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Chapter Two
Citizenship, Media and Liberal Forms of
Government: Political and National Dimensions
This chapter begins with an overview of citizenship theory, drawing attention to
its national and cultural as well as its political dimensions. It also critically
appraises the relationship of liberal and critical media theories to citizenship
discourses, with the claim that citizenship is automatically related to public
service broadcasting being critiqued. It is argued that binary oppositions between
citizens and consumers, and public and commercial broadcasting, are neither
empirically sustainable nor intellectually productive. A detailed overview is
provided of the historical development of citizenship and its relationship to political strategies associated with governmentality, or the management of
population through the diffusion of techniques of self-management aimed at
regulating conduct. Tensions between governmentality and citizenship are seen as
arising from three sources: the paradox of political power being exercised over
populations in the name of their own popular sovereignty; the relationship
between policy failure and political contestation; and the relationship between
policy expertise and political sovereignty. Enhancing the scope for citizen
participation in political decisions that have an impact on their lives has often
been presented as the solution to these problems, but it presents its own issues,
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most notably around questions of representativeness and the nature of political
agency.
The second half of this chapter explores the concept of national citizenship
and its relationship to the development of national cultures, with particular
reference to the role played by print and broadcast media as cultural technologies
that can be engaged in the nationing of populations. The capacity to distribute
broadcast media across national boundaries presents challenges to the cultural
sovereignty and territorial jurisdiction of the nation-state, analogous to thosediscussed in the debates about globalisation. It is found that, just as the
globalisation literature overstates both the newness and the significance of the
phenomena it describes, debates about media globalisation need to recognise the
relationship between global, national and local forces in the circulation of
audiovisual media content, together with the important roles played by nation-
states and national cultures in the regulation of these international media flows,
and the significance of these forms of communicative boundary maintenance to
the formation of national citizens.
The Return of the Citizen in Media Studies
The 1990s saw the concept of citizenship put forward as providing a set of
guiding principles for media policy and media studies. Stuart Cunningham
proposed that citizenship discourses provided a direction for research and critical
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activity in media and cultural studies that would be developed and justified
within an operational reformism that is sensitive to what is possible as much as to
what is ideal (Cunningham 1992b: 535). Geoff Mulgan utilised citizenship
discourse in the quality debate about British broadcasting, to argue that a
citizenship perspective allowed television viewers to conceive of themselves as
contributors to the making of television as well as being its receivers, and got
beyond the sterile dichotomy of consumer sovereignty versus cultural elitism
(Mulgan 1990). James Curran (1991), Jo Hawke (1995) and Julianne Schultz
(1994) proposed an orientation to citizenship as essential to requiring both media proprietors and journalists to recognise social obligations as well as private
interests, and as an alternative to policy approaches which they saw as
interpreting community well-being as being synonymous with the extension of
market relations.
Utilising T.H. Marshalls (Marshall 1947) historical typology of civil,
political and social citizenship, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock (1989)
propose that communications policies that guaranteed citizenship rights would:
(1) maximise the access of individuals to information, advice and analysis
concerning their rights; (2) provide all sections of the community with access to
the broadest possible range of information, interpretation and debate on issues;
and (3) allow people from all sections of society to recognise themselves in the
representations offered in communications media, and to be able to contribute to
the development and shaping of these representations. The necessary conditions
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for communications and information systems to achieve such goals are maximum
possible diversity of provision, mechanisms for user feedback and participation,
and universal access to services regardless of income or place of residence.
According to Graham Murdock, to meet these criteria, a communications system
needs to be both diverse and open (Murdock 1992: 21).
Renewed interest in citizenship in media and communications studies
coincided with developments in the 1990s which saw citizenship become the
buzz word among political thinkers on all points of the political spectrum(Kymlicka and Norman 1994: 352; cf. Turner 1986; Hall and Held 1989; Hirst
1990). In political terms, citizenship is a polysemic category, open to
contestation (Miller 1993: 12), and has been used to justify political projects as
diverse as privatisation of public assets and retention of public ownership, or both
the rights of welfare recipients and schemes requiring the unemployed to work in
order to receive welfare benefits. In current usage, citizenship has become a
Third Way concept, used to find ways forward in social and political debates
from long-standing divides between neo-liberalism and Marxian socialism
(Giddens 1998; Latham 1997).
