20

Chapter One

Cultural Institutions, Cultural Policy and the

Historical Foundations of Australian Broadcast

Media Policy

This chapter begins by discussing the ‘cultural policy debate’ in Australian

cultural studies. This debate raised a series of issues that are critical to media and

cultural studies as well as to policy studies, including the relationship of academic

criticism to political agency, the significance of Marxist and social-democratic

approaches to state power, and the need for a comparative and historical

perspective on policy that recognises the prevalence of policy failure. Examining

media from a policy-oriented perspective also allows greater consideration of the

role of institutions in the development of cultural forms and practices. It is

proposed in this chapter that an institutional approach to cultural analysis can

overcome some of the problems in media studies and media policy studies that

have arisen out of elitist, structuralist Marxist and cultural studies methodologies.

In the latter part of the chapter, an institutional framework is deployed to

develop an understanding of the structure of broadcasting and broadcast media

policy, and the bases for political agency arising from the relationship between
 21

‘public interest’ discourses and the structure of broadcast property. It is proposed

that a ‘policy settlement’ emerged in Australian broadcasting in the 1950s and

1960s, where a formal commitment to cultural citizenship and community

participation was in practice negated by regulatory capture, indifference towards

cultural policy goals, and political dominance of broadcasting policy. At the same

time, however, this period saw the emergence of a linkage between cultural

nationalism and participation discourses that is at the cornerstone of the

campaigns for media policy reform that gained momentum in the 1970s.

Three elements are identified as central to the Australian broadcast policy

settlement: strong political and broadcaster influence over the conduct of

regulatory agencies; the expectation that the high profits of broadcast networks

legitimate demands for ‘pro-social’ content regulations, such as those around

Australian drama production and children’s programming; and demands that local

content regulations are important to ensuring that Australian commercial

television fulfils national cultural development objectives. The relationship

between public participation and the rights of media consumers as citizens, in

contrast to broadcaster expectations of a ‘hands-off’ relationship with

governments and regulatory agencies, was an area of contested political terrain

throughout the period from the 1970s to the 1990s.

 22

The Cultural Policy Debate in Australian Cultural Studies

One of the most significant debates in Australian cultural studies in the 1990s was

the cultural policy debate. Tony Bennett, one of the leading protagonists in the

debate, argued that culture and cultural practices should be seen as ‘intrinsically

governmental’, and defined in terms of ‘the specificity of the governmental tasks

and programmes in which those practices come to be inscribed’ (Bennett 1992d:

397). Bennett proposes that culture is best thought of as ‘a historically specific set

of institutionally embedded relations of government in which the forms of thought

and conduct of extended populations are targeted for transformation - in part via

the extension through the social body of the forms, techniques, and regimens of

aesthetic and intellectual culture’ (Bennett 1992c: 26). For Bennett, this

genealogical approach to the development of culture links contemporary advocacy

of cultural policy studies to historical analysis of the formation of culture in

modernity, by seeing its ‘governmentalisation’ as part of a broader trend towards

the use of specific forms of knowledge as a technology for the management of

populations.

The implications of such a revised analytical framework for the study of

cultural institutions were threefold. First, it would shift the emphasis of histories

of culture away from the ways in which intellectuals and critics interpreted
 23

culture, and towards the institutional arrangements governing its administration

(eg. Hunter 1988a, Hunter et. al. 1991; Hunter 1994, Bennett 1995; Meredyth

1997; Meredyth 1998). Second, it would move cultural policy from being an

optional add-on to cultural studies, to being ‘central to the definition and

constitution of culture’ (Bennett 1992d: 397). Third, it would require critical and

theoretical work in cultural studies to be ‘informed by a more concrete sense of

the actual organisation of the political, institutional and policy fields it must

negotiate in order to be translated into programs capable of being implemented by

agencies and organisations with the capacity to do so’ (Bennett 1989: 11).

A related argument was developed by Stuart Cunningham (1992a), who

argued that cultural policy studies provided the possibility for research that

incorporated insights from the social sciences, such as politics and policy studies,

into how cultural policy is made, as well as expanding the scope for cultural

intellectuals to engage with such processes. Cunningham argued for cultural

studies to become more policy-oriented, and to develop ‘a more subtle and

context-sensitive grasp of the strategic nature of policy discourse in negotiating

piecemeal, ongoing reform in democratic capitalist societies’ (Cunningham

1992b: 535). Cunningham maintained that this turn from radical oppositional

politics to a reformist and social-democratic approach to political change would

not only strengthen the critical element of intellectual practice, by giving it a

greater capacity to engage with institutional decision-making processes around

current issues, but would provide the potential for a more dynamic engagement on
 24

the part of cultural intellectuals with the political sphere, particularly through a

revitalisation of citizenship discourses:

A renewed concept of citizenship should become increasingly central to

cultural studies as it moves into the 1990s ... Replacing revolutionary

rhetoric with the new command metaphor of citizenship commits cultural

studies to a reformist vocation within the terms of a social democratic

politics. This can connect it more organically with the wellsprings of

engagement with policy (Cunningham 1992a: 10-11).

Neo-Marxists such as Boris Frankel opposed such a call, arguing that

cultural policy theorists, or what Frankel terms the ‘cultural technocrats’, had

promoted ‘a managerial, market-oriented form of culture policy, in the process of

abandoning both cultural critique and aesthetic criteria of judgment’ (Frankel

1992: 88, 270). In a similar vein, Bronwen Levy accused cultural policy studies of

possessing a ‘lack of skepticism ... about the political programmes of

governments,’ and being unable to deal with conflict, contradiction or the limits of

social democracy as a program for reforming capitalist societies (Levy 1992:

554). For Levy, it was essential that cultural studies retain criticism as its central

function, and that it project its political aim ‘beyond the limits of what appears

pragmatically achievable in the current governmental context’ (Levy 1992: 555).

Both Frankel and Levy wished to retain criticism as the central function of

intellectual practice, but lacked a clear analysis of what political forces such an
 25

intellectual practice could be articulated to. Both seemed to favour the idea that

the critical intellectual should operate within what Terry Eagleton (1984) termed a

counter-public sphere, or in a relationship of mutuality with oppositional social

movements. Such a counter-public sphere would enable a ‘shift [of] the role of

critic from isolated intellectual to political functionary’, as well as provide ‘a

readership [that is] institutionalised rather than amorphous, able to receive and

interpret such work in a collective context and to ponder its consequences for

political action’ (Eagleton 1984: 112).

Three problems can be identified with such a strategy. The first is a

pragmatic one: the 1990s were marked in Australia, as in many other countries

since the demise of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism in 1989-

90, by the virtual disappearance of what Peter Beilharz (1994) termed a ‘left

public sphere’ of political, social and cultural organisations, that had historically

sustained such a form of critical intellectual practice. Second, and more

significantly, this approach overstated the possibilities of linking a diverse range

of political, cultural and intellectual practices into a broad movement capable of

constituting a public sphere in opposition to the bureaucratic organisations of the

state. One of the problems with broad conceptions of counter-hegemonic politics

has been that they frequently fail to link advocacy of cultural reforms on behalf of

particular social groups to political practices that can change the conduct of

identifiable institutional agents. As a result, there is a recurrent danger that such

cultural politics is otherwise largely rhetorical, with no substantive impact in the

 26

political domain. Effective political practice necessitates recognition of its own

institutional and discursive conditions of existence, most notably its relationship

to decision-making institutional agents with capacities to represent interests or

organise outcomes. It is not sufficient to conflate an enunciative practice in an

academic context with effective political practice in a decision-making

institutional context.

