Media Content Regulation Research Articles

The Effects of Green Banking Practices on Financial Performance of Listed Banking Companies in Bangladesh

There exists broad recognition of the pivotal role of media in bringing about social change through transformation, as media clearly reflects the values of any given civilization. But the misrepresentation of women in media is on the whole a national problem because the majority of Bangladeshi teenagers look up to and emulates the personalities shown in the media, leading to gender stereotypes and even violence at times. This study seeks to discover how Bangladeshi teenagers feel about women being portrayed in media, and how relevant those portrayals are to their everyday lives. A purposive sampling strategy was used to pick a random sample of 100 14- to 20-year-old pupils. Of the 100 pupils who participated in the survey, half were boys and half were girls. The research data was collected with the aid of a self-constructed questionnaire, including 30 questions. The study shows how the media in Bangladesh, including movies, dramas, and commercials, etc perpetuate sexist stereotypes on multiple levels. In addition, this depiction reinforces old patriarchal gender notions, which adolescents tend to accept. One of the findings showed, female students were more likely to support traditional stereotypes about women and were more in favor of government regulation of media content compared to male students.

Contested Sovereignties: States, Media Platforms, Peoples, and the Regulation of Media Content and Big Data in the Networked Society

This article examines the legal and normative foundations of media content regulation in the borderless networked society. We explore the extent to which internet undertakings should be subject to state regulation, in light of Canada’s ongoing debates and legislative reform. We bring a cross-disciplinary perspective (from the subject fields of law; communications studies, in particular McLuhan’s now classic probes; international relations; and technology studies) to enable both policy and language analysis. We apply the concept of sovereignty to states (national cultural and digital sovereignty), media platforms (transnational sovereignty), and citizens (autonomy and personal data sovereignty) to examine the competing dynamics and interests that need to be considered and mediated. While there is growing awareness of the tensions between state and transnational media platform powers, the relationship between media content regulation and the collection of viewers’ personal data is relatively less explored. We analyse how future media content regulation needs to fully account for personal data extraction practices by transnational platforms and other media content undertakings. We posit national cultural sovereignty—a constant unfinished process and framework connecting the local to the global—as the enduring force and justification of media content regulation in Canada. The exercise of state sovereignty may be applied not so much to secure strict territorial borders and centralized power over citizens but to act as a mediating power to promote and protect citizens’ individual and collective interests, locally and globally.

In the name of the nation: Media classification, globalisation, and exceptionalism

This article examines the relationship between exceptionalism and nationhood in media classification. The history of age-ratings is an international one, and the present challenges associated with digital media circulation are similarly international. We argue that the nation nevertheless provides an appropriate frame for understanding age-rating by attending to the ways national agencies have struggled to articulate the specificity of their work based on the specificity of domestic constituencies. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, our central examples include the resistance of the Motion Picture Association of America to age-based film classification, the British Board of Film Classification’s examination of American films in the 1980s, contemporary Japanese videogame regulation, and the emergence of the International Age Rating Coalition. We argue that national exceptionalism is itself generalised and that media content regulation is less about producing national culture than about laying claim to a nation by differentiation.

Innovative Regulation through Competition: A Response to Rapidly Evolving Markets

How can regulators keep up with sea changes in dynamic markets? This article proposes the use of competitive forces to generate innovative regulation. In markets where national, social, cultural, economic or other interests must be maintained in the face of evolving risks, heightened uncertainties and dynamic technological developments, regulators have to learn by doing.This article proposes the novel concept of intra-regulatory competition (IRC), a powerful method for developing innovative regulatory solutions by staging a contest between different regulatory regimes imposed simultaneously on market participants in a given jurisdiction. The article describes the principles of and justifications for IRC, conditions for its effective implementation, its potential benefits and drawbacks. IRC is analysed against the backdrop of similar concepts such as randomised law, experimental law and inter-jurisdictional competition. Finally, the article argues that the regulation of media content in order to promote cultural pluralism and the regulation of computerised trading in securities and futures markets are fields that are ripe for and compatible with the application of IRC.