In their discussion of the renewal of interest in citizenship in political
theory, Kymlicka and Norman point to two cautionary issues. First, they observe
that the scope of a theory of citizenship is potentially limitless ... [as] almost
every problem in political philosophy involves relations among citizens or
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between citizens and the state (Kymlicka and Norman 1994: 353). Second, they
point to a need to avoid conflating citizenship-as-legal-status, involving full
membership in a particular political community independently of ones degree of
political participation (so-called passive citizenship) with citizenship-as-
desirable-activity, or active citizenship, where the extent and quality of ones
citizenship is a function of ones participation in that community (Kymlicka and
Norman 1994: 353). A third issue is the complex and sometimes contradictory
relationship between political citizenship, which can be the basis for an open,
inclusive and universalist understanding of rights, and national citizenship, withits associated obligations to a nation-state, a common culture and a moral
community. Employing Hindess (1993) definition of citizenship, the concept can
be seen to have three dimensions:
1. A legal-political dimension, based upon an egalitarian understanding of
rights and duties, including the guarantee of legal rights of independence and
equality before the law, the political rights of freedom of speech and association,
and the right of citizens to participate in decisions concerning their governance, as
part of their standing as independent persons;
2. A national dimension, or the existence of forms of exclusivity over the
granting of citizen rights within a territorially defined community, and control by
state authorities over formal admission into that community, including the right to
deny admission, as well as requirements upon citizens to participate in the affairs
of that community, including the defence of its territory;
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3. A cultural dimension entailing, on the one hand, the sustaining of some
form of moral community or common culture among its citizens, as part of a
binding sense of membership in a political community and, on the other,
recognition and tolerance of difference, diversity and the rights of individuals to
freedoms within the private sphere.
Media and Citizenship: Classical and Contemporary Debates
Citizenship in its modern sense has long been connected to the media of
communications. Popular media have played both a pedagogical role as cultural
technologies deployed for purposes of nation-building and citizen-formation, and
a more critical role as sites for articulation of popular discontent with the unjust or
illegitimate use of public power and authority. Philosophers of modernity such as
Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel recognised the relationship between the means
of expression of ideas and the popular imaginary. Kant defined the public use of
reason as that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing
the entire reading public (Kant 1971: 55), while Hegel described reading the
morning paper [as] a kind of realistic morning prayer (quoted in Donald 1998:
219). More generally, the centrality of media to modern conception of citizenship
arises from the re-emergence of classical citizenship discourses in the context of
modernity, whose features include: the large multi-ethnic nation-state;
representative democracy; commerce and capitalist industry; rational and
calculative modes of government administration; and a world of sovereign states
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(Heater 1990; Davidson 1997). The primary means of communication of modern
nation-states would not be the direct speech and face-to-face interaction of the
ancient city-states, but rather forms of mediated interaction associated with the
development of print technology and the mass circulation of the printed word and,
later, broadcasting (Thompson 1995; Finnegan 1988).
In broad terms, two approaches to the relationship between media and
citizenship have predominated. The first has been that of liberal media theory ,
which points to the role of the media in modern liberal-democratic societies asguardians of the rights and liberties of citizens in the face of unaccountable or
irresponsible exercises of institutional power, or as the Fourth Estate. According
to liberal media theory, the principal requirement of a free media is that it must
possess freedom from government controls or domination (Seibert 1963: 51).
Structural independence from government, and a willingness to champion popular
interests in the face of institutional power, are central parts of the rhetorical
armour of the media as the Fourth Estate. Julianne Schultz has argued that, in
the late twentieth century, this has been associated with the watchdog role of the
media, and the assertion by journalists of their idealised role as defenders of the
public interest, in the face of challenges from the executive, parliamentary and
judicial estates of government (Schultz 1998: 93).
The primary weakness of liberal media theory is its difficulty in
reconciling the formal equality of senders and receivers in the communications
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marketplace with substantive inequalities in access to material resources to
influence public opinion, and the concentration of ownership of the most
influential media among a small number of powerful corporate interests. Curran
(1991) describes the three principal limitations of liberal media theory as being:
its reluctance to address the implications of media concentration for diversity of
opinion; the tendency for media markets to consolidate the position of dominant
media conglomerates; and the adverse implications for diversity of opinion arising
from the tendency to pursue the largest possible media audience through limited
product differentiation. Schultz also points to the difficulty in promoting FourthEstate ideals in the context of a predominantly commercial media system, in her
observation that journalism has been increasingly bound by the paradox of
holding its head in politics while its feet are grounded in commerce (Schultz
1998: 45).
Critical media theory shares with liberal media theory a belief in the
emancipatory possibilities of media, but is concerned about the degree to which
media institutions are enmeshed with wider structures of political and economic
power. The tension between the formal equality of citizens in democratic societies,
and the structural inequalities and forms of hierarchy characteristic of capitalist
market economies, is seen as creating a situation where the public sphere - this
space for a rational and universalistic politics distinct from both the economy and
the State - was destroyed by the very forces that had brought it into existence
(Garnham, 1990: 107). This argument is most full developed in Jurgen Habermass
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historical-normative analysis of the public sphere, which is seen as first emerging
among the educated middle classes of Western Europe in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries as the bourgeois public sphere, but which has been marked by
decline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, due to the concentration of
corporate control over media industries, the rise of advertising and public relations
as mechanisms for control over media content, and the growing role of the state in
economic and social management through Keynesian economics and the welfare
state. As a result, for Habermas, the liberal model of the public sphere cannot be
applied to the actual conditions of an industrially advanced mass democracyorganised in the form of the social welfare state (Habermas 1977: 200).
