.

Influenced by heterodox approaches to unpack the institutions and interests marking media policy, this chapter proposes the notion of "considered silence", besides that of strategic aims, in shaping the personality of the TV business in India.

Since the early 80’s —when local broadcasting starts in some regions of Spain as a new phenomenon of the national television landscape— until these days, public policies on this sector can be seen as divided in three main periods: the first, with the absence of explicit public regulation; the second one with the 41/1995 Act of Local Broadcasting and, finally, a final period of strong deregulation originated through the deactivation of sanctions to the new and illegal spectrum occupations. This paper reviews these three periods and tries to establish the bases to understand this deregulatory process of local broadcasting in Spain.

This article intends to provide a survey of the sparse research done on Italian radio, within an historical framework, and in particular to investigate the reasons why for so long it has been subjected to specific "high brow" academic interests and areas. While in Britain and in the USA the debate about radio has been characterised most obviously by a perceived opposition between public service and commercial broadcasting, discussion in Italy has by contrast been framed firstly by an assumed dichotomy between literary, humanistic culture and broadcasting, and later between radio and television. Now deregulation, globalization and new technologies provide or require new models of communication, and are offering an opportunity for researchers to bridge this gap in a wider multidisciplinary and transnational academic community.

I problemi metodologici che emergono dalla vicenda della radio in Italia, i fraintendimenti e le sottovalutazioni che hanno accompagnato la sua storia.

The existing literature on ESPN tends to explain the network’s phenomenal success as a function of savvy executives, charismatic talent, and Americans’ insatiable appetite for sports. Each of these factors has certainly been important; however, ESPN did not achieve its dominance in a vacuum. This chapter identifies several key law and policy developments that since the 1960s have shaped the sports, cable, and satellite television industries in ways that were fortuitous for ESPN. Yes, ESPN’s executives recognized Americans’ demand for live sports and witty banter; however, there is nothing natural or inevitable about the markets for sports or media. They are products of struggle over law and policy, and ESPN has been a clear beneficiary of those struggles.

Keywords: ESPN, Political Economy of the Media, Cable Television, Media History, Media Policy

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign will likely preoccupy future historians for years to come. While a number of factors contributed to his rise—including the growing power of social media, a latent racism and nativism within sections of the American public, and economic malaise resulting from Republican and Democratic administrations’ trade policies—the media deserve special scrutiny for their role in accelerating Trump’s candidacy, most obviously because they set agendas and frame political debates each election cycle.

Today, Georgia's media is less free and pluralistic than it was before the Rose Revolution in 2003 and the ousting of President Eduard Shevardnadze. While the country enjoys a pluralistic, albeit small print media, Georgia lacks a truly pluralistic television sector. Television remains the dominant source of information for most Georgians.

“We have 27 independent channels in Georgia, we have dozens of political talk shows every day”, President Mikheil Saakasvhili stated in an interview with CNN on October 15th, 2009. In fact, there are more than 27 channels in Georgia. However, it remains unclear, who actually owns and controls most of the country's TV stations.

In the European Union's Neighborhood Policy action plan, Georgia has committed to ensuring and improving freedom of the media, one of the fundamental institutions necessary to develop and consolidate a democratic political system.

In late October, the EU further stressed that “freedom of expression and freedom of the media are essential elements in the bilateral dialogue with Georgia.”

This report not only tries to shed some light on the ownership of the country's broadcasters but also provides an assessment of the market environment television stations are operating in. Furthermore, it looks at the role of the institution charged with regulating electronic communication, the Georgian National
Communications Commission (GNCC), and at the planned reform of the Georgian Public Broadcaster
(GPB).

Georgia's current regulation of the broadcasting sector has proven insufficient to ensure a transparent media ownership regime and to promote a competitive, pluralistic television market. This problem could be addressed by an amendment of the broadcasting law, in order to ensure that sufficient information about the shareholder structure of license holders and their indirect owners is reported to the GNCC and also
made accessible to the general public. The GNCC is not perceived as a truly independent regulatory body. Thus, an effort should be made to depoliticize the regulator and increase its credibility by revising the process of how its commissioners are appointed.
                       
There is also an urgent need for a comprehensive reform of the GPB, which currently operates more like a state broadcaster rather than a real public service institution. President Saakashvili's plan to enlarge the broadcaster's board from nine to 15 members, allowing opposition parties to appoint seven of the board members, is likely to lead to increased political influence on the GPB's programming. A strengthened Channel 1, showing informative and critical news and reports, could provide important momentum and contribute to a more pluralistic television landscape in Georgia. Financially, the independence of the broadcaster is not ensured either. Currently, the government decides on the GPB's annual funding which
comes from the national budget. Intensive thought should be given to the idea of funding the GPB with an obligatory fee to be paid by each household or to reintroducing the previous financing system, under which the broadcaster received at least the equivalent of 0.15 percent of the Georgian GDP.