ICT Variables for Development in South America Through Federal Lenses

From the perspective of the information revolution and based on the methodology put forward by the Telecommunications Law Indicators for Comparative Studies (TLICS) Model published in 2011 and 2012, this paper builds on the federative indicator used by the literature on dependence of economic development on ICT to answer the following research question: What indicators better represent the institutional federative background in South America for the ICT comparative research? Six sets of federative indicators on revenue, fiscal transfer, regulatory power, judicial centralization, planning, and media content regulation are put together to compare South American federal environment as a groundwork for the ICT comparative research. The empirical universe of the paper encompassed eleven countries that formed a potpourri of eight officially unitary countries – Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, and Uruguay –, and three federal countries – Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela –, that account all countries in South America apart from Guiana. The article is organized in three main parts. A brief description of the ICT federative indicators of the TLICS model is performed in the first part. The second part applies these variables to the aforementioned South American states. The third part delves into the comparison of the states analyzed by means of categorizing the differences and commonalities revealed by those indicators. To test the association between federalism as the explanatory variable and each of the outcomes proposed by the TLICS model, we used the following tests of significance: (i) Fisher exact test, to test the association between the federal status of a country and decentralized features in the given group of states; (ii) the relative risk of a country categorized as federal to have decentralized/interdependent ICT variables relative to the chance that a unitary country shows the same features; (iii) logistic regression, to predict the probability of a federal country to present decentralized/interdependent ICT variables. Using Fischer exact test, only ICT tax was significantly associated with a country being classified as federative in the telecommunications (p = 0.024) and e-commerce (p = 0.033) sectors. Calculating the logistic regression pinpointed tax as the only outcome with significant association to the institutional variable of federalism in telecom, broadcast, and e-commerce sectors. In terms of relative risk, the chance of a federal country having decentralized tax is 8 times greater than the chance of a non-federal country having decentralized tax in the telecommunications sector, and 7 times greater in the e-commerce sector. As a main outcome, based on data collected from the institutional background of those countries, we found clusters of commonalities between federal and unitary countries that support the assumption that the sole reference to a single federative category, as opposed to the use of atomized indicators, cannot provide a real picture of their institutional background for ICT and development comparative purposes.

Media Content Regulation in Germany in the Convergence Era

Media Content Regulation in Germany in the Convergence Era

UK Television Policy and Regulation, 2000–10

Between 2000 and 2010, new institutional arrangements were created for UK broadcasting regulation, built upon a radical rethinking of communications policy. This article examines key changes arising from Labour's media policy, the Communications Act 2003 and the work of Ofcom. It argues that changes within broadcasting were less radical than the accompanying rhetoric, and that contradictory tendencies set limits to dominant trends of marketisation and liberalisation. The article explores these tendencies by reviewing the key broadcasting policy issues of the decade including policies on the BBC, commercial public service and commercial broadcasting, spectrum and digital switchover, and new digital services. It assesses changes in the structural regulation of media ownership, the shift towards behavioural competition regulation, and the regulation of media content and commercial communications. In doing so, it explores policy rationales and arguments, and examines tensions and contradictions in the promotion of marketisation, the discourses of market failure, political interventions, and the professionalisation of policy-making.

A Study on the improvement direction of the media content regulation in administrative system

A Study on the improvement direction of the media content regulation in administrative system

Fairness 2.0: Media Content Regulation in the 21st Century

Civil libertarians feared that a change of administrations would herald a revived Fairness Doctrine, a policy that previously permitted the government to oversee news coverage for balanced views. A return to the Fairness Doctrine, however, now seems unlikely. It is very likely, however, that politicians from both the left and the right will try to extend government control over the media beyond current policies. New rules adopted or proposed by the Federal Communications Commission suggest that the agency may be poised to enforce the most intensive government oversight of programming in decades - perhaps even in the history of the agency. The FCC voted last year to require each licensee to file quarterly reports - highly detailed information regarding its programming and editorial choices. This information will be used by organized groups to file complaints to pressure broadcasters to air programming that the complainants prefer. The FCC is also formulating programming guidelines based on the enhanced disclosure reports purporting to ensure that broadcasters meet local needs. This broadcast localism effort may also require broadcasters to appoint local boards to oversee their performance and their editorial decisions. As the FCC seeks to expand regulation of media, the traditional justification for its authority - spectrum scarcity - has lost credibility, and the agency's new efforts are likely to run afoul of the First Amendment.

Privacy, the public and journalism

The paper takes as its starting point the question of whether or not the journalistic normative commitment to full disclosure of information empirically finds favour with the public. We indicate that in the case of war reporting full disclosure is not always desired by the public and then examine if, in certain circumstances, full disclosure is desired by the public in civil situations. The area for examination is that of privacy. By conceptually drawing on the notions of the Liberal and Neo-Aristotelian we show, through both focus group research and survey questionnaires, that the existence of different value positions within the population provides different responses to the rights of the individual and the public good generally and, more specifically, in relation to the regulation of media content. Yet our research shows a virtually unanimous convergence on criteria taken to govern a person's right to privacy and justifiable full disclosure which neither hold privacy to be an absolute right nor wholly subservient to the public good. We then sketch the beginnings of an analytic framework which articulates how and why this should be so. Our conclusion is that so far as the public is concerned, there is no universal right to know, and that journalists ought to understand, in each case of reporting, the emergent ‘status rules' that govern audience response to the news.

Community without Flesh

Community without Flesh