Drawing upon Habermas, critical media theorists such as Nicholas Garnham
(1990), James Curran (1991) and Peter Dahlgren (1995) have argued for the
significance of public broadcasting as central to the project of collective citizen
formation within nation-states. Garnham argued that public broadcasting possesses
elements of an ideal-type public sphere, such as operational principles premised
upon a communally agreed structure of rules and towards communally defined
ends, and the opportunity for different classes and groups to take part in the same
public dialogue (Garnham 1990: 105). Curran proposed that a decentralised and
highly accountable form of public broadcasting should constitute the core of a
democratic media system, around which would operate politically - aligned media,
journalist-controlled media, private enterprise media and social market media. For
Dahlgren (1995), the central tension with broadcast media is in the contemporary
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public sphere, where those media institutions which are of the most significance
for the majority of citizens are to a great extent beyond the reach of citizen
practices and interventions (Dahlgren 1995: 155). In order to overcome this tragic
(Dahlgren 1995: 5; Garnham 1992: 107) vision of the relationship of media to
citizenship in liberal-capitalist societies, Dahlgren looked to the coexistence of
decentralised and accountable common domain media with advocacy media,
nurtured through public policy, to promote strong citizenship and an active civil
society.
The connection drawn by critical media theorists between public
broadcasting and political citizenship is not as clear-cut as it first appears to be.
Richard Collins (1993) has drawn attention to the tendency in critical theory to
deal with public service broadcasting as a normative ideal, rather than with the
actual conduct of public service broadcasters. The point is not merely a semantic
one since, as Collins observed, in countries where commercial and public service
broadcasters have coexisted, the conduct of public service broadcasters can only
be understood in terms of their interaction with the commercial sector, rather than
as a stand-alone broadcasting system. For Collins, this interaction with the
commercial sector has been a positive influence on public service broadcasting
since, in countries where public service broadcasting developed without pressures
from audience competition from a commercial system, the outcome has largely
been a top-down broadcasting service [that] constructed an idealised and
reified public, to which it represented a public sphere of broadcasters
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imagination (Collins 1993: 250). Gay Hawkins (1999) has noted the problems
that have arisen for public broadcasters in their assumption that quality meant
not commercial, most notably in the perpetual quandary that arises between
ensuring distinctiveness and achieving popularity, and a resulting tendency to
constitute quality in terms that consistently value the middlebrow over the vulgar
and information and aesthetics over fun (Hawkins 1999: 176). From the
commercial broadcasting perspective, Stuart Cunninghams (1993) account of the
historical mini-series that screened on Australian commercial television in the
1980s, and their relationship to discourses of national identity that were reflectiveon formative national events, provides an interesting counter-example of nation-
building programming on Australian commercial television.
John Hartley (1996, 1999) has developed a very different model of the
relationship between media and citizenship in modernity. In Popular Reality:
Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture (Hartley 1996), Hartley proposes that,
since popular culture is another name for the practice of media readership in
modernity (Hartley 1996: 47), and as it is through journalism that the logic of
democratic equivalence that is at the heart of political citizenship is circulated, it
is not possible to understand the functioning of media in relation to citizenship in
terms of binary oppositions between the quality and the popular, or the public and
the commercial. Hartley extends this argument in Uses of Television (Hartley
1999), proposing that the uses of television are best understood by means of the
concept of transmodern teaching [and] what television has been used for is the
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formation of cultural citizenship (Hartley 1999: 26). Associating cultural
citizenship with the right to claim an identity based upon difference, Hartley
argues that in the great competition of modernity between governmental,
educational, media and critical institutions for popular attention in the public
sphere, it is the broadcast media that have been most effective in leading a
movement from mass society and adherence to a national culture, to identity
politics and what Hartley terms do-it-yourself (DIY) citizenship (Hartley 1999:
154-165, 186-187).
Hartleys work significantly challenges the tragic account of the
relationship between media and citizenship in liberal-capitalist societies,
developed by critical theorists out of Habermass work on the public sphere. 1 Its
strengths lie in: its focus upon the incidental means through which the media
contribute to citizen-formation; its focus upon what people do with media rather
than what media do to people; its questioning of a hierarchy of genres in terms of
how the media inform the development of citizens; and its rejection of a
dichotomy between quality and popular media, or public service and commercial
media, from the perspective of how they are used by their audiences. For Hartley,
good popular television can be both popular and critical, fun and informative; it
does not rest upon the sublimation of pleasure to value that Hawkins critiques in
the approach taken by quality public service broadcasting towards its audience
(Hawkins 1999: 177).