Third, the opposition between state institutions and counter-public spheres

that underpinned such a counter-hegemonic role for criticism under-estimateed

the porosity of boundaries between state organisations and those of civil society.

Bennett noted that this opposition neglects the extent to which:

Public spheres ... are brought into being not merely outside of and in

opposition to the bureaucratic apparatuses of the state but also within

those apparatuses or in varying degrees of quasi-autonomous relations to

state bureaucracies (Bennett 1992a: 235-236).

The significance of actions by state institutions to the formation of sites for

diverse and critical cultural activities is cogently developed in Gay Hawkins’

(1993) history of community arts in Australia. Hawkins’ account provides ample

evidence to indicate that community arts, rhetorically constructed by some as the

most avowedly oppositional and anti-statist of forms of cultural practice (e.g.

Kelly 1984) is, at least in the Australian context, ‘a creation of government policy,
 27

an official invention’ (Hawkins 1993: xviii). The emergence of community arts in

Australia had far less to do with demands ‘from below’ for autonomous forms of

community self-expression, than with application of social democratic discourses

of ‘access’, ‘equity’, ‘participation’ and ‘community involvement’ to Federal arts

funding regimes since the Whitlam Labor government of the early 1970s. Rather

than marking a retreat into pragmatism, the engagement with cultural policy by

community arts activists provided a clearer basis for the articulation of intellectual

practice to sites of contestation in cultural politics, with the outcomes of such a

‘reformist’ commitment being unable to be determined in advance.

Tom O’Regan (1992c) argued that advocacy of cultural policy studies in

Australia involved a shift in intellectual practice from an orientation towards the

non-organised subjects of policy actions, towards those agencies and institutions

involved with the development and implementation of policy, and to becoming

policy participants. He claimed that such an approach both unduly narrowed the

scope of policy-oriented research, and promoted a ‘pragmatic’ politics, that

prevented critique of current cultural arrangements from extending beyond a

‘horizon of the thinkable’ (O’Regan 1992c: 420). In doing so, O’Regan argued

that a concern with cultural policy can serve a number of purposes, and different

subjects and/or agents of policy, including: state administration purposes;

reformism within the governmental system; oppositional purposes; and

‘diagnostic’ purposes, in which policy emerges as a politics of discourse in a

descriptive enterprise. O’Regan defined an orientation towards the subjects of

 28

institutional power as a ‘bottom-up’ approach, which he described as being

characteristic of cultural studies, whereas an orientation towards the agents of

institutional power is defined as a ‘top-down’ approach to policy, which he saw as

central to the cultural policy studies ‘turn’. The outcome, for O’Regan, was an

associated narrowing of the scope of what constitutes ‘relevant’ intellectual work

to ‘that which can be made governmentally or corporately actionable, can be

publicly endorsed, and can be institutionally sanctioned and found useful by

government, tribunal, policy-makers and interest-group lobbyists directly

involved in forming policies’ (O’Regan 1992: 414).

O’Regan’s critique of cultural policy studies was a wide-ranging and

cogent one, but could be seen to possess two related limitations. The first,

addressed above, is the claim that much of cultural studies and cultural criticism

can be interpreted as policy analysis. This claim that enunciative practice is

synonymous with effective political engagement effectively dilutes policy studies

of any specificity and distinctiveness. The second flaw is the dichotomising of

‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ orientations toward institutional power,

commissioned and independent academic research, and political positions that are

for or against the reproduction of existing relations of social and cultural power. It

is not self-evident that an involvement with bureaucratic institutions entails

complicity with ‘top-down’ policy programs, particularly if one accepts the

existence of porosity between state agencies and the institutions of civil society,

and that state agencies can be established which aim to represent the interests of
 29

disorganised or disempowered individuals and groups. The use of binary

oppositions between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ orientations to power has

difficulty in dealing with the politics associated with the ‘governmentalisation of

culture’, and the extent to which ‘the management of cultural resources in ways

intended to reform ways of life remains very much part of the active politics and

policy of culture in contemporary societies’ (Bennett 1998: 104).

A different line of criticism of cultural policy studies as it has developed in

Australia was taken by Miller (1994, 1996) and Craik (1995), who argued that

theorists had overestimated the coherence and rationality of the policy formation

process, assuming an easy translation between the policy statements of

government agencies and their effective implementation as policy. This emphasis

upon the role of government in the shaping of culture was also seen as leading to

neglect of the role played by the corporate sector as shapers of culture, and the

extent to which it has been the private sector, rather than the state institutions, that

have driven the development of cultural technologies such as broadcast media.

There is also the concern that cultural policy theorists are too sanguine in their

evaluation of the ways in which ‘reason of state’ or the ‘bureaucratic imaginary’

are directed towards the management of populations and the governance of

conduct, and are insufficiently concerned with the limits of governance and the

extent to which citizenship rights are legitimately directed in opposition to

governmental power.
 30

The genesis of many of these problems lay in the manner in which cultural

policy studies, as it has evolved in Australia, had developed largely as a reaction

to the perceived weaknesses of cultural studies, thus tending to neglect research

findings arising out of the social sciences or policy studies. Craik argues that

‘Foucault-derived’ or ‘governmental’ approaches to cultural policy failed to

adequately engage with the dynamics of policy formation and its relationship to

the political process. It was claimed that such approaches to cultural policy

studies worked, typically in an implicit rather than an explicit sense, with a

rational-comprehensive model of policy formation ‘which assumes that the

pronouncements of governments equals their policies and practices’, thereby

glossing over the ‘labyrinthine minefield of competing agents and agencies,

contradictory agendas, political expediency, and bureaucratic intransigence’ found

in actual policy processes (Craik 1995: 205). Miller (1994) argued that, in the

enthusiasm to advocate cultural policy studies as an alternative approach to

cultural studies, there was confusion between advocacy for engagement with

policy processes concerned with media and culture, and critical analysis of the

impact of policy processes upon media and culture.

There have also been varying degrees of uptake of cultural policy as an

organising principle of arts and media policy across industrialised societies, which

is a point often neglected in more ‘governmental’ approaches to cultural policy as

the practice of citizen formation in modernity. A commitment to cultural policy

has been more notably a characteristic of European states where there are strong
 31

social-democratic traditions, such as France, Germany, the Netherlands and the

Scandinavian states. By contrast, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ states such as Australia,

Britain and the United States have been more reluctant to develop cultural

policies, as there is a strong historical suspicion of the role of governments in the

administration of culture, and a resulting emphasis upon keeping a distance

between governments and decisions concerning the allocation of cultural funds.

