Federal Radio Research Articles

Regulatory Policies and Community Broadcasting in Nigeria

The broadcast media landscape in Nigeria changed in 1992 following the approval of private individuals and organisations to own and operate private radio and television stations. In Rivers State, there are sixteen private commercial stations, in addition to two state-owned stations and the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN). Sadly, there is no single community-based radio station in the state, and the story is the same in most states in Nigeria, despite the important role such a media platform plays. Expectedly, the commercial radio stations focus mostly on issues of regional and national interest, leaving the rural populace unrepresented and their issues underreported. Against this backdrop, this discourse investigated whether the deregulation of the electronic media in Nigeria does not cover community broadcasting. The survey research method was used. The population consists of 649,600 residents in Obio/Akpor LGA in Rivers State, Nigeria, and the Australian online sample size calculator was used to derive 278. A systematic sampling technique was employed in the study. Questionnaire served as the instrument for data collection, and the data was analysed using simple percentages. The findings revealed that the development of community radio is being stifled by discriminatory and exorbitant licence fees charged by the federal government of Nigeria. In the light of this, this discourse recommends a far-reaching reduction of the licence fee for community broadcasting, as well as the end of licence renewal as currently practised in the country, to enable rural dwellers to actively participate in deciding issues that concern them.

Coverage of Science, Technology, and Innovation by Major Broadcast Networks in Nigeria: an Exploratory Survey

This investigates the nature of reportage accorded Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) matters by the African Independent Television (AIT), Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN) and Nigerian Television Authority (NTA). Science communication research is only beginning to feature in Nigeria as a key aspect of academic inquiry. However, science and technology broadcast has been going on for decades. The study aims at knowing the feedback those broadcast media houses have been receiving from the public about the dissemination of emerging science, technology, and innovation matters as well as the perception by the select broadcast houses of the contributions of Nigeria’s science community to specific areas of national development. The study adopts interviews as the instrument of data collection from senior correspondents directly involved with the selected broadcast houses' coverage and reportage of science, technology, and innovation. The major findings of the research are that not all the broadcast houses have science desks and science correspondents, although all the media houses under study cover STI matters; though in varying degrees and only the NTA has a science correspondent who is a science graduate. Also, the FRCN and NTA provide extensive coverage of STI matters with dedicated programs and segments for STI on their stations and correspondents covering major STI Agencies and the Ministry of Science and Technology Headquarters. It is recommended that broadcast media in the country should show greater commitment to the coverage of STI matters since the majority of audience members depend on the broadcast media for information on all aspects of life. Moreover, a content analysis of news bulletins of the selected broadcast houses and other news media should be conducted to have more data on the coverage of STI matter.

Coverage of Science, Technology, and Innovation by Major Broadcast Networks in Nigeria: An Exploratory Survey

This investigates the nature of reportage accorded Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) matters by the African Independent Television (AIT), Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN) and Nigerian Television Authority (NTA). Science communication research is only beginning to feature in Nigeria as a key aspect of academic inquiry. However, science and technology broadcast has been going on for decades. The study aims at knowing the feedback those broadcast media houses have been receiving from the public about the dissemination of emerging science, technology, and innovation matters as well as the perception by the select broadcast houses of the contributions of Nigeria’s science community to specific areas of national development. The study adopts interviews as the instrument of data collection from senior correspondents directly involved with the coverage and reportage of science, technology, and innovation by the selected broadcast houses. The major findings of the research are that not all the broadcast houses have science desks and science correspondents, although all the media houses under study cover STI matters; though in varying degrees and only the NTA has a science correspondent who is a science graduate. Also, both the FRCN and NTA provide extensive coverage of STI matters with dedicated programs and segments for STI on their stations and correspondents covering major STI Agencies and Ministry of Science and Technology Headquarters. It is recommended that broadcast media in the country should show greater commitment to the coverage of STI matters since the majority of audience members depend on the broadcast media for information on all aspects of life. Moreover, a content analysis of news bulletins of the selected broadcast houses and other news media should be conducted to have more data on the coverage of STI matters.