This paper undertakes a hard look at the digital transition in Doordarshan, India's public broadcaster. Drawing on approaches in institutionalism that aid unraveling why certain interests get prioritized over others, the paper unmasks the official reasoning justifying the digital switchover in India. The paper infers that the marginal sections of society, for whom Doordarshan is the sole affordable TV outlet, will be the most challenged by this mandatory transition. Moreover, the move to terrestrial digital broadcasting is not guided by public interest values like enhancing diverse content, which could be the key mechanism for Doordarshan to regain the viewership it has lost to private satellite channels.

Popular accounts attribute the economic rise of both China and India to liberalization, be it Deng Xiao Peng’s ‘modernization’ in 1981 or Manmohan Singh’s ‘reforms’ in 1991. This offers a temporal framework to trace parallels in the liberalization of their media economies. A close look reveals that the defining moments of broadcast deregulation in both countries emerged many years after macro-economic liberalization was initiated – around 1999 in India, and around 2001 in China. There is analytical purchase in approaching our comparative account of media deregulation from around the turn of the century.

Since the Second World War, radio has been playing a significant role in the dissemination of political campaign information and influencing public opinion. This study investigated the role Yobe Broadcasting Corporation (YBC) Damaturu radio plays in reaching campaign information to rural areas in Yobe State, Nigeria. This study specifically aimed to find out the perception of voters in rural Yobe toward political campaign information broadcast on YBC radio and whether they were influenced by the information they heard on the medium to make voting decisions from 1999 (when democratic governance returned in the country after over 16 years of military rule) to 2006. Using cluster sampling method, 90 participants of voting ages were selected and interviewed at Babbangida and Maisandari rural communities. It was found that although majority of the electorate accessed political campaign information on YBC radio, only about a half of them had been influenced by the information to vote. Hence, this study concludes that political information broadcast on YBC is perceived with little creditability and that YBC stands the risk of losing its audience and patronage by prospective advertisers. This study recommends that YBC should be given sufficient autonomy and the present reach of the station should be widened.

Abstract
Public Relations activities cut-across public and private establishments. This has brought about an increase in
the demand for practitioners in this profession. Because of this, people from allied disciplines such as International
Relations, Labour Relations, Marketing, Advertising and Journalism have usurped the duties of Public Relations
practitioners not even when they have neither been trained nor registered with the statutory body; the Nigerian
Institute of Public Relations (NIPR). This work therefore, critically assesses the regulation of the practice of Public
Relations in Nigeria by Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) and further recommended ways of improving the
regulation of the practice. Data for this study were obtained through primary sources (questionnaire and interview
with officials of the Nigeria Institute of Public Relations, Scholars and Practitioners) while the secondary data were
obtained through published materials. Findings showed that regulation of the practice of Nigeria Institute of Public
Relations in Nigeria is necessary if sanity, discipline and professional excellence are to be attained and maintained.
The study also revealed that most practitioners of the profession are not aware of the Institute and its activities. This
means effective publicity campaign by the Institute and intensified collective efforts of practitioners must be pursued.
Consequently, the researchers sought the advice of Public Relations Practitioners and Scholars on the way forward.
Based on this submission, some recommendations on how to properly regulate the practice of Public Relations in
Nigeria were advanced.

In this article the use of subtitles is proposed as a way by means of which the problem of acknowledging and recognizing language rights on SABC TV can be addressed. The concept of language rights is approached in terms of how it is understood in the field of sociolinguistics. Within the South African context the language provisions in the Constitution (1996) need to be taken into account. An overview is also provided of multilingual broadcasting and of how this type of broadcasting is realised by SABC TV. Despite legislation and SABC policy that accommodate the acknowledgement and protection of language rights, SABC TV favours the use of English. In this article the importance is emphasised of pivot and bilingual subtitles within the South African situation. Finally, this article proposes subtitling as a method through which multilingual broadcasting can be realised and the language rights of the speakers of languages other than English be acknowledged and protected on SABC TV.

In the last years, local television has been seen as an emerging
industry linked to projects of audiovisual clustering. Through
interviews with some of the actors implied in these processes,
this article takes to pieces the discourse generated around the
capacity of local television to act as a driver of the audiovisual
industry; it cannot contribute to develop local audiovisual
clusters, which have grown without control because of the
lack of a national cluster policy for the audiovisual sector. The
inactivity of the regional government has generated problems
such as an excessive competence or a lack of coordination.

The explosion of video content and online entertainment services has fundamentally brought in the new chapter of the digital economy. Various kinds of products and communication services are now delivered online through IP networks, accessed and consumed over multiple platforms on different times, places and on various devices: thanks to this process the long awaited media convergence is now becoming a reality. In this new framework, as in the past, the Internet continues to play a major role, disrupting consolidated industries and creating a competitive arena for new ideas, players and business models.
The underpinning objective of the paper is to study the impact of these changes on consumers, industry and markets, and to put forth recommendations on how to address, on a policy perspective, the new challenges.