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This thesis, however, distances itself from Hartleys appraisal of the
relationship of media to citizenship in three key respects. First, while recognising
the material dimensions of textuality to which Hartley draws attention (Hartley
1999: 55-70), there is also a need to reaffirm the positivity of institutions in terms
of their role in constituting a social field, forming individual identities, and
providing a basis for political and social agency and meaningful action. This also
draws attention to the distinctiveness of institutional formations across societies
and over periods of time, and how these constitute the conditions of existence for
the types of television programming that are produced and distributed in nationaltelevision systems. Second, there is the danger of concluding that, since media
texts are polysemic and audiences are unknowable to empirical analysis, criticism
is impossible. There is a blurring in such an approach between critiques of
television as an overall system of popular provision of information and
entertainment, which Hartley convincingly argues against, and critique of
particular programs and programming strategies, which continues to have validity
(cf. Flew 1998). Third, since Hartley blurs distinctions between televisions
address to audiences as an over-arching community and its appeal to particular
taste constituencies, his analysis faces difficulties in dealing with some of the
problems that have motivated the development of non-commercial media, such as
the lack of provision of certain program types for economic reasons, as well as
factors that have motivated the regulation of commercial media .2
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Critical media theory has observed the split nature of the modern citizen,
between a discourse of media freedom that is associated with the global
information and entertainment market, and a discourse of cultural citizenship that
is typically national in its domain of application, and associated with public
interest media regulation. Toby Miller has observed that this is less a matter of
divided subjectivities, and more to do with a policy divide (Miller 1991: 204),
whose significance has become more apparent in an era where national forms of
media regulation are becoming overlaid with global trade agreements and other
forms of international law. A major focus of this thesis will be upon thecampaigns of media reformers to use legislative and regulatory mechanisms to
transform the conduct of commercial broadcast television in Australia, with one of
these aims being to make it more responsive to the discourses and principles of
citizenship. In this context, an examination of the impact of media policy reforms
becomes not an add-on to other forces which determine the conduct on the part
of Australian commercial television broadcasters, but moves closer to the centre
of an understanding of their modus operandi . In this respect, both the critical
media theory tradition and Hartleys work present too generalised a framework
for the detailed empirical work on how citizenship discourses have informed the
development of Australian commercial television.
Governmentality and Citizenship
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Michel Foucault developed the concept of governmentality in his later work to
describe the process in modern Western societies where the conduct of the state
shifted from rule by primarily juridical means to an increasingly administrative
and technical basis for rule. Techniques associated with the practice of
government also came to be dispersed through a range of social institutions that
were linked to, yet distinct from, the formal apparatuses of the state. In Foucaults
work, the state consists in the codification of a whole number of power relations
which render its functioning possible (Foucault 1984: 64). An understanding of
the practices of government thus requires that these activities of government areunderstood, not in terms of the institutions that undertake them, but rather in
terms of their capacity to guide the conduct of others.
Particularly important in this regard is the development of liberal forms of
government from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, which was associated with
what Foucault describes as the introduction of economy into political practice
(Foucault 1991: 92), or what Burchell (1991) terms a principle of cost-
effectiveness into government regulation. Liberal form of government promoted
the autonomous functioning of civil and economic processes, by establishing
limits to governmental regulation founded around the proper use of liberty by
self-governing and self-interested individuals. The result was that civil society
emerged, not as that which is outside of or necessarily opposed to state power, but
rather as both the object and end of government, involved with a complex and
shifting set of relationships with state agencies, that provides fertile ground for
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How governments problematise particular domains, and seek to act upon
them through various programs, involves establishing a relationship between
political rationalities and governmental technologies. Political rationalities have
three characteristics:
1. They have a characteristically moral form, in the manner in which they
address the proper distribution of tasks and actions between different
types of authorities, and the ideals or principles to which these tasks
are related.2. They are grounded in particular theoretical understandings of chosen
domains, drawn from academic bodies of knowledge, with the
disciplines of the social sciences being particularly important in
defining the social field and rendering it thinkable.
3. They construct problems, and the means of addressing them within
particular discursive fields, or political discourses, in ways that
elucidate not only the systems of thought through which authorities
have posed and specified the problems for government, but also the
systems of action through which they have sought to give effect to
government (Miller and Rose 1992: 177).
Miller and Rose use the term technologies of government to broadly define
the diverse range of techniques, procedures, calculations, surveys, systems,
designs and vocabularies, deployed across a heterogeneous array of sites and
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through a broad series of domains, that enable the decisions and actions of
individuals, groups, organisations and populations to be understood and
regulated in relation to authoritative criteria (Miller and Rose 1992: 177). What
programs of government, understood as a combination of political rationalities
with technologies of government, enable is influence over the conduct of citizens
through action at a distance . Following Foucault, Miller and Rose observe that
modern liberal forms of government are not characterised by the relentless
expansion of state powers and capacities; rather, state agencies identify a domain
outside politics, and seek to manage it without destroying its existence and itsautonomy (Miller and Rose 1992: 177). Central to such a mode of government is
the role played by experts and expertise, who enter into a double alliance with
political authorities on the one hand, for whom they problematise new issues and
translate political concerns into governmental programs, and individuals and
groups on the other, for whom they provide the techniques and forms of assistance
aimed to enable them to achieve greater personal satisfaction and overcome
material deprivation (Johnson 1993).
Governmentality, Citizenship and the Political Sphere
The theory of governmentality provides the basis for important insights into the
relationship between administrative and policy practices at the level of particular
issues, institutions or problematics, and larger political rationalities and social
relationships. At the same time, three problems emerge for the theory of
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the name of liberty loses sight of the complex links between the acquisition of
capabilities and the growth of autonomy that has characterised the experience of
subjectivity under the various techniques of power in modern Western societies.