Dispelling Revisionist Myths Regarding Spectrum Property Rights in the 1920s

When assessing legislation and policies of the past, one must analyze the context in which they were developed. Failure to understand the past and the path to the present may lead to misunderstanding a regulatory agency’s structure and values. Such failures to understand the past have resulted in assertions that property rights and spectrum markets would have been superior to the regulatory system of the Radio Act of 1927. The author explores the relative efficiency implications of Federal Radio Commission regulation under the Radio Act of 1927 and a system of spectrum property rights. He observes that discussions of hypothetical spectrum property rights in the 1920s fail to take into account (1) the vast differences between the radio propagation conditions in the radio spectrum in use then and propagation in the bulk of the radio spectrum today and (2) the technical limitations of equipment at that time. Propagation conditions in the AM band make interference a diffuse problem. A single radio transmitter could impair the reception of dozens to hundreds of other stations; consequently, market transactions would have had to involve many parties. Hypothetical property rights systems also fail to consider directly the utility of the listening audience—the group responsible for more than 90% of the investment in the AM radio broadcasting system. The author concludes that spectrum property rights would have resulted in more radio service in urban areas, substantial loss of rural service, and diminished consumer welfare.

The Political Economic Structure of Early Media Reform Before and After the Communications Act of 1934

This paper examines how early media reform work evolved from political activism into a system-building advocacy campaign in support of Schools of the Air between 1930 and 1940. Calling upon archival work that focuses on 1935–1940 records, it examines how prominent activist groups the National Committee for Education by Radio (NCER) and the National Advisory Council for Radio in Education (NACRE) shifted their strategic approaches to adjust to the “public interest” mandate of the Communications Act of 1934. Though scholarship has chronicled disagreements between the NCER and NACRE over how to best support educational broadcasting, a dialectical interplay emerged after the act during the New Deal due to the influence of the Federal Radio Education Committee (FREC). FREC inspired A.G. Crane of the NCER to build the Rocky Mountain Radio Council (RMRC). The RMRC was the first sustainable educational media network, and the group coined the term public broadcasting. While the Communications Act signaled the end of the first wave of media activism, the policy also inspired reformers to develop a new system-building strategy that set the groundwork for NPR and PBS.

Authoritarian Nature of the People’s Democratic Party on Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria in the Fourth Republic (1999-2015)

This article empirically discusses the Authoritarian nature of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN) in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic between 1999-2015. It employed qualitative method as a means of data collection and analysis. The primary data was generated via in-depth Interviews with relevant stakeholders who were purposively selected. Secondary data was also utilized to compliment the interviews. The article is written within the purview of the Authoritarian theory of communication and it was found that FRCN between the period under study has been dominated, controlled and dictated by the ruling PDP, reporting issues unethically. The outfit was mostly dancing to the tune of the party in power (PDP). It is recommended that FRCN should not be directly controlled by the government or party in power. Also, a law should be put in place to make it discharge its responsibility of communicating vital, truthful and objective information fairly for the people to be equipped with factual information capable of bringing the needed informed decision particularly during elections.

Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone by Thomas Winslow Hazlett

Reviewed by: Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone by Thomas Winslow Hazlett Jon Agar (bio) Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone. By Thomas Winslow Hazlett. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 416. Hardcover $35. The radio spectrum is an extraordinarily interesting subject for the historian of science and technology. On the one hand it is natural: radio waves have been filling the universe since the big bang. On the other hand it is artificial: the deliberate transmission and reception of radio waves for communication dates from Marconi in the late nineteenth century, and since then technologies to exploit the resource have become central to the modern world. As circuits became tunable and new applications proliferated, there has been increasing demand to use radio waves free from the interference of other users. From early in the twentieth century the response has been the parallel growth of a bureaucracy, at national and international levels, that has assigned frequencies and constructed the radio spectrum as a space to be sub-divided, occupied, and protected from trespass. [End Page 806] Hazlett, a professor of economics, believes that this bureaucratic management of the radio spectrum has been deeply inefficient. Political Spectrum is a messy, frustrating, occasionally entertaining, and insightful polemic. Readers will not find a balanced, straightforward account of the development of frequency assignment policies, nor an even-handed assessment of policy choices. What they will find is a story of free-market heroes and bureaucratic villains, and a plan for the future. Specifically, Hazlett calls for the auctioning of overlay rights, in other words allowing secondary licensees to make use of frequencies being left unused (or underused) by legacy licensees and granting them further rights, say to bargain with incumbents. Public agencies would be particular targets of this measure. Even public bodies that might be considered to have an overriding reason to be granted clear spectrum, such as first responders and the military, should, says Hazlett, be forced to purchase commercial wireless services and be subject to these processes of market liberalization. If such a policy was adopted, then the unleashing of market forces would produce a paradise of efficient and high quality wireless services. The problem is that Political Spectrum is poorly structured, jumping from period to period, appealing to personal anecdote when document-based reasoning is necessary, and reading evidence only in ways that support the overall argument. The actions of the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), later the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), are cases in point. This organization is the chief bureaucratic villain in Hazlett's eyes, and it can do no right. See, for example, the FRC's rejection of a plan to extend the range of AM frequencies in 1927 due to "the manifest inconvenience to the listening public which would result" (p. 48); Hazlett lambasts this action because it would force consumers to buy new receiver sets. Yet in the 1940s when the FCC did consider moving FM frequencies, which would have required early adopters to junk their receivers, Hazlett again criticizes it (p. 67). Damned if it does, damned if it doesn't, the government cannot get a break from Hazlett. Nevertheless, there are some useful contributions in Political Spectrum for the historian. Perhaps most interesting is the reassessment of the contribution of the economist Ronald Coase. An Englishman who moved to the United States in 1951, Coase brought fresh thinking to the "political economy of radio and television." Specifically, in the late 1950s, while at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, he built on the earlier arguments of Leo Herzel. Coase cogently argued that administrative control of the radio spectrum might be replaced by a "pricing mechanism." Coase submitted his paper to the Journal of Law and Economics, only to be told by the editors that he had made basic theoretical errors. Coase responded, saying that "even if my argument was an error, it was a very interesting error," and remarkably the editors conceded. Hazlett credits Coase as the discoverer of a "deeper truth" (p. 75), and as a prophet: [End Page 807] "Coase did not...

