Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

BROADCASTING POLICY 93
Common concerns across the Atlantic: the Canadian context
Without doubt however, underfunding – and the lack of political commitment
to a public broadcasting ethos – is the haunting companion of
Public Broadcasting Service in the USA. Political economists and critical
policy studies analysts have examined at length the competing social
actors that set the parameters of modern US broadcast policy embedded
in the ideals of ‘corporate liberalism’, an attempt to balance a faith in
individual rights in market society with the dominance of ‘giant, impersonal
corporations’ (Streeter 1996: 51). Social movements that struggled
for community access to the radio spectrum in the 1920s and 1930s lost
to private industry with the passing of the Communication Act of 1934,
which would have reserved one-fourth of broadcasting frequencies for
non-profit organizations (McChesney 1993). In the decades to come,
the FCC would reserve one or two channels in most markets for noncommercial
broadcasters, in both radio and television, with the issue of
the financing of these stations under consistent threat since the 1980s. 7
Although public broadcasting in the US has done much to ‘change the
character of broadcasting available to the American public’, it has been
severely constrained by the fact that the FCC has historically argued that
non-commercial stations should provide ‘programming that is of an entirely
different character from that available on most commercial stations’
(Streeter 1996: 88). Instead, with some exceptions, public broadcasting
in the US is largely relegated to serve as a paternalistic (and unpopular)
educator of audiences as ‘apolitical consumers’ (Streeter 1996: 204).
In North America, the symbolic dominance of commercial broadcasting
has defined the limits of possible public broadcasting. The struggle
for the maintenance of a form of publicly owned and public interest
centred broadcasting system is best exemplified in the case of Canada.
Underfunding has been one of the major problems of the public service
broadcasters, despite their long history in coexisting alongside commercial
broadcasters since the 1950s (Raboy 1996). During the era of
increased private media activity, the Canadian government reframed its
approach to broadcasting policy through the Department of Communications,
in an attempt to identify ‘technology’ rather than ‘free market’ as
the driving force behind regulatory changes (Raboy 1990; Young 2000).
From very early on, convergence between broadcasting and telecommunications
became a policy issue 8 in Canada that promoted the creation
of media markets and media enterprises. In the 1990s, following the shift
in discourse in European policy circles, enthusiasm about the ‘Information
Society’ and the Information Age became popular discourse in
Canada. Policy-makers pushed for a greater role for the private sector in