State Broadcasting Research Articles

Televisi Bangsa Baru: Television, Reformasi and Renewal in Indonesia

For nearly 30 years, television in Indonesia was dominated by the state broadcaster TVRI and five commercial channels with very close links to former President Soeharto. In the reform period since Soeharto's resignation, there has been a new sense of public and publicness, an expansion of the public sphere and the break-up and re-imagination of the Indonesian audience. These developments have been led by media sector insiders. This paper argues that, despite the progressive work of new licensees and civil society media groups, it is media sector outsiders which are needed to lead television in Indonesia out from under the totalising, essentialist models of the past to establish televisi bangsa baru — television for a new nation.

Sounds of the "Third Way": Identity and the African Renaissance in Contemporary South African Popular Traditional Music

It is in the production of audiences that the political and social reality of art can be found. --John Fiske (1989) Many of you will have already remarked on the word in the title of this article and perhaps prepared yourself for yet more ink spilled in the quest to define this rare, possibly mythical, concept of musical style. But it is my purpose here to develop rather than to authenticate the notion of tradition, and I shall not be concerned (regrettably) with the sounds of southern Africa that evoke most ineffably its cultural geography: the demonstrably indigenous, audibly other-than-Western music of imagined communities of custom that ethnomusicologists might deem truly Yes, players of acoustic percussion, string, and wind instruments made of materials animal and vegetable can still be found if one has the endurance and four-wheel-drive vehicle required to seek them out. People who sing in the old prehymnodic way, with scales unadjusted to Western harmonic intervals, are still yet more common in South Africa's rural areas. I propose rather to give up the ghost of alien organicological and tonal categories and simply use to mean what black African people in South Africa, and more specifically, Zulu people in Johannesburg and Durban, mean by it. Their conception, a la Chris Waterman's Yoruba slogan, Our is a very modern tradition (Waterman 1982), is that musical is quite adequately maintained and signified through continuities of genre, verbal idioms of experience, and polyvocalities of tone, tune, and texture, of hue and cry. Where is used to signify correspondences between aesthetic structures and an idealized social order, such correspondences are created through the specifically musical qualities of style, timbre, texture, and rhythmical flow (Erlmann 1966, 237). Electric guitars, basses, and keyboards; pentatonic and hexatonic scales and staggered linear melodic polyphonies; shiny drum kits thumping out rhythms of centuries-old stamping dances; faux leopard tails, antelope skin, or string skirts with sneakers and spandex underwear; miraculously balanced beaded headdresses and Kangol caps worn backwards; rhythmically bouncing, nude (insouciant rather than provocative) breasts; antiphonal lead vocalists and a chorus of back-up singers; synchronized hip swinging and stealthy Afro-Christian step-dancing--all are part of Zulu popular music. Indeed, Joseph Nhlapo (2000, 29-30) has convincingly argued in a recent thesis that maskanda guitar need not be termed neo-traditional as I had done (Coplan 1985, 268) but simply traditional. Ezodumo (It Shall Sound), the state broadcaster's (SABC) single live-performance music television offering explicitly devoted to traditional music, features bands of rural-born labor migrants whose only (amplified, of course) acoustic instruments are the guitar, the German button concertina, and piano accordion. The gourd or mouth-resonated monochords, hand-beaten wooden drums, and reed and animal horn aerophones of preindustrial Africa are almost never heard on the broadcast media, although they are still played in rural communities. Significantly for the present discussion, when such instruments do appear on an urban stage, it is as syncretic elements in the eclectic ensemble music of serious African jazz composer/performers. These include Johannesburg's Sipho Mabuse, who employs a lesiba (mouth-resonated quill-reed monochord) player from Lesotho, and Cape Town's Pops Mohammad, who plays Khoi stringed instruments in an explicit attempt to musically reconstitute his self-avowed Khoi aboriginal origins. (1) No musical ethnonationalist, Mohammad also performs his own original improvisations on the twenty-one-stringed Malinke kora. In brief, for black South Africans means the Afro-industrial popular music of African urban labor migrants and dispossessed peasants. …

Thinking across spaces

This article is concerned with the development of transnational television from Turkey, particularly across the European space. First, it seeks to provide an overview of which channels are currently available, emphasizing the new variety – from the programming of the state broadcaster (TRT), through a vibrant array of new commercial broadcasters, to new Muslim channels. Then we move on to look at the implications of these new developments for Turkish audiences in Europe. What we argue is that Turkish television culture is now quite diverse, as also are the audiences that watch it – there are many different ways of being Turkish now. Against those, generally conservative, critics, especially in Germany, who believe that Turkish television is becoming a kind of cultural ghetto for the Turkish audiences that are its viewers, we maintain that the picture is in fact far more complex. As they select different channels and programmes to watch, these audiences use television to actively think about their own identities: their identities between places. They are thinking across spaces, and give us some sense of the experience of a new kind of media culture that has become de-linked from a singular national reference point.