Assessing the Efficiency of the Federal Radio Commission's Regulation of Broadcasting

The author explores the relative efficiency implications of Federal Radio Commission regulation under the Radio Act of 1927 and a system of spectrum property rights. He examines the technological efficiency achieved by FRC regulation and compares that outcome with a scenario of property rights in broadcast frequencies set forth by Ronald Coase (1959). The author concludes that spectrum property rights would have resulted in more radio service in urban areas and diminished consumer welfare.

Training: A Tool for Developing Human Resources in Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria- A Theoretical Analysis

Training: A Tool for Developing Human Resources in Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria- A Theoretical Analysis

The public will vs. the public trust: Early american radio as a public information resource

ABSTRACTOver the century that has transpired since the first public broadcasts aired in the US, radio programming has become a staunchly commercial enterprise. The earliest radio broadcasts, by contrast, were seen as public goods to be protected in the interest of neutrality of the information being conveyed. In the late 1920s and early 1930s a range of colorful individuals contracted with stations in order to broadcast news and information that involved the sale of personal and medical consultations to individual listeners. Astrology, in particular, became a significant factor in Federal Radio Commission (FRC) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) license renewal hearings due to two main perceptions: (1) because such broadcasts constituted point‐to‐point transmission of information, and (2) because such programs were usually related to the marketing of some product or involved the solicitation of funds, therefore, they were deemed to be contrary the interests of the public at large. While the mandate of the FRC and FCC did not involve oversight of content or outright censorship, these hearings nonetheless effectually resulted in the development of guidelines that banned certain types of broadcasts and sometimes shuttered local stations entirely. For a brief time during these decades, educational and cultural institutions benefitted from the utopian ethos of these federal regulatory efforts. During this time science journalism emerged and scientists themselves experimented with the new medium as a means of public edification. Discussion of the early history of radio broadcasting in the US is relevant to the core concerns of information science and technology research given that its development gave shape to the social practices and legal principles surrounding public use of and access to the ICTs (information and communications technologies) that emerged in its wake—from television programming to the provision of Internet service.

The Dynamics of Spectrum Management: Legacy, Technology, and Economics

The Dynamics of Spectrum Management: Legacy, Technology, and Economics

The Rationality of U.S. Regulation of the Broadcast Spectrum in the 1934 Communications Act

The Federal Radio Commission regulated radio broadcasting, 1927–1934. With the passage of the Communications Act of 1934, the 1927 Radio Act (enabling the Commission) was re-enacted in whole. This congressional endorsement yields key evidence as to what policy outcomes were intended, differentiating competing theories for the origins of spectrum allocation law: Coase (J Law Econ 2(1):1–40, 1959), emphasizing policy error; Hazlett (J Law Econ 33:133–175, 1990), focusing on “franchise rents” in a public choice framework; and the “public interest” hypothesis, reconstructed by Moss and Fein (J Policy Hist 15(4):389–416, 2003). Congress’ revealed preferences prove consistent with the franchise rents theory, while contradicting the other two.

