Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

106 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
landscape. What we are now witnessing can be compared to the changing
communications environment in the late 1980s and it is reasonable to
expect it to constitute a second wave of liberalization of communications,
this time including the complete liberalization of content and goods that
can be transferred and therefore distributed through digital means. The
financial motives behind this new regulatory wave of reregulation are to
be found in the profits generated by intellectual rights on conventional
and digital content.
Cultural content and public broadcasting: Quo vadis?
As we can see, the redefinition of cultural content and the role of public
service broadcasting have been two of the most significant areas of negotiation
and opposition in the field of international broadcasting policy.
These traits can be found across countries with strong PSB traditions,
while those without face greater difficulty in their efforts to develop a
public broadcasting system. National PSBs have been under growing
pressures from telecommunications and media transnationals in their
march to conquer new and emerging markets. The degree of the ability
to protect and indeed autonomously develop a new identity has depended
largely on the negotiating power of individual states with the forces of
market integration and globalization. In the case of the EU, the traditions
of identifying national identity with a present PSB have brought
the debate over the future of PSBs to the parliamentarian plenaries and
consequently to the negotiating table of the EU. The matter has been
of such significance that it has been one of the legislative fields that contributed
not only to the definition of the EP as a co-legislator (with unique
institutional power in global politics in comparison to other representational
institutions) but also affected the direction of the EU and added
an unusual note to international agreements.
As the decline of PSBs in many parts of the world and the failure to
establish such forms of public communication spaces signals the need for
better designed policy and participation, it is evident that the issues of
recognition gain a central position in the global arena of macro-economic
integration and institutional change. Again, legitimating discourses of
this era, technological determinism with its variation of technological
nationalism (Young 2000) and neoliberalism, seek to underwrite global
and local media markets. Resisting ideas and counter policies – often
originating from subordinate actors and, in the case of the EU, together
with their political representatives – put firmly on the agenda
demands for redistribution but also for recognition. 12 Fraser’s definition
of recognition is careful to address the ‘status’ rather than ‘perception’ of
recognition and dispels the assumed purity of stability of culture and