Hunt and Wickham (1994) draw attention to a similar contradiction in Foucaults
critique of law in modern societies, on the grounds of Foucaults argument that
the principal forms of power in modernity are essentially non-legal, found in the
disciplines and in governmental practice. As a result, according to Hunt and
Wickham, Foucault finds struggles over legal rights and legal regulation,
characteristic of modern democratic politics, to be based upon an ideologicalmisrecognition of their object, since power and control actually operate in a more
disciplinary, capillary and subterranean level than this surface level of democratic
and legal rights (Hunt and Wickham 1994: 41-52; 59-61). Hunt and Wickham
argue that this account rests upon a caricature of the significance of democratic or
representative institutions, forms of participation in governmental processes and
the implications of extended citizenship rights, providing instead a one-sided
interpretation that ignores the extent to which the new forms of disciplinary
power have already or can potentially become subject to processes of legal rights
and legal regulation (Hunt and Wickham 1994: 62).
The second problem that emerges in the relationship between
governmentality and citizenship is the nature of failure as an inevitable aspect of
governance. Malpas and Wickham argue that practices of governance can only
ever involve a partial appropriation of things, and that they must therefore
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involve instances of failure, since failure marks precisely the limit of governing
practice and not something that lies within its boundaries (Malpas and Wickham
1997: 94). Miller and Rose reach a similar conclusion when they observe that
government is not a perfect regulatory machine, but rather a congenitally
failing operation, where the will to govern is fuelled by the constant
registration of failure, the discrepancy between ambition and outcome, and the
constant injunction to do better next time (Miller and Rose 1992: 191). OMalley,
Weir and Shearing (1997) have argued that such approaches to policy failure,
while valid, downplay the significance of political contestation in favour of astress upon programmatic failure. They propose instead that governmentality
literature needs to focus more upon political contestation as a limit to programmes
of government, given the abundant evidence that contestations, resistances and
social antagonisms shape rule through systematic provision of alternatives
(OMalley, Weir and Shearing 1997: 510).
Third, there is a tension between governance and citizenship, or between
rule through expertise and popular sovereignty. Barry Hindess notes that, as a
consequence of the principle in liberal-democratic societies that there is no natural
or essential basis for the subjection of the majority of the governed population to
rule by a small minority, government has no source of legitimacy outside its own
effectiveness (Hindess 1997: 261). The tensions between formal empowerment of
populations in liberal-democratic societies through citizenship, and their
substantive subordination to state authority through practices of governance, lead
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to what has been termed a citizenship gap . The development of institutional
frameworks that enable extended participation in decision-making processes has
frequently been presented as the best means of resolving this citizenship gap. Hall
and Held capture this tradition when they observe that rights can be mere paper
claims unless they are practically enacted and realised, through actual
participation in the community (Hall and Held 1989: 175). This understanding of
degrees of democracy based upon the scope for participation can be found in the
of a ladder of participation from administrative tokenism to genuine
participatory democracy (Minson 1986), and in the concept of strong democracyas a stage beyond representative democracy, where citizenship is realised in its
fullness through what Benjamin Barber describes as a self-sustaining dialectic of
participatory civic activity and continuous community-building in which freedom
and equality are nourished and given political being (Barber 1984: 152).
The connections drawn between political participation and active citizenship
typically revolve around three sets of arguments (Richardson 1983). First, there is
the developmental argument, which focuses upon the political skills acquired by
individuals through participation, as part of realising their full potential as
citizens. Second, there is the fairness argument, focusing upon the rights of
individuals to be involved in the making of decisions that affect them. Third, there
is the instrumental argument for participation as producing better outcomes as a
result of a wider consideration of interests and broader process of public
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involvement. Mark Considine draws links between the normative goal of
maximising participation and processes of policy formation in his argument that:
Policy always involves a dual structure. It has an instrumental dimension
in that it produces decisions, programs and other outcomes which actors
value. It also has a set of developmental relationships in the way it allows
for the communication of moral and ethical norms, and the building of
trust and solidarity between actors ... Participation describes three types of
action: it facilitates rational deliberation; it creates and communicatesmoral principles; and it expresses personal and group affects and needs.
When all three forms of action are available, then participation provides a
means for the creation of social capital from which all central democratic
objectives spring. (Considine 1994: 130)
It would indeed be a happy combination of outcomes if the extension of
participation not only gave citizenship a revitalised and more active form, but led
to better policy outcomes than those derived from administrative and technical
expertise. Two problems keep emerging, however, in attempts to transpose the
abstract arguments for participation into practices that can be transposed into
areas of policy formation and governance. First, there is the need to clarify the
goals of participation, and to recognise links between forms of participation and
the likelihood of effective outcomes, recognising that participatory structures do
not themselves lead to positive outcomes from the decision-making process. Kate
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obligations of broadcast licensees. The second issue is how such participation can
be organised. If theorists such as Rorty, Hirst and Hindess are correct to observe
that active citizenship and policy participation is more likely to occur through
organised interest groups than through the actions of individuals, then what are
the conditions under which an organisation or interest group can claim to speak
for an audience or sections of it? The emergence of such interest groups in the
broadcast media sphere, and how they have negotiated interfaces between the
broadcast institutions, the policy process and the wider interests of the Australian
community will be explored in the second part of this thesis.