Measurement of Ground Electrical Conductivity for Planning Medium Wave Radio Broadcast Stations in South Western Nigeria

Results of propagation measurements are often required to improve the coverage of Medium Frequency (MF) broadcast transmitters. To achieve this, ground electrical conductivity measurement is one of the parameters often determined. In this study, ground conductivity has been measured around MF radio transmitters in some parts of Western Nigeria, using the Vertical Electrical Sounding (VES) technique based on the Wenner Array geophysical prospecting method. Four of the radio transmitters belong to the Ondo State Radio Corporation (ODRC) and are located at Irese and Oba-Ile (both near Akure), Okitipupa, and Ido-Ani, while one each belongs to the Ekiti State Broadcasting Service (ESBS) at Ifaki-Ekiti, and the Osun State Broadcasting Corporation at Osu. The mean ground electrical conductivity obtained in this study ranged from mS/m at Okitipupa to mS/m at Ido-Ani. Investigation shows that the penetration depth at the frequency of transmission of each station varies from a minimum of m at Ido-Ani at a transmitting frequency of 1035 kHz to a maximum of m at Okitipupa at a transmitting frequency of 765 kHz. Nigeria Journal of Pure and Applied Physics VOLUME 1, AUGUST 2000, pp. 11-16

The Italian broadcasting system between politics and the market

Silvio Berlusconi's success in the European elections of 1999 reopened the Italian debate over the leader of Forza Italia's conflict of interests in the media and politics. This question is one among many that currently concern the relationship between the media, the market and politics in Italy. The Italian broadcasting system has long been subaltern to the political climate and its idiosyncrasies: in the past, the incapacity or lack of desire to regulate the development of the system made the formation of Berlusconi's broadcasting trust possible;in the present,an excess of political sensitivity prevents thoroughgoing reform.The development of digital pay-TV,coupled with the resistance of the state broadcaster,Rai,to return to a mission of public service,provide good examples of some of the contradictions that mark the Italian path to the globalization of communication.

Global versus local

Since the general election of 1994 the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), previously a state broadcaster, has attempted to reconstitute itself. By launching new programming and scheduling the SABC has tried to take into account the requirements for public service broadcasting and the perceptions of what this entails for a new democracy. To contextualize the debates about public service broadcasting in South Africa a brief historic overview of broadcasting is provided. The language requirements for a multicultural society and their effects on programming are explained. Evolution of a local situation comedy genre through two local productions, Suburban Bliss and Going Up, is traced in the SABC’s attempt to achieve a balance of programmes for all members of South African society. The multicultural audience’s varied responses to these productions are discussed to demonstrate how audience reception analysis can serve as an indicator of the rearrangement of cultural power.

Broadcasting the Rainbow Nation: Media, Democracy, and Nation‐Building in South Africa

This paper examines the politics and economics of media reform in South Africa during the 1990s. This process has involved the transformation of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) from a state broadcaster into an independent public service broadcaster, as well as the opening of the airwaves to new entrants in order to extend the diversity of media ownership and programming. The formulation of media policies before and after the elections of 1994 is discussed, with reference to the different interests involved in this process and their differing positions on how broadcasting should be restructured in accordance with new constitutional principles of language equity. The implementation of policies from 1996 to 1998 is critically examined, revealing the contradictory political and economic factors that have shaped the transformation of broadcasting institutions and the performance of independent regulatory bodies.

The Public Broadcaster and Democracy in Transformation: The 1996 Spry Memorial Lecture

Public service broadcasting’s purpose, the object of much debate in South Africa, may be defined as the provision of a universal service of excellent programming while maintaining public legitimacy through an editorial independence from both the government of the day and commercial interests. Since the 1980s, the global media landscape has undergone fundamental changes. Most of the dynamics which today plague public broadcasting are of international import, and the direct result of the intervention of the global economic order. Public service broadcasting must be carried out within the means available to the public broadcaster, and so it is at this point, when the pragmatism of limited financial means meets with the idealism of an all-encompassing mandate, that public service broadcasting’s late-twentieth-century contradictions become apparent. This paper tracks this paradox across the re-launch and transformation of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) from a state broadcaster serving the interests of largely “white,” “coloured,” and “Indian” middle classes to a public broadcaster mandated to better serve the country’s 11 official language communities.