Craik (1996) and Vestheim (1996) have developed four ideal-type models of

cultural policy, which correspond to the dominant practices of state institutions in

particular nations and regions (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1

Models of Cultural Policy

Role of Model Principal Dominant Modes of

State Country Funding Strategies Evaluation
Cultural Mechanisms
Agencies
Facilitator United States Tax Market Commercial or
concessions manipulation patron tastes
Patron Britain, Grants by ‘Arm’s length’ Professional or
Australia quasi- principle peer-based
independent
bodies
Architect France, Direct grants National and National and
Scandinavian from Ministry community community
countries of Culture cultural
development
Engineer Former Government State political Political
USSR, ownership of objectives
China, Cuba cultural
organisations

Source: Craik 1996; Vestheim 1996.

 32

Institutions and Cultural Studies

The cultural policy debate brought a renewed focus upon institutional analysis in

cultural studies. The concept of institutional power that was developed, as being

positive and productive, owed a great deal to the work of Michel Foucault.

Foucault consistently linked power, knowledge and discourse, as part of his

concern with elaborating a ‘political economy of truth’ that moved beyond

questions of truth and ideology, to grounded historical accounts of the discursive

and institutional formations of power/knowledge. Foucault proposed that power

should not be understood in terms of sovereign or juridical rights, or as the

exclusive property of any single group or class over others, to be possessed or

captured. Rather, Foucault believed that power operated among individuals and

institutions through a ‘net-like’ structure of relations of production, circulation

and redistribution, which are strategic, flexible and productive in their

combination and application of institutional and discursive forces (Foucault 1980,

1990). What emerged from Foucault’s work was a particular way of theorising

the relationship between power and government, with power being associated

with the ability to structure the conduct of free subjects:

The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct

and putting in order the possible outcome. Basically power is less a

 33

confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other

than a question of government. This word must be allowed the very broad

meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. ‘Government’ did not refer

only to political structures or to the management of states; rather it

designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might

be directed … [and] modes of action, more or less concerned and

calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of

other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field

of action of others (Foucault 1982: 221 - emphases added).

In referring to the role of institutions as positive, three aspects of this

positivity need to be distinguished. First, there is the extent to which institutional

practices are constitutive of a social field. This concept is derived from Foucault’s

work on power, particularly his analysis of the emergence of sexuality as a

problematic of government in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe (Foucault

1990). It has been used by Jacques Donzelot in his account of the diverse

ensemble of institutions, discourses and practices that emerged in eighteenth and

nineteenth century Europe around the management of families, as a crucial link

between promoting the economic wealth of the society and the health and well-

being of individuals and the population as a whole (Donzelot 1979).

Second, recognition of the interrelationship between institutions and the

formation of individual identities enables consideration of how institutions confer

 34

identities, or how they provide the cognitive and discursive conditions for the

‘making up’ of an individual persona, or ‘self’. Mary Douglas (1986) has

explored the relationship between institutions and individual identities by drawing

an analogy between the development of institutions and the development of ideas,

noting that the preservation and reproduction of both depends upon their ability to

provide ‘a set of analogies with which to explore the world and with which to

justify the naturalness and reasonableness of the instituted rules, and it can keep

its identifiable continuing form’ (Douglas 1986: 112). Rather than seeing

institutions as the result of shared agreement between autonomous individuals,

Douglas proposed that institutions confer identities, providing a classificatory

system that formed the basis for shared discourse. This is consistent with Scott’s

(1995) observation that the ‘new institutionalism’ in politics, economics and

sociology is characterised by its stress upon the cognitive dimension of

institutions, and how they frame situations and define identities, as well as by a

social constructivist approach to knowledge, whereby meaning is generated out of

a repertoire of available discourses and situated social identities. Such a shared

public memory would not, however, provide a sufficient basis for the continuation

of institutions or of ideas; what is also needed is the ability to ‘intervene to

support individual strategies to create a collective goal’ (Douglas 1986: 73).

Finally, if institutions are a necessary condition for meaningful reflection,

decision-making and action, it follows that effective social and political agency

largely arises in and through institutional forms. The notion of an institution

 35

includes, but need not be restricted to, legally - sanctioned formal bodies such as

corporations, state agencies, trade unions, political parties, etc. At the same time,

institutions do not necessarily need to be formal legal entities. Raymond

Williams’ account of cultural formations draws attention to the significance of

alternative or oppositional cultural producers developing forms of group

organisation, such as formal membership, collective public manifestations (eg.

manifestos), or informal networks of conscious association or group

identification, alongside creative practices which place them in an alternative or

oppositional relationship to formal or established cultural institutions (Williams

1981: Ch. 3). In a different vein, John Ruggie approached multilateralism as an

institution in two senses: as both a set of shared ideas and conventions that

independent national governments could agree to, in order to establish generalised

principles of conduct; and as a set of formal international organisations that ‘are

palpable entities with headquarters and letterheads, voting procedures, and

generous pension plans’ (Ruggie 1993: 13).

The need to conceive of institutions as both a set of organising rules and

principles of conduct, and as formal legal - political entities capable of exercising

effective agency within and outside of their organising domain, is reinforced by

the literature on collective action and the limits of individualism. Friedland and

Robertson (1990) argue that the failure of mainstream economic theories to

adequately account for power is most apparent in the exclusion of so-called ‘rent-

seeking behaviour’ from the operations of efficient markets, since the

 36

establishment of property rights, and resulting rent – seeking capacities, are

central to the exercise of economic power. Campbell and Lindberg (1990) extend

this focus on property rights as central to economic power with the observation

that the state is both a social actor and an institutional structure, with state

agencies tending to act, through the creation of particular governance regimes, to

create, maintain, enforce and transform arrangements concerning property rights.

As such, the role of state agencies in creating and administering these structures

of governance acts as a powerful catalyst for the institutionalisation of other

actors that wish to participate in these governance structures. From a different

angle, Elster (1985) has argued that a concept such as class consciousness requires

mechanisms for the realisation of principles of solidarity, or what Elster described

as a ‘technology of collective action’, that would involve a combination of

mechanisms through which a shared understanding of a social situation could

emerge, and the capacity to undertake actions that demonstrable gains from co -

operation.

Beyond Agency and Structure in Media Policy Studies

Media policy studies has been characterised by detailed institutional and policy

analysis, including detailed empirical histories of regulatory institutions (eg.

Krasnow and Longley 1978), comparative studies of media policy as a form of

public administration (Humphreys 1996; Hoffman-Reim 1996), and approaches

 37

that combine the study of media institutions with analysis of media politics in the

context of technological, economic and political change (McQuail and Siune

1986; Siune and Truetzschler 1991; McQuail and Siune 1998). In Australia, two

approaches to the study of media policy have predominated. The first approach,

that of ‘media mates’, places a primary emphasis upon the interaction between

media proprietors and leading figures in government (Bowman 1988; Chadwick

1989; Tiffen 1995). Second, there are structuralist or political economy

approaches, which interpret Australian media policy formation through structural

models such as neo-Marxist political economy (Ashbolt 1975; Plews 1976;

McQueen 1977; Bonney and Wilson 1983).