National Citizenship and National Culture
The literature on citizenship in political theory tends to stress its politically
egalitarian dimensions, where full democratic citizenship is an end-state of the
democratic imaginary unleashed by the French and American Revolutions of the
eighteenth century (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Yet the formulation
nation=state=people, which has been so central to revolutionary discourses of
citizenship, has also been central to discourses of nationalism, and the notion that
citizenship is derived from a sense of belonging derived from affiliation to a
national common culture. It is insufficient to conceive of citizenship purely in
terms of an inclusive and egalitarian discourse of rights since, as Barry Hindess
has observed, citizenship has also always been defined not only in terms of
reciprocal obligations to the nation-state, and through various forms of exclusion
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of those deemed to be non-citizens. The various ways in which citizens are
differentiated from non-citizens, through access to civil, political and social rights
and resources, have developed against the background of a conception of
community in which the unity of a self-governing polity is expected to correspond
to the unity of a national culture (Hindess 1993: 39).
Ernest Gellner has defined nationalism as primarily a political principle,
which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent (Gellner
1983: 1). Eric Hobsbawm has also drawn attention to the political dimension of nationalism, claiming that:
The primary meaning of nation ... was political. It equated the people
and the state in the manner of the American and French Revolutions... The
nation so considered, was the body of citizens whose collective
sovereignty constituted them a state which was their political expression.
For, whatever else a nation was, the element of citizenship and mass
participation or choice was never absent from it. (Hobsbawm 1990: 18-19)
Yet the political element of nationalism, as a principle of citizenship tending
toward universalism, has also coexisted with its cultural element, which stresses
the particularities and commonalities of the people of a nation, in relation both
to each other and to those outside of that collectivity. While such claims to
cultural uniqueness on the part of nationalist movements have been treated with
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nationhood have crossed political boundaries, from liberal hopes for world
government or a global village united by communications technologies, to
Marxist visions of international working-class solidarity, to the dialectic of
localism and globalism presented as a strategic vision for political action by the
feminist, environmentalist, peace and other social movements. Such
cosmopolitanism emerges in contemporary cultural studies, sociology and related
fields, and is related to a belief that the nation-state is in irrevocable decline as a
result of economic globalisation, global communications flows, transnational
movements of people and cultural forms and practices, and a resulting set of cultural transformations which have been termed postmodernism (cf. Robbins
1998; Cheah 1998). Lata Mani has argued that trends in the global cultural
economy confound, complicate, and increasingly render irrelevant earlier
mappings of the world, whether in terms of binary divisions or discrete units, and
will in turn offer hospitality, if not centrality, to practitioners of postmodern,
postcolonial, transnational historiography and ethnography, and provide a location
where the new politics of difference - racial, sexual, cultural, transnational - can
combine and be articulated in all their dazzling plurality (Mani 1992: 392).
Similarly, in the Australian context, Andrew Milner has argued that economic
globalisation and postmodernity have rapidly reduced to redundancy all cultural
nationalisms, thereby creating the conditions for a post-national cultural studies
that can render this actually existing transnational postmodernity
comprehensible, and thereby hopefully changeable (Milner 1991: 110).
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spatially (Anderson 1991: 44); and the emergence of languages of administration
and power with the codification of laws and rules under modern forms of
governance.
Anderson understands the nation as an imagined political community
(Anderson 1991: 6), and proposes that the symbolic dimension of nationalism as a
series of myths grounded in representations and everyday practices becomes
crucial in extending the boundaries of community, promoting a symbolic
unification through common allegiance to a deep, horizontal citizenship thatseeks to transcend divisions within the nation-state. Through the modern nation-
state, policies are developed that are self-consciously directed towards cultural
integration, including language policy, formal education, collective rituals such as
national events, public exhibitions of high culture in art galleries and museums,
and the mass media. Andersons emphasis upon the role of print media as a
cultural technology of national cultural integration is parallelled in Tony Bennetts
work on museums as cultural technologies of nationing, where constructions of
the nations past and projections of its future destiny are embodied in museums
and natural heritage sites (Bennett 1995: 142).