Lowering Coordination Costs for Federal Radio Engineers

Federal radio engineers have the expertise and job description to perform federal spectrum repacking. However, these federal employees have high costs of coordination due to administrative constraints. The inter-agency structure of federal spectrum management creates fragmentation on spectrum decisions. Radio engineers are disaggregated from their counterparts in other agencies and removed from policy decisions made by spectrum policy committees. Several proposals for institutions to manage federal spectrum have been advanced this year to bring federal spectrum into a modern organizational service. Institutional reform requires a closer analysis of the role of federal employees who perform repacking and inventory of federal spectrum. Institutional reform is needed to incorporate best practices from federal property management to federal radio spectrum reallocation to better align incentives of federal employees, particularly engineers who manage custom and localized federal radio equipment.

Copyright, Community Radio, and Change: How the U.S. Community Radio Sector is Negotiating Changing Copyright Rules and the Rollout of Digital Distribution

Radio has been regulated in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission, and previously the Federal Radio Commission, since the 1920s. Now, community radio operators and producers find themselves operating within a range of regulatory frameworks, depending on the platforms (over-the-air or online) on which they place their content. This article reviews how the impact of copyright regulation on community radio is changing as that sector expands into internet distribution. The article draws on a number of case studies of U.S.-based community radio stations, and forms part of a larger study of the changing structure of that sector. A significant lesson from this case study is a better understanding of the manner in which community stations are not only negotiating the platforms on which they distribute their content, based in large part on regulatory constraints on different platforms, but also are often fringe actors in policy debates dominated by larger economic groupings, such as corporate broadcasters and recording industry lobby groups.

DEALING WITH OUR APATHY THROUGH THE RADIO: ANALYSIS OF THE ROLE OF FRCN NNoKO UMUNWANYI PROGRAMME IN INFLUENCING WOMEN TO PARTICIPATE IN POLITICS

The last three decades has been dotted by the continuous agitation by women for equal political positions in the political space of Nigeria. While women advocacy groups and international organisations accuse the men folk of engineering a political architecture that makes it difficult for women to participate, the men believe that there is growing apathy on the part of women. This has brought to the fore the issue of 35 percent affirmative action for women in developing societies like Nigeria. But this can only be achieved by raising the awareness level and interest of women in politics. In line with this demand, the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN) Enugu developed a gender political programme- Nn?ko Umunwanyi. The programme which is only targeted at women of Igbo speaking origin in Enugu State, is design to raise the interest of rural women in politics. More than ten years after this programme was designed and broadcast to rural women in Enugu State, how far has it gone in raising the awareness, knowledge level and interest of women in politics? In investigating all these, the researcher used Explanatory Sequential mixed methods design developed by Cresswell (2012) to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. Questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data while focus group discussion was used to generate qualitative data. After a thorough analysis using both quantitative and qualitative data, findings showed that women in Enugu State are exposed to Nn?ko Umunwanyi. programme to a large extent. It was equally found that the knowledge and women participation in politics have increased as a result of their exposure in the programme. Based on these, it was recommended that more programmes of this nature should be designed. Keyword: World? FRCN? Politics ?Marginalization ?Awareness ?Knowledge ?Participation

Media coverage of nature conservation and protection in Nigeria National Parks

Low level of knowledge and awareness of the conservation efforts and activities of Nigeria National Parks in wider Nigerian public have been observed and prompted this study. Five print media (newspapers) and four electronic media (television and radio) were sampled. The print media were The Punch, Nigerian Tribune, The Nation, The Vanguard and The Guardian newspapers while the electronic media were Edo Broadcasting Service (EBS-Television), Taraba Television Corporation (TTV), Edo Radio and Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN) and Ibadan National Station. The electronic media were selected based on the States where National Parks are located. Articles in the selected print media and programmes on the sampled electronic media which cover nature conservation and protection and other environmental issues were analyzed. The result indicates that 316 articles were published on environmental issues by the print media. The Guardian newspaper has the highest number of articles with 257 articles. Articles on nature conservation and protection had the least number of articles published. Broadcast media had no specific programmes on nature conservation.Synergy between Nigeria National Parks Service and major media establishments is required. With this, there will be an increase in public awareness, knowledge, appreciation of parks’ resources, and policy support for biodiversity conservation efforts. These have the tendency to catalyze actions at local and decision-making levels that could halt the degradation of Nigeria’s biodiversity. Keywords: Media, coverage, protected areas, Nigeria National Parks, biodiversity, conservation.