The ‘media mates’ approaches to Australian media policy tell a lively and

frequently compelling story of the interactions between Australia’s powerful

media proprietors, most notably the Packer and Murdoch families, and leading

figures in both the Liberal and Labor Parties. Its underlying strengths lie in its

documentation of the uses of media outlets as organs of political influence, its

focus upon the broad reach and highly concentrated ownership of Australian

media, and the myriad ways in which this connects with political power and

political ambitions. Nonetheless, it possesses real weaknesses as a basis for

analysing media policy. It adopts what Dunleavy and O’Leary (1987) term the

cipher image of public policy, where policy development is largely seen as the

reflection of outcomes agreed to through elite bargaining among powerful agents

outside of the policy process. Technical, administrative and organisation aspects

 38

of policy formation and implementation are treated essentially as what is required

to secure larger strategies of elite co-option of the decision-making process.

The ‘media mates’ approach also simply assumes two points that need to

be proven. First, it assumes that the power of governments to act independently is

relatively weak vis-à-vis corporate power. In the literature on state theory,

Nordlinger (1981), Skocpol (1985) and Block (1987) have drawn attention to the

problems that arise from assuming that public policies are largely determined by

the balance of forces and priorities of powerful groups outside of the state

institutions. Skocpol has argued that ‘the formation, let alone the political

capacities, of … interest groups and classes depends in significant measure on the

structures and activities of the very states the social actors, in turn, seek to

influence’ (Skocpol 1985: 27). Second, it is assumed that the distribution of

decision-making power within complex media organisations is based upon a

relatively straightforward ‘top-down’ model, where decisions come from a unified

organisational leadership and are duly ratified and implemented at lower levels.

Political economists (Herman 1981; Murdock 1982) and economic sociologists

(Scott 1979, 1986; Tomlinson 1982) have pointed to the limitations of assuming

that corporate behaviour can be characterised by a ‘top-down’ model. They

instead argue that corporate strategies have to be seen as the result of particular

and contingent forms of decision and action, with the forms of calculation,

decision-making and action undertaken by corporations as economic and social

 39

agents being highly variable across nations, on the basis of a diverse and

historically - based range of legal, economic, political, social and cultural factors.

Political economy approaches to media studies have drawn attention to the

significance of structural determinants upon the behaviour of agents, seeing this

as central to the dynamics of media policy. In the process of defining and

defending the political economy approach to media, Mosco points to ‘the value of

theorising the social totality ... [and] conceptions of power that derive from the

fundamental rules governing structures in society’ (Mosco 1995: 258). Similarly,

Murdock (1982) argued that it was most useful to understand corporate control as

being primarily driven by the structural constraints upon decision-making arising

from the operations of capitalism as a mode of production, since the basis of

power for large media corporations is not personal but structural, driven by the

impersonal forces associated with capitalist competition. Murdock drew upon

Marxist approaches to corporate strategy and behaviour, which argued that ‘the

study of … capitalism should not crystallize on the question of whether the units

of decisions are isolated corporations or interest groups … because, whatever

form prevails, it is still the rationality of the system, its logic of accumulation,

which dominates these forms’ (De Vroey 1975: 9).

Marxist analyses work from a structural analysis of capitalism as a mode

of production with definable and determinate features, providing a sufficient basis

for understanding the practices of institutions and other social agents. Since
 40

corporations as economic agents can be understood as personifications of the

social relation of capital, it is the structural characteristics of capitalism as a social

totality that dictate their conduct. In his own writing, Marx stressed the extent to

which ‘the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely

personifications of economic relations’ (Marx 1976: 179), and maintained that

‘the individual has an effect only as part of a social power, as an atom in a mass

(Marx 1981: 295), since the process of competition produces a set of mechanisms

whereby ‘the many capitals force the inherent determinants of capital upon one

another and upon themselves’ (Marx 1973: 651).

The claim that the practices of institutions can in some sense be ‘read off’

from an abstract mode of analysis of the capitalist mode of production has been

subject to a withering critique by Cutler et. al. (1977, 1978). These authors have

pointed to the limitations of an approach that assumes an abstract analysis of

capitalism as a social totality can provide the foundations for understanding the

actions of individual institutional agents. This is argued by Cutler et. al. on the

basis of structuralist Marxism’s inability to deal with:

• the significance of corporations operating within national economies,

with their own distinctive laws, regulations and policies, and the fact

that these national conditions shape corporate behaviour;

 41

• the decision-making practices of corporations, the forms of

calculation upon which these are based, and the widely divergent

consequences of such decisions on overall corporate performance;

• divergences between the position of economic agents within a social

structure and the forms of political practice which predominate within

particular nation-states (Cutler et. al. 1977, 1978).

Cutler et. al. argued against the concept of a mode of production, instead

proposing that connections between social relations, institutions and practices can

only be established in the context of their specific conditions of existence within

particular societies. One implication of Cutler et. al.’s critique of structuralist

Marxism is that it is impossible to understand the conduct of corporations as

economic agents independently of the laws and policies through which they

operate within particular national economies. State policy is central to the creation

of the conditions of existence of capitalist commodity production and exchange at

all levels, from monetary policy to corporations and industrial laws, and there is

no simple ‘functional’ or ‘converging’ relationship between the structural entity of

capitalism and the associated forms of law and policy at the level of national

economies. It is essential to analyse national legal and policy forms as significant

in their own right, rather than as ‘reflecting’ other ‘global’ structural determinants,

because they constitute aspects of the conditions of existence of corporations as

economic agents, and influence their decision-making practices.

 42

This analysis points to significant limitations to those approaches that

explain policy formation through theories of the state based upon underlying

structural analyses of society. Vincent Mosco (1988, 1989) has argued that

changes in US telecommunications policy can largely be explained as a

consequence of a shift in approaches to governance from a

managerialist/expertise-based to a pluralist/market-based approach, that can in

turn only be explained from the standpoint of a class-based approach (Mosco

1988: 119). What is apparent from Mosco’s account is that he defines the state as

a unified social agent with a singular set of interests, and an ability to make

decisions and act upon them. At the same time, however, the state’s interests are

not its own; instead, its forms of control over decision-making and policy agendas

are ‘expressions of dynamic processes and power relations in the entire social

system’, and ‘a vehicle for maintaining class power without directly appearing to

do so’ (Mosco 1988: 117, 118). The problem with this structuralist-Marxist

approach is, as Les Johnston has observed, it ‘leaves us with the uncomfortable

inference that the study of state institutions is something of an irrelevance’

(Johnston 1986: 69). Politics located at the level of particular institutional sites

and policy domains, such as telecommunications, become secondary to a second,

more fundamental, set of political relations, formed at the society - wide level of

antagonistic class relations, which are then reflected back onto the level of

telecommunications policy. Significantly, Mosco provides no account of how the

capitalist class as a whole can form ‘interests’ in the outcomes of

telecommunications policy, nor does he establish how these interests are in

 43

opposition to the interests of what he describes as non-dominant groups, or how

‘interests’ are translated into actual policies towards the telecommunications

sector.

The work of Anthony Giddens (1979, 1981, 1984) is important to

developing an approach to institutions that can balance the dichotomy between

agency and structure that has dogged critical social theory. Giddens’ approach

aims to account for the longevity and the constitutive roles of particular

institutional configurations in the formation of social identities, discourses, and

practical consciousness, while at the same time avoiding the tendency of

structuralist analysis to presume that agents simply occupy ‘places and functions’

within overarching structures for which institutions provide the conduit. For

Giddens, institutions provide the ‘deeply-layered structures’ of a time and a place

that continuously organise the behaviour of social agents (Giddens 1979: 64-65).