While an important feature of Andersons account of the rise of nations
and nationalism is the explicit attention given to mass communications media as a
bridge linking political nationalism and systems of governance to cultural
nationalism and its links to everyday life, Anderson limits his analysis to print
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media forms. Philip Schlesinger has pointed out that Anderson does not push the
argument further to take account of later, post-Gutenberg media technologies, and
to try and examine their implications for the consciousness of nationhood
(Schlesinger 1991a: 164). The issue is not simply one of choice of medium to
research, since a characteristic feature of twentieth century nations and
nationalism is the uncoupling of space and time in global communications, as
distance has been eclipsed by proliferating networks of electronic
communication (Thompson 1995: 149). Communications historians such as Innis
(1951), Meyrowitz (1985) and Carey (1992) have observed that, while printculture was associated with the rise of nationalism, as it promoted continuity over
time, decentralisation and regional differentiation, broadcast media were space-
binding, promoting centralisation of production, decentralisation of dissemination,
and the need for continuity and instantaneity, and oriented toward international
distribution. 5
Globalisation, Nation-States and National Cultures
Globalisation has been defined as a series of interrelated trends that include: the
internationalisation of production, trade and finance; international movements of
people, as immigrants, guest workers, refugees, tourists, students and expert
advisers; international communications flows, delivered through technologies
such as broadband cable, satellite and the Internet; the global circulation of ideas,
ideologies and keywords; the development of international organisations,
including regional trading blocs, cultural, professional and standards bodies, and
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non-government organisations (NGOs); and the growing significance of
international law to national policies. In relation to communications media, it has
been argued that one implication of media globalisation is that audiovisual
geographies are becoming detached from the symbolic spaces of national
culture (Morley and Robins 1995: 11). Such arguments are associated with wider
claims that globalisation has triggered an uncoupling of culture and polity in
contemporary nation-states. One example of such claims is Arjun Appadurais
argument that contemporary global economic and cultural flows have generated
fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics, and that globalmediascapes produce imagined worlds that are increasingly disjunctive to their
lived experience of their audiences in particular places and dominant cultures
(Appadurai 1990: 296, 299). Similarly, John Urry identifies the growing global
access to mass communications forms such as broadcast media with globalising
processes which undermine the coherence, wholeness and unity of individual
societies (Urry 1989: 97).
Since a defining feature of nationalism is the striving to make culture and
polity congruent, to endow a culture with its own political roof, and not more than
one roof at that (Gellner 1983: 43), such developments would point to the
declining influence of nation-states, as they are no longer to maintain distinctive
national cultures which unify their population. For Appadurai, these global
mediascapes are part of the cultural politics that have subverted the hyphen that
links the nation to the state, which in turn generate distinctive forms of
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deterritorialised cultural identity and associated strategies of micropolitics
(Appadurai 1990: 304-308). Similarly, Urry sees the disorganising of modern
nation-states as arising from the simultaneous processes of globalisation from
above, of decentralisation from below, and of disintegration from within (Urry
1989: 101).
The globalisation thesis points to some of the critical dimensions of
international cultural and economic flows in the 1980s and 1990s. Nonetheless,
strong globalisation theories have typically possessed two abiding problems.First, while their empirical basis is superficially plausible, it is in fact relatively
weak when evaluated in a historical perspective, or when the scale of international
markets is compared to those of national markets. This point is made forcefully by
Hirst and Thompson (1996), who argue that globalisation arguments are
superficial in their use of evidence, lack historical depth and greatly underestimate
the continuing significance of nation-states in regulation and governance of the
international economy. They argue that economic globalisation is not a
historically unique experience of the post-1960s era, and the world economy was
more open in the 1870-1914 period, with volumes of trade, capital flows and
levels of international migration being higher then than now. Linda Weiss (1997)
has developed a similar critique in the East Asian context, arguing that
globalisation must be seen as a politically rather than a technologically induced
phenomenon (Weiss 1997: 23). Second, the thesis draws too heavily upon the
particular experience of the nation-states of Western Europe, and the central
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premise that once-strong and unified nation-states are being dispersed or
disorganised by globalising and decentring tendencies does not work when
applied to the majority of nation-states outside the metropolitan centres of
Western Europe. A related point is that much debate about the so-called global-
local dialectic, and the associated decline in significance of the national level of
political and cultural engagement, has been animated by the implications of
greater European economic and political integration, and that the implications of
these developments for nation-states outside of Europe have to be approached
carefully. The deterritorialising trends identified by Morley and Robins do notseem as unique in countries such as Australia, New Zealand or Canada since, for
these countries, limited and shared sovereignty is nothing new (ORegan 1993:
101). In such countries, the issue for media policy that seeks to regulate
international flows has often had less to do with communicative boundary
maintenance, to use Philip Schlesingers phrase, and more to do with the
establishment of national cultural infrastructures that can be developed and
nurtured in an audiovisual environment that is highly permeable to imported
content.
The construction of dichotomies between media globalisation and national
media cultures is therefore mistaken. While studies affirm the centrality of the
United States to the world audiovisual trade, accounting for 70 per cent of total
audiovisual exports, it is also the case that most of the worlds television product
remains local, both in terms of not being broadcast outside of its home country
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and in its textual style and mode of address. Broadcast media have always been
implicated in global communications and cultural flows, yet, paradoxically,
television has not always been international, both culturally and economically,
as cinema has been described (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, quoted in ORegan 1996:
48), due to the strength of national public broadcasters, national regulatory
systems, and audience preferences for locally produced material in most
countries. The complex relationship between economic and technological forces
that promote imported programming, and political and cultural (including
linguistic) factors which promote local content, results in considerable unevennessin the degree of penetration of overseas programming in national television
systems. As a result, hybrid program forms often emerge which negotiate local,
national and international cultural markets, such as the local production and
international trade in program formats, or what Moran (1998) terms copycat TV.