The book provides an outlook of many accusations against Television in the XX Century, reconstructing their cultural roots and precedents.
Il volume discute le molteplici accuse che sono state rivolte alla televisione nel Novecento e ne ricostruisce le motivazioni culturali e gli antecedenti.

Digital disruption is often characterized as the conflict between the exponential rate of change in technology, and the slower-paced, incremental rate of change in law, economy, policy, and society writ-large (Franklin, 2012). The rapid encroachment of over-the-top (OTT) content distribution raises policy issues concerning jurisdiction, access, pricing, consolidation of ownership, and source diversity (Holt, 2014), while undermining many of the traditional policy instruments. In this paper, we analyze Netflix’s strategic expansion and meteoric growth in Canada, and focus on a landmark event in Canadian broadcasting policymaking: the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) “Let’s Talk TV” hearings of 2013-2014. Through an examination of public documents, we analyze the ways Netflix is considered an opportunity, ally, or a threat by consumers, broadcasters, independent producers, and governments. We show that in a reprioritization of values, many of the pr...

Digital disruption is often characterized as the conflict between the exponential rate of change in technology, and the slower-paced, incremental rate of change in law, economy, policy, and society writ-large (Franklin, 2012). The rapid encroachment of over-the-top (OTT) content distribution raises policy issues concerning jurisdiction, access, pricing, consolidation of ownership, and source diversity (Holt, 2014), while undermining many of the traditional policy instruments. In this paper, we analyze Netflix’s strategic expansion and meteoric growth in Canada, and focus on a landmark event in Canadian broadcasting policymaking: the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) “Let’s Talk TV” hearings of 2013-2014. Through an examination of public documents, we analyze the ways Netflix is considered an opportunity, ally, or a threat by consumers, broadcasters, independent producers, and governments. We show that in a reprioritization of values, many of the pr...

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This dissertation critically examines the emergence of a neoliberal market-oriented media system in Bangladesh and its impact on news production in both television channels and broadcast policymaking. The dissertation dissects the ownership structure and politics of licensing private television channels by successive governments between 1995 and 2017. It surveys the trends in the commercialization of television news to assess the symbolic and economic influence of advertising on journalism. It argues that the politically concentrated ownership of television and the practices of market-oriented television journalism in Bangladesh are symbiotically embedded with the political and social transformation of the nation-state, a postcolonial quest for nation-building, as well as an asymmetrical integration with the processes of neoliberal globalization. The analysis draws insights from critical and transcultural approaches to political economy of communication. Based on a mixture of multisite case studies, in-depth interviews, and documentary research methods, the study reveals multiple areas of journalistic struggles and democratic deficits in the television industry. It shows that with the rapid growth of private television channels and online media, state-administered television in Bangladesh is faced with a higher pressure of political instrumentalization and advertising dependency. The study demonstrates that although news production in private television channels appears to be less hierarchical, the ideology of market-orientation serves as an unwritten in-house self-censorship policy. It is evident that there is a mutual relationship between the ownership of television channels and ways in which news are produced and commodified within an urban-centric, exploitative and gendered division of labor. The study further reveals that the process of broadcast policymaking in Bangladesh, despite its inclusion of multiple stakeholders, is dominated by the same forces in a politico-commercial nexus which also owns and leads the private television industry. The study concludes that policy reform alone can achieve very little in the context of a postcolonial-turned- neoliberal nation-state like Bangladesh, as the problems are deeply rooted in political practices and social relations in which public participation in policymaking is either made structurally impossible or rendered invisible to the masses. To make the media system more democratic and inclusive, policy-reform must be aligned with a broader and more progressive socio-political movement for social change.

Abstract
Throughout times, the use of propaganda, false flags, and cover operations have become a useful tool in warfare for advancing military operations and to make a decisive influence in communities or societies as academics have been studying.
Since the onset of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, it appears that the U.S. government has financed and developed strategies on radio, television, media and the internet with the provocateur purpose of a change in Cuba’s leadership. These strategies seem to have impacted the favorable attitudes in the island population for evolution to a democratic government while a state sympathetic to American investments and interests have been in play.
The Cuban government’s response to American interference as well as the government’s mind control in their society includes blocking of air waves as well as the limitation of the Cuban people’s access to media and internet.  The support for these strategies is a parallel approach of response teams, potent radio stations and military resources for specialized radio and television interference, including helicopters and roof ‘sniper’ teams equiped with radio and television blocking systems.
The purpose of this research is to trace specific propaganda and media control actions in modern times, based on the confrontation of the U.S and Cuba, and to show the possible effects on the Cuban population subject to the intense bombardment of propaganda and censorship.