Institutions are both the medium for and the outcome of practices that constitute a

social system, and exist as forms that both mediate and transcend the duality of

agency and structure. They do not just work ‘behind the back’ of the social actors

who produce and reproduce them, but work through the active engagement of

social actors who possess knowledge of their operations and choose to interact

with them: ‘such knowledge is not incidental to the operation of society, but is

necessarily involved in it’ (Giddens 1979: 71).

 44

Giddens’ concept of structuration (Giddens 1984) has been developed as a

means of developing an institutional typology that allows for differing

configurations of agency and structure across historical time. The concept of

structure refers, in the first instance, to ‘the structuring properties allowing the

“binding” of time-space in social systems, the properties which make it possible

for discernibly similar social practices to exist across varying spans of time and

space and which lend them “systemic” form’ (Giddens 1984: 17). These

embedded structural principles, such as the ones that constitute the distinctively

capitalist form of class society, are those most deeply implicated in the

reproduction of societies, and which are found across a large number of

comparable societies. Structures, however, have a duality, whereby they are both

relatively enduring over time and across societies, and subject to conditions of

reproduction, mediation and transformation. The reproduction of structures, for

Giddens, has to be seen as being grounded in the behaviour of knowledgeable

agents, and as enabling as well as constraining of the conduct of social agents

(Giddens 1984: 25). The concept of structuration, then, links structures, as

relatively invariant institutional forms, and systems, which constitute the domains

within particular periods of time and social spaces where relations between actors

and collectivities are organised and reproduced as regular social practices,

frequently through the mediation of state agencies.1

A focus upon the duality of structures also points to a need to uncouple the

concept of agency from its association with individuals. Barry Hindess (1986,
 45

1989) has defined an agent as a locus of decision and action (Hindess 1989: 3).

An agent must have reasons for some of the actions they undertake, and means of

assessing situations and reaching decisions about appropriate forms of action.

These actions may in turn be based upon an agent’s assessment of its interests, but

it cannot be presumed that the interests of an agent can be understood

independently of its actions or the forms of assessment and calculation involved

in reaching decisions to undertake such actions. An individual may be an agent,

but so too can a variety of social institutions, such as political parties, trade

unions, industry lobby groups, organisations representing social movements,

corporate enterprises and state agencies (Hindess 1989: 90-92; cf. Rorty 1988:

Ch. 1). One important implication of such an approach to agency is that the

concept of agent cannot be conflated upward to entities such as classes, nations or

genders. The reason is that such social entities, even if they can be presumed to

have shared interests, cannot make decisions and act upon them, even if actions of

the agents that represent such interests (eg. trade unions as representatives of

working class interests) may in some cases depend upon the actions of others

within the organisation (such as the votes of their members). Insofar as

organisations exist to represent such interests, it is necessary to analyse the actions

of such agents in their own right, and in the sites specific to their forms of

decision-making and action. This does not mean that the actions of such agents

float free of any forms of institutional or structural constraint, but it does mean

that agents cannot be presumed to be simply reflective of wider social forces,

 46

since they are themselves loci of decision and action within particular decision-

making sites.

The Institutional Structure of Broadcasting

The institutional structure of broadcasting derives, in the first instance, from the

dual nature of the airwaves (spectrum) as both a public resource and a form of

property that can be privately owned. The direct relationship that exists between

the broadcaster as communicator and their audiences is thus always mediated by

the institutional arrangements that enable that broadcaster to have access to the

broadcasting spectrum. The constitution of the airwaves as a scarce resource, and

as property, is thus intimately bound up with their constitution as a public

resource. As a result, broadcasters necessarily engage not only with audiences as a

public, but also with regulatory agencies that have responsibility for spectrum

allocation and management, and which have the capacity to require broadcasters

to meet certain ‘public interest’ or ‘affirmative’ obligations as a condition of

access to scarce and public spectrum space. While the case for regulation of

broadcasting on the basis of its potential social impact emerged at an early stage

in the development of broadcasting, spectrum scarcity and public ownership of

spectrum preceded a public interest rationale for public interest broadcast

regulation, both historically and analytically.

 47

The concept of a ‘public interest’ in broadcast communication was first

officially expressed by the US Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, in 1924,

and was enshrined in the US Radio Act of 1927, which established that broadcast

licensees should uphold the ‘public interest, convenience and necessity’ (Krasnow

and Longley 1978; Streeter 1995). Out of the notion of a ‘public interest’ in

broadcasting emerged the concept of a ‘public trust’ as a basis for broadcast

policy and regulation, defined by Robert Horwitz in these terms:

Broadcasters, though given licences to monopolise a given radio

frequency, were not to view that licence as a property right. The airwaves

were deemed to be the property of all the people … and the holders of

broadcast licences were required to operate as public trustees. Ultimately,

broadcast regulation was founded upon a public domain argument, that the

airwaves were a natural resource held in common ... The state acted to

protect and safeguard that commonly held resource ... In a very real sense,

the government endowed certain private parties with immense public

benefits. Because of this, the broadcast licensee technically was deemed a

‘public trustee’, and had to fulfill certain ‘affirmative’ obligations.

(Horwitz 1989: 13)

The ‘public trust’ discourse of broadcasting policy clearly implied the

accountability of broadcast licensees to the public. ‘The public’ as a concept was

understood not simply as an aggregation of listeners and viewers, but as a

 48

collectivity with interests that broadcasters had an obligation to serve. Anthony

Smith has described the concept of the public interest as containing ‘sub-textually

a sense of the existence of a natural conflict between individual and public goods,

between the natural strivings of people for their own betterment and the social

benefit which might ensue from a partial or temporary denial of self - gain’ (Smith

1989: 11). Smith has observed that there have been three major attempts to

guarantee the ‘public interest’ in broadcasting. The first has been monopolisation

of the airwaves by state-funded broadcasters, which occurred in the majority of

European, Asian, African and Latin American countries, and closely tied

broadcasting to principles of political and national citizenship. Second, there was

statutory regulation by a government agency of private broadcaster conduct,

which the United States is the most prominent example of, and which has to deal

with what Smith describes as ‘a permanent tension ... between what might be

labeled constitutional and “public interest” positions’, or between commercial

freedoms guaranteed by law and social responsibilities sought through regulation

(Smith 1989: 20). Finally, there are those countries such as Australia and Canada,

which adopted a dual broadcasting system, with regulated commercial

broadcasters coexisting with a state-funded national broadcaster.

Accounts of the history of ‘public trust’ discourse in US broadcasting policy

typically tell of its betrayal in the warp and weft of actual regulatory practice.

Robert McChesney has argued that the passing of the Communications Act of

1934 saw the defeat of a significant oppositional movement to commercial

 49

broadcasting, and that since this time contestation of the institutional and

structural arrangements of American mass media has remained ‘off limits’ to

legitimate political debate (McChesney 1992). Similarly, Tom Streeter has

observed that the managed commodification of broadcasting spectrum arising out

of the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934 had the paradoxical

consequence of requiring the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a

regulator ‘to simultaneously designate licences as both property and not property’,

with the consequence that the FCC appears to ‘engage in after-the-fact regulation

of the behaviour of private owners of information properties’ (Streeter 1994: 100,

112). Nonetheless, for all of its limitations in practice, the concept of public trust

as a condition of ownership of broadcast licences has embedded in it an implied

right of public participation, and the self-constitution of citizens as interested

parties in the conduct of commercial broadcasters, to be reflected in the structures

and practices of governance through which such conduct is regulated.

