Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

108 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
Notes
1. Routinely, claims for ‘cultural purity’ are utilized to maintain sexist
and racist practices across many domains of public and private life
throughout the world. Examples are found in elite and everyday
politics, in the programmatic statements of (legal) British (British
National Party), French (Le Front National), German (Nationaldemokratische
Partei Deutschlands) and other political parties in
the West, concerned with cultural and racial ‘purity’ ( Jeffries
2002). Examples are: the reports and critique in alternative presses
and scholarly research about the Taliban in Afghanistan; Muslim
fundamentalists who defend the ‘purity’ of Islam and Muslim culture
when applying gender segregation (Appleton 2001; Hélie-Lucas
2001); patriarchal societies defending the murder of women and
young girls as ‘restoring the family honour’ in ‘honour killings’; or
even the question of ‘autonomy’ and independent ‘choice’ for body
mutilation in the form of plastic surgery fiercely defended by the
beauty industry in the West.
2. One of the most recent examples was the 2004 distribution of radio
frequencies to commercial radio stations in the Netherlands that
drove out of the frequencies long-standing Dutch pirate radios. See
for example http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/27/115517/137.
Also see the call from the National Union of Journalists in the UK
for a reorganization of the radio spectrum to allow pirate and community
radio stations to continue transmissions http://www.nuj.org.
uk/inner.php?docid=304. For a thorough discussion of the role of
pirate radio see, for example, Soley (1999) or Grant (1990).
3. One can recall the example of US public and commercial broadcasters
offering up airtime to government propaganda for the building of patriotism
and nationalism, with the rewriting of scripts to suit such visions
in World War Two. Other examples would refer to the pressures
exercised by the UK government upon the BBC during the Falkland
War or in contrast the role of the French ORTF as de Gaulle’s
spokesman. (We thank David Hutchison for alerting us to this point.)
4. Time AOL Warner, Murdoch’s News Corporation, General Electric
(see, for example, Sarikakis 2004b for British media ownership
patterns) are some of the greatest media conglomerates.
5. It is beyond the purpose of this chapter to provide a full and detailed
account of the history of broadcasting policies in the EU. For that see
Collins 1998; Hartcourt 2005; Sarikakis 2004c. It is widely accepted
that some of the EU institutions are closer to the ideas of PSB and
the protection of cultural production, such as the majority of the
European Parliament and the Directorate General for Audiovisual,