Structural and Cultural Aspects of the Regulation of Television Broadcasting in East Asia

Based on the comparison of the degree of constraints upon television broadcasters in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, this article argues that the relationship between the state and television broadcasters in the three countries studied has been maintained not in an open, but in an enforced or limited fashion. This is because the relationship has been bound mainly by legal constraints (Hong Kong) or indirectly enforced or limited by moral and structural constraints (Japan and Korea). It also argues that the dominant common cultural factor in the three countries, that is, Confucian values, has been reflected in the practice of regulating television broadcasting.

Globalization and policy choice: television and audiovisual services policies in India

Policies shaping the production and distribution of electronic broadcasting or audiovisual services in India have undergone tremendous changes from the 1980s to the 1990s. The number of channels and programming carried by Doordarshan, the state broadcaster, has grown. Private companies both from within and outside India now produce television programming and distribute it through direct broadcast satellites or cable television systems. The dominant account of the liberalization of audiovisual services policies in India focuses almost solely on the role of global economic forces and technical change. While policy choices have been constrained, many of these limitations arose from Indian decisions made about the role of broadcasting in the 1970 and 1980s, and from social and economic developments within India in the 1990s.

“Touching the sentiments of everyone”;: Nationalism and state broadcasting in thirties Mexico

This paper provides a historical perspective on the intersection of media, popular culture, and nationalism through a study of the broadcasting policies and programs of one of Mexico's earliest government radio stations. This study analyzes the musical programs that formed the centerpiece of government radio programming in order to evaluate the racial and class ideologies imbedded in the nationalist discourse of state broadcasters. By viewing these government programs through the lens of a broader literature on nationalism in the Third World and among diasporic communities, it is possible to identify a fundamental tension in Mexico's official nationalism between a search for the roots of an “authentic”; ethnic identity, and a need to position Mexican culture within the constellation of Western “civilization.”; Finally, this paper investigates audience reactions to state broadcasts in order to explore the meaning of early broadcast nationalism for Mexico's radio listeners.

Communications, Corporatism, and Dependent Development in Ireland

The A. explore the complex relationship between the corporate state and public service broadcasting in Europe by means of historical case study of Ireland

Structural changes in Kenya's broadcasting system: A manifesta tion of presidential authoritarianism

Between December 1988 and March 1990, the government of Kenya restructured its broadcasting system. Examination of government documents and press reports viewed from the perspective of literature on authoritarian politics in Africa indicates that the structural changes were part of a strategy intended to enhance the image and authority of President Moi, breath new life into the ruling party and attract foreign investors. The strategy did attract foreign aid and investment in the media and did give the president a more efficient propaganda tool and tighter control over the state's broadcasting system. But, the aid increased the nation's external debt; the regime's propaganda alienated the public, and the second TV channel served to encourage open debate and multi-party politics which undermined the president's authority.

State Broadcasting and Minority Languages: the Case of Irish in Ireland

Abstract The scale and content of minority language programmes in State broadcasting services reflect (a) technical/operational, (b) language planning and (c) ideological considerations. These three elements form the environment within which broadcasting policy is formulated and within which, over time, it changes. Irish language broadcasting in Ireland is discussed from this viewpoint.

A national survey of NAB member stations' support of broadcasting education

In the Spring of 1962 the Journal of Broadcasting published a “Directory of Scholarships for Students of Broadcasting” an amalgamation of compilations by Gordon Greb (for the Council on Radio‐Television Journalism of the Association for Education in Journalism and the Radio‐Television News Directors Association) and Sidney Kraus (for the Association for Professional Broadcasting Education). This directory, although listing scholarships worth more than a quarter million dollars, named fewer than 30 as coming from broadcasting stations, group ownership, or state broadcaster associations. In the compilation that follows, even though it is restricted to NAB member stations, more than 90 stations report granting scholarships to students of broadcasting. Surely, this represents a vast increase in the amount of student aid and recognition, and not merely underreporting on the earlier survey. The following study had its genesis in a discussion between Dr. Kraus and Howard Bell, then vice‐president for Planning an...