In terms of the interaction between strategies of governance and forms of

political contestation, discourses of citizenship emerge in two key respects. First,

the failure of commercial broadcasters to meet the demands placed upon them, by

both regulatory agencies and by the critics of regulatory practice, draws attention

to the continuing public status of broadcast property and the collective notions of

‘public interest’ enshrined in the concept of ‘public trust’. Such failures have

implicitly raised larger questions about the social nature of private property and

the inescapably public nature of the broadcast medium. The authors of the 1954
 50

Royal Commission on Television in Australia described such a tension in the

following terms:

If the public puts up with inferior television, it will only have itself to

blame if it fails to take advantage of the means provided for the expression

of its dissatisfaction. What is needed is a vocal public which will offer

constructive criticism and refuse to be satisfied with inferior programmes

... An active policy of constructive public criticism is essential in Australia

if television is to reach the standard desired (Parliament of the

Commonwealth of Australia, 1954: 37).

Institutional Stability and Institutional Change: Periodisation and

Policy Settlements

In his discussion of media institutions in modernity, John Thompson observesd

that a degree of stability is given in the existence of institutions, since institutions

are constituted by ‘determinate sets of rules, resources and relations which have

some degree of durability in time and some extension in space (Thompson 1995:

12-13). At the same time, it has been argued in this chapter that, while an

adequate theoretical framework for understanding institutional dynamics is

required in media and cultural studies, this should not become a structural edifice

that obscures an understanding of changes over time in institutional structures,

 51

and important differences between national policy systems. The concept of

periodisation has been used in a number of studies as a way of establishing the

principles underpinning institutional stability as well as institutional change, and

elements of specificity and difference between national societies, within an over-

arching interpretative framework. The ‘Regulationist’ approach, developed by

Michel Aglietta (1987, 1998) and Alain Lipietz (1987), among others, provides

one example of such a framework. Michel Aglietta has argued that stability in

capitalist economies is premised upon the ability to effectively align the dynamics

of capital accumulation at a particular historical time to a mode of regulation

within a particular society, defined as ‘a set of mediations which ensure that the

distortions created by the accumulation of capital are kept within limits which are

compatible with social cohesion within each nation’ (Aglietta 1998: 44).

Aglietta (1987) argued that a stable regime of accumulation in the period

from 1945 to 1970 was based around a more interventionist and regulatory role

for government, overlaid by a historic compromise between capital and organised

labour that has been termed ‘Fordism’, after the industrial production and labour

management techniques pioneered by car manufacturer Henry Ford (cf. de Vroey

1984; Lipietz 1987; Murray 1989). Thjs developed in the context of a global

capitalist economic ‘Golden Age’ or ‘Long Boom’ (Armstrong et. al. 1984;

Bowles et. al. 1984; Marglin and Schor 1990). Under the ‘Fordist’ historic

compromise, organised labour secured a degree job security and wages growth, in

exchange for conceding to management the right to reorganise the labour process
 52

to achieve productivity growth through intensification of labour. This in turn

enabled the development of a high-wage economy based upon a regime of

accumulation of mass production, mass consumption, a strong consumer goods

sector, and relatively egalitarian incomes growth within regulated national

economies. The mode of regulation, or system of institutional relations, social

norms and ‘ways of living’ which underpinned this regime, constituted structures

that provided limited recognition of the rights of organised labour, rewarded

company loyalty through internal promotions, and promoted the development of

semi-autonomous ‘nuclear’ family structures which acquired consumer goods in

the new suburban housing estates.

Francis Castles (1985, 1988) and Stephen Bell (1997, 1998) have

developed the concept of policy settlements or historic compromises as a basis for

understanding and interpreting long-term institutional stability. Castles observes

that historic compromises emerge in situations where competing or antagonistic

interests develop a ‘broadly agreed conception of mutual gain’ that is less about

achieving consensus and more upon establishing the terms and conditions under

which ‘contending groups and classes have something to gain by establishing a

limited agreement as to the parameters in which their conflicts will be pursued’

(Castles 1988: 71). A condition of successful historic compromises is the

existence of ‘a power above the conflict that is sufficiently trusted by all parties to

act as guarantor of their agreement’, which is most likely to be a state agency, in a

 53

national context where ‘the state is both strong and seen to be capable of action

autonomous of the interests of any particular collective actor’ (Castles 1988: 77).

Bell defined a policy settlement as a ‘political coalition and political

compact that underpins a given model of economic development, which in turn is

broadly defined as the mix of state intervention and market forces that structures

political economy in any given era’ (Bell 1998: 157). Bell proposed that the

pattern of Australian economic development from the early twentieth century to

the 1970s could be explained through the intersection of two policy settlements.

First, there is the model of ‘domestic defence’, that used a mix of tariff protection,

wage-fixation systems and immigration controls to forge an alliance between

powerful economic interests (both capital and labour), political leaders, state elites

and electoral coalitions around the promotion of the manufacturing sector.

Second, there is the ‘Fordism’ model of state regulation, welfarism and regulation

of international financial flows that developed in many capitalist economies in the

post-World War II period (Bell 1997).

Both the ‘Regulationist’ framework and the concept of policy settlements

provide important insights into the development of the institutional framework for

Australian television broadcasting. Williams (1974), Attallah (1991), Spigel

(1992) and Hartley (1999) have established the central place of broadcast

television in the intersection between a Fordist regime of accumulation and the

social and cultural institutions that underpinned a ‘modern’ mode of life in the
 54

post-World War II period. Williams (1974: 26) saw broadcast television as

bringing together two contradictory tendencies of advanced industrial capitalism -

enhanced mobility and the self-sufficient suburban home - in an emergent

formation he termed mobile privatisation. Hartley relates television to the post-

World War II ‘Long Boom’, observing that in this period ‘“mass” housing was

perfected, in suburbs and high-rises, as the necessary precondition for television,

which in turn became the advertising medium of choice for promoting the values

of domesticity and the products and services by means of which that ideology

could most visibly be espoused’ (Hartley 1999: 99). It is useful to trace

correspondences between the organisation of television as an industrial system for

the production and distribution of programs, and the broader patterns of industrial

organisation seen as characteristic of ‘Fordism’ as a regime of accumulation and

mode of regulation (see Table 1.2):

Table 1.2

Fordism as a Regime of Accumulation and Broadcast Television

Characteristics of Fordism Characteristics of Broadcast Television

• Mass production
• Standardised products
• Mass markets
• Universal access
• Stable labour relations
• Oligopolistic markets
• Stable market structures
• Limited channel television
• Comprehensive services
• Broad appeal programming
• Universal service
• In-house production
• Broadcaster oligopoly
• Stable network/licensee arrangements
 55

In considering how national broadcasting systems differed in their

development in the context of ‘Fordism’ and the ‘Long Boom’ in advanced

capitalist economies, a threshold question is the extent to which ‘the public’ are

considered to have a right and capacity to intervene in the conduct of broadcast

media as citizens, in a capacity that is additional to their status as consumers of

broadcast media content. If the public are recognised as having the capacity to

influence the conduct of broadcasters as well as to consume or not consume its

content, this introduces an additional dimension to the broadcaster-regulator-

public relationship, where the regulator has obligations to the public as citizens to

provide opportunities to participate in the conduct of broadcast media policy in

addition to its regulatory responsibilities toward the broadcasters. A further

question is the extent to which, given that interests are characteristically

represented in the policy domain by institutional agencies with their own rules of

formation, strategies and modes of political calculation, the organisations that

claim to represent either the ‘public interest’ or particular interests (eg. children,

religious organisations, pensioners) should be provided with the right and

capacity to participate in processes of broadcast media policy formation.