The Listener's Voice: Early Radio and the American Public

The thesis of The Listener's Voice is that radio listeners “participated in the formation of radio” in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. The book offers a different emphasis in American radio history. It goes beyond business and legal histories, and also audience histories, to show how the latter affected the former previously overlooked ways, perhaps precisely because they were informal and unorganized and thus not explicitly documented. Even so, Elena Razlogova has found them by reading numerous listener letters in a new light. The book documents a range of ways audiences affected the shape of radio in these decades. Razlogova effectively shows that large corporations did not have their way unimpeded. Instead, she describes multiple ways listeners at first countered the concentrated power of radio corporations and networks, as well as the Federal Radio Commission, in efforts to influence radio development. In the 1910s and 1920s audiences provided feedback to experimental broadcasters to help them develop better technologies. In the 1920s local stations welcomed and responded to listener letters about their programs. When the 1927 Radio Act reallocated broadcast frequencies and licenses from small to large stations and networks, listeners wrote to support local stations and protest the changes. Radio magazines for radio amateurs in the 1920s, like local radio stations, forged a mutual relationship with their readers. Eventually, they were displaced in the 1930s by fan magazines published by large “pulp” houses, more interested in leading than listening to readers. Still they retained letter-to-the-editor columns where listeners could voice their opinions. Radio serial writers attended to listener letters and drew from them ideas for scripts. However, Razlogova finds that by the late 1930s radio's moral economy broke down as network concentration and audience measurement took hold. But the story did not end there. After the war, the arrival of television, and the decline of network radio, there was a revival of listeners' voices and of local stations listening to those voices.

Making Early American Broadcasting's Public Sphere: Radio Fortune Telling and The Demarcation of Private and Public Speech

Discussion of the regulation of program content in the early years of radio has most often been framed in the context of First Amendment rights and freedom of speech. This however removes from view one of the most potent and pervasive forms of censorship exercised on early American radio – the regulatory attempt to banish personal and private matters from the air as almost by definition not in the public interest. Charged with defining the public nature of broadcasting, in order to license stations whose programs served the public interest, the Federal Radio Commission (1927–1934) urgently needed to define what was public and what was private in broadcast communications. The regulatory war on radio fortune tellers from 1931, hitherto scarcely noticed by historians, provides evidence for an archivally-researched case study of the regulatory construction of early American radio’s public sphere, and illuminates it in a much sharper way than the usual recital of the colorful Brinkley, Baker and Shuler de-licensing cases. Establishing radio’s public sphere required identifying, and then outlawing, private uses of the new medium. The article follows Nancy Fraser in identifying different elements in the subordinated private sphere, and shows how meanings of private as commercial and private as personal both ran through early broadcasting policy discourse.

The problems with sponsorship in us broadcasting, 1930s–1950s: perspectives from the advertising industry

Sponsorship, or advertiser control of programming, was the predominant form of program financing in American commercial broadcasting in the 1930s; by the end of the 1950s, only a minority of progra...

Balanced Scorecard para extraer conocimiento de la tecnología

En la globalización, la innovación tecnológica (it) y el capital intelectual (ci) son fuerzas que ayudan a las instituciones a crecer y a alcanzar sus objetivos. Para lograrlos, se han desarrollado herramientas que ayudan a las organizaciones a identificar los puntos medulares y sus relaciones para traducir las acciones en resultados concretos; uno de esos instrumentos es el Balanced Scorecard (bsc), el cual identifica los elementos clave de la compañía para manejarlos de manera sistemática y estructurada bajo relaciones de causa-efecto. <br />En este trabajo se adapta la metodología del bsc a un proyecto de innovación tecnológica de una institución del sector público mexicano encargada de aplicar la Ley Federal de Radio y Televisión con el propósito de extraer el ci y mayores beneficios de la tecnología adquirida. De la adaptación, surge el tablero de capacidades tecnológicas (tct) y la cadena de valor tecnológica, cuyos eslabones principales son la it y el ci; las diferencias técnicas entre cada uno de ellos impactan los objetivos organizacionales. Las variaciones entre los eslabones constituyen áreas de oportunidad donde aplica el tct con el fin de incrementar el conocimiento, las capacidades de la organización y, en consecuencia, los beneficios tangibles e intangibles de la tecnología.