The Policy Settlement for Australian Broadcast Television

Early Australian broadcasting policy was premised upon identification of a ‘moral

dimension’ as well as a purely commercial element to the operations of

 56

commercial broadcast licensees, on the basis that it dealt with ‘a public

collectivity beyond the market place’ (Hawke 1993: 14). The first major public

inquiry into broadcasting in Australia, the Gibson Committee on Wireless

Broadcasting, argued that ‘there is no reason why the public should be asked to

accept anything less than the highest possible ethical standards that can be

attained by those who hold commercial broadcasting licences’ (Australian

Parliament 1942: 60). This public trust discourse formed the basis for state

interventions in programming, such as the requirement that broadcasters are

required under their licence conditions to provide ‘an adequate and

comprehensive service’, with the precise forms of evaluation to be determined

through the policy process.

In practice, the policy settlement for Australian broadcast television was

characterised, in the first instance, by strong and politically powerful broadcast

licensees, and weak and compliant regulatory agencies. As a result, demands for

commercial broadcasters to meet affirmative programming obligations, and for

greater public involvement in the broadcast policy process, were ongoing areas of

political struggle up to the 1970s. Another element of the policy settlement was

the highly profitable ownership structure that emerged out of laws governing

networking and barriers to entry, and the question of whether the monopoly

profits that subsequently accrued to broadcasters should be directed towards

programming of high social or cultural value, such as Australian drama

production and children’s programming. Early Australian commercial television

 57

was also characterised by high levels of imported programming, particularly from

the United StatesThis in turn created demands for policy intervention to secure

levels of local content, particularly in the area of drama, that would enable the

medium to develop as a site for national cultural development and provide

employment opportunities for creative people and the development of a strong

local audiovisual industry.

The 1953-54 Report of the Royal Commission on Television (Parliament of

the Commonwealth of Australia 1954) provides revealing insights into the politics

of broadcasting policy in the ‘pre-history’ of Australian television. The Royal

Commission, which was established by the Menzies Liberal-Country Party

government to advise on the establishment of television in Australia, is often

considered a failure, since primary structural questions such as whether TV

should be introduced, or whether there should be a public service monopoly or a

dual commercial/public service system, had been decided in advance by the

government (Hazlehurst 1982/3; Curthoys 1986; Moran 1993). Nonetheless, its

findings on the relationship of policy to television program content are worth

considering in relation to the emergent policy settlement and its limitations in

terms of realising cultural citizenship goals.

The Royal Commission’s approach to the relationship between television,

its audiences and program content was based upon an implicit cultural

evolutionism, arguing that audience use of the medium would improve over time
 58

as they become habituated to it (Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia

1954: 34). The Report advocated use of the ‘compulsive period’ of TV viewing as

one that ‘gives an opportunity to widen the interests of the viewer’, so that more

culturally appropriate forms of programming will be available over the

subsequent period, where ‘the viewer becomes more selective’ in their viewing

habits (Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia 1954: 34, 37). As a policy

document read on its own terms, the Royal Commission’s vision of Australian

television’s development can be seen as one of establishing broadcast television

as a new domain of cultural policy, whereby regulatory agencies would manage

the interrelated development of an informed viewing audience, a civic-minded

broadcasting sector, and governmental institutions willing to guide the process

toward preferred outcomes. This would be analogous to the processes described

by Bennett where forms of culture became enmeshed with modern forms of

government through ‘the emergence of new fields of social management in which

culture is figured forth as both the object and instrument of government’ (Bennett

1992: 26). Similarly, the Royal Commission’s vision of greater public

participation in the broadcasting sphere as being the key to better television

parallels Miller’s account of cultural policy as a technology of governance, or as

‘a means of managing the public by having it manage itself’ (Miller 1992: 12).

What is striking about the subsequent development of Australian

commercial television was how little it was informed by this reformist trajectory.

Dr J.R. Darling, a member of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board who had
 59

responsibility for the drafting of program standards for commercial television, has

referred to the ‘considerable hope’ that existed at the time about how ‘television

could be a powerful influence for good in the country and that through the box a

true democracy could be born’ (Darling 1978: 211-212). The reasons why

commercial television did not develop in the ways foreseen by these public

administrators were partly structural and partly institutional. At a structural level,

the rejection of arguments for public monopoly had also involved a substantive

rejection of the idea of broadcasting as primarily an instrument of cultural reform,

citizenship education and nation-building. The result was that attempts to institute

these priorities upon television would continue to work ‘against the grain’ of the

logic of commercial ratings and mass audiences. The institutional problem lay

with the failure of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB),

established in 1949 by the Chifley Labor government, to act as an effective

conduit for public participation, an effective regulator of program standards or

even an initiator of research which could enable informed public debate about

television and its impact. What developed in the early years of Australian

television was a closed policy framework, where the ABCB was unwilling to use

powers to revoke a licence or suspend a licensee, in spite of its powers under

Section 109 of the Broadcasting and Television Act 1953. Instead, the ABCB

relied upon what has been described as a mix of ‘gentleman’s agreement and

friendly gestures’, in a context where the Board and licensees were ‘a very happy

family in those days’,2 and where the Board was fearful of Ministerial rejection of

Board recommendations which contravened the government’s objectives. 3

 60

The ABCB as a regulatory agency exhibited elements of what Robert

Horwitz has termed regulatory capture. Horwitz defines a captured agency as one

that ‘systematically favours the private interests of regulated parties and

systematically ignores the public interest’ (Horwitz 1989: 29). Regulatory failure

or regulatory capture arises from over-identification on the part of the regulatory

agency with the industry which it regulates, and its bases include: (1) recruitment

procedures which tend to draw those already associated with the industry into

being its regulators; (2) the need for good working relations with the regulated

industry, as well as with Ministers and Parliamentarians with a particular interest

in the industry; and (3) a structural relationship of weakness on the part of the

regulatory agency vis-a-vis the industry which it regulates. Mark Armstrong found

that program standards as administered by the ABCB were ‘a quagmire on the

outskirts of which various opposing forces in the community became bogged: the

elusive drafting and legal status of the standards prevented them from actually

coming into direct conflict’ (Armstrong 1981: 135). The Vincent Report, released

in 1963, was harshly critical of the ABCB, arguing that it should have ‘long since

abandoned its policy of “sweet reasonableness” and taken much firmer action

with the commercial stations’ (Parliament of Australia 1963: 6). These findings

are consistent with Horwitz’s sketch of the captured regulatory agency, that not

only fails to adequately police the conduct of the industry which it has been

empowered with the responsibility to regulate, but whose legislative basis and
 61

regulatory practice act as a positive barrier to community demands for reform in

the conduct of industry participants.

The Vincent Report (Parliament of Australia 1963), which came out of a

Senate Inquiry into how to encourage Australian film and television production,

marks an important transitional document in Australian media policy. While the

Report itself had little immediate impact on the media policies of the Menzies

Liberal-Country Party government, and its criticisms of the ABCB had no

significant impact upon its conduct, it nonetheless acted as a catalyst for media

reform in Australia that was to have a more significant impact in the 1970s.

Bertrand and Collins (1981) and Dermody and Jacka (1987) observed that the

Vincent Report was critical in bringing together an alliance of production industry

representatives, social reformers and cultural nationalists, across the film and

television sectors, that would be the principal drivers of media policy reform for

the next 20 years. It promoted the development of a range of organisations and

alliances, such as the Australian National Television Council, formed in 1965, the

Australian Mass Communications Council, which emerged in 1969, and the ‘TV:

Make It Australian’ campaign, as models of coalition politics in the media field,

that complemented the ongoing policy activism of unions such as the Actors’ and

Announcers’ Equity of Australia (later Actors’ Equity). These media reform

coalitions would link greater openness in media policy processes to campaigns for

improvement of the medium generally, and programming content of commercial

television broadcasters in particular. They also drew attention to the closed nature
 62

of the policy and regulatory process, and the absence of a tradition of activism

from within the policy process, such as that which emerged in the United States in

the 1960s under Newton Minow’s activist chairmanship of the Federal

Communications Commission from 1961 to 1963 (Barnouw 1982: 299-300;

Krasnow and Longley 1978).

The Vincent Report was particularly interested in the dominance of

programming imported from the United States, observing that, in 1962, 97 per

cent of television drama was imported (Parliament of Australia 1963). It aligned

the lack of local TV production to the absence of enforceable local content quotas

and in turn linked this to the lack of a developed Australian film industry. In doing

so, it linked campaigns for a local content quota for Australian TV drama to

support for the development of an Australian film industry (Dermody and Jacka

1987: 50-54). It also linked campaigns for local content quotas to the wider

cultural nationalist movement developing in Australia in the 1960s, which united

liberals (eg. Phillips 1988) and Marxists (eg. Turner 1987) around the argument

for a distinctive national culture as a condition for social advancement, and which

saw the lack of a local film production industry as preventing the cultivation of a

distinctive national imaginary. Central to the extension of this discourse to

television was the pivotal role of television drama, described by Mungo

MacCallum as being ‘as much a part of the community’s culture as its sport … it

reflects us to ourselves, helps us to know ourselves and passes on the information

to the rest of the world (MacCallum 1968: 67). Demands for a strengthening of
 63

local content requirements for Australian commercial television, particularly in

drama, were to represent a significant appendix to the ‘cultural nationalist’

moment in Australian film policy, where the demands of industry-oriented lobby

groups such as the Australian Film Council and the Film and Television

Committee of the Australian Council for the Arts would receive a sympathetic

hearing from Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton (1968-69) and the Labor Prime

Minister Gough Whitlam (1972-75).

Conclusion

This chapter has proposed that a deep structure can be observed in

Australian commercial broadcasting, providing the basis for relatively durable

discursive, institutional and policy frameworks, yet also promoting significant

forms of political contestation, particularly around the simultaneously public and

private nature of commercial broadcast licences. The Australian commercial

broadcast media system takes its particular forms out of a combination of a ‘dual

system’ of commercial and national public broadcasting, and because its

characteristic policy settlement has been one where relatively powerful

commercial broadcasters have dealt with relatively weak regulatory agencies, and

where the scope to extend citizenship discourses around the ‘public trust’ aspects

of access to broadcast spectrum has been characteristically circumscribed. The

development of institutional bases for reformist policy activism would, however,

 64

link demands for enhanced public participation in decision-making processes

concerning broadcast television with demands for stronger content regulations,

particularly in the areas of Australian content and children’s programming.

The policy settlement in Australian broadcast television was one where a

fomal expression of support for the capacity of broadcast television to develop

cultural citizenship and community participation coexisted with a political context

where regulatory capture was prevalent. The likelihood of regulatory agenices

utilising their capacity as gatekeepers of access to spectrum to exercise control

over the conduct of commercial broadcasters was minimal during the period of

ABCB responsibility. This was partly because of close links between the Menzies

and other Liberal-Country Party governments and major media proprietors, but it

was also because both the self-organisation of prospective critics and the

developmernt of policy discourses that would enable a wider scope for the

organisation of the public as citizens would only gradually develop in the course

of the 1970s and 1980s, although their institutional origins can be traced to the

aftermath of the Vincent Report in the mid-1960s.

It was a policy settlement where the demand for local content on

commercial television remained an ongoing concern, linking local film and

television producers, media policy activists, and cultural nationalists, around the

demand that governments and regulatory agencies will set and enforce rules that

require the commercial broadcasters to commission and broadcast local programs,

 65

particularly in the strategically significant genre of drama. A progressive position

towards Australian media policy that would be influential in the 1970s and 1980s

thus emerged in the 1960s, based around demands for an enhanced political

participation and the development of a distinctive national audiovisual culture as

central elements to the insertion of citizenship principles into Australian

commercial broadcast television.

 1
Giddens (1984: 185-193) illustrates this with the example of labour markets in capitalist societies. The labour
market and the wage-labour contract is a structural feature of capitlaist class-based socieites. At the same time, the
functioning of labour markets and the legal realtions of employment vary consdierably across capitalist societies, and have
significantly changed over time, on the basis of factors such as the relative strength of trade unions ot employer
oprganisations, the priorities of different political parties and governments, and laws and policies towards labour and
employment in different countries. For Giddens, it is through the axis of structuration that an abstract analysis of the nature
of wage-labour in capitalist socieities can be linked to the highly variable institutional frameworks that govern labour
markets and employment relations in different capitalist societies.
2
The quotes are taken from A. Jose, Director of Programme Services at the ABCB, 1949-1971, and J. O’Kelly,
Secretary of the ABCB 1949-1962, in interviews with Mark Armstrong, 1976, held in the Australian Film and Television
School Library.
3
Myles Wright, Board chairman from 1966 to 1976, admits that the Board’s plans were ‘very substantially
influenced by political considerations’ (quoted in Armstrong 1980: 132). The best known manifestation of this was the
‘Brisbane and Adelaide affair’ of 1958. With television about to commence in Brisbane and Adelaide in 1958, the ABCB
recommended to the Minister that only one commercial licence should be issued in these two markets, due to their small
size in relation to Sydney and Melbourne. It also argued against granting licences to the proposed applicants, arguing that
they were too close to the dominant commercial interests in Sydney and Melbourne.
The Minister rejected the findings, and asked for a second report recommending applicants for the grant of two
licences in each city, which the Board provided. On the ‘Brisbane-Adelaide affair,’ see Harrison (1986: 30-31); Davidson
(1968); and Armstrong (1980: 142).