Moreover, sustained exposure to overseas television programming is frequently
the trigger for strengthening national production systems, whether through
protectionist cultural policies of le defi Americain (Schlesinger 1991),
development of cosmopolitan program formats which play at being American
(Caughie 1990), or the fashioning of national champions which can compete in
definable global audiovisual markets, such as the soaps and telenovellas
exported from countries such as Brazil, Mexico and Australia to particular
Portuguese, Spanish and English language audiences (Sinclair et. al. 1996).
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As cultural industries, audiovisual media content continues to bear the
markers of the national cultures it came from, and international trade in broadcast
media occurs on the basis of the irreducibly cultural relationships that are
established between certain types of program and the audiences for whom they
are meaningful (Sinclair 1996: 55). It is also apparent that nation-states and
public policy have an ongoing significance in regulating the relationships between
global flows and their local impacts within the national community, that includes
positive initiatives to develop a national cultural infrastructure as well as controls
over cross-border media flows. It is also important to bear in mind that the notionof strong citizenship, where national institutional structures have sought to tightly
bind national citizens to the state through transmission of a common language,
culture and national identity, may be more historically and geographically specific
than is allowed for by those discourses arising from the strong nation-states of
Western Europe, and may not be so applicable to the majority of the worlds
population, who live in countries where weaker notions of national citizenship
and cultural sovereignty have been the norm (Collins 1990; Castles 1997;
Davidson 1997a, 1997b).
Conclusion
Citizenship provides an important link between media as culture and the
development of institutional regulatory forms and policy frameworks. The
paradox of citizenship in liberal democracies, where free subjects are required to
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consent to their institutional governance as populations, means that there is an
ongoing tension between rule through expertise and popular sovereignty. This is
connected to an ongoing debate about the extent to which active citizenship
should be promoted, where citizens actively participate in the institutional
structures of governance. In relation to an area such as media, such questions are
unavoidably connected to the degree to which commercial media forms and
market relations are held to be sufficient to meet the needs and interests of diverse
populations, or whether activist forms of media policy and regulation are a
necessary corrective to the limitations of the market. This chapter has sought toquestion both overly sanguine accounts of commercial media found in liberal
media theory, and the tragic accounts of critical media theory, to instead address
media policy as integral to the conditions of existence and modes of operation of
commercial broadcast media, thereby constituting a significant site of negotiation
and political contestation.
The question of national citizenship, and its relationship to national
culture, is also an important animator of media policy. Media have operated as
sites of citizen-formation and the development of national and cultural identities,
and the relationship between broadcasting as a potentially global cultural
technology and national cultures is a complex and contested one. This is seen in
debates about globalisation, which have, nonetheless, been one-sided, in their
tendency to assume strong nation-states and relatively homogeneous national
cultures existing prior to the impact of global media such as broadcasting. If it is
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the case, as Richard Collins has argued, that relatively few actual states fit the
theoretical model where a nation, bound together by shared ethnicity,
language, religion, stable frontiers, and economic interest, is politically sovereign
in its own state (Collins 1990: 18), then it may follow that the apparent newness
of globalisation, and concerns about the capacity of globalisation to weaken bonds
between culture and polity, may not apply particularly well to the states in which
the majority of the worlds population live. If this is the case, then the model of
weak national citizenship and an uncertain degree of national cultural
sovereignty, found in nations such as Australia, Canada and Brazil, may indeed provide a template for the development of national cultural policy and its
articulation to cultural citizenship worldwide.
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1 Habermass work on the public sphere was based around the printed word, and can only be extended to broadcastmedia with some difficulty. Indeed, as Collins has noted, Habermas was hostile to film, radio and television, arguing in TheStructural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989: 171) that:
In contrast with printed communications the programs sent by the new media [radio, film and television] curtailthe recipients in a peculiar way. They draw the eyes and ears of the public under their spell but ... deprive it of theopportunity to say something and to disagree. (quoted in Collins 1993: 248).
2 An argument can be made for public broadcasting that is not based upon claims about quality, but rather concernsthe tendency for commercial media to undersupply particular areas of broadcast programming with strong public goodelements, such as public affairs programming, critical and investigative forms of news and current affairs and documentary,and childrens programming (Herman 1997). This shifts the focus away from defending public broadcasting on the basis of value criteria, towards the notion of maximising programming diversity within a broadcast media system (cf. Flew 1994).
3 One of the most famous rebuttals of the cultural uniqueness of nations was Ernest Renans (1882) account of howthe modern European nation was not founded upon dynastic continuity, racial homogeneity, linguistic unity, a commonreligion or geographical limits. Instead, Renan argued that the origins of the modern European nation were historicallycontingent, and that the conditions for a nation-states continuing existence had to be continuously reproduced andreinvented, in order to win the consent of its people: a nations existence is ... a daily plebiscite (Renan 1882, in Bhabha1990: 11, 12, 19).
4 See Flew (1996) for a more detailed discussion of the concept and its applications. That paper draws attention tofive influences upon the concept: philosophies of technology as developed by Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger;
psychoanalytic film theory; social shaping of technology arguments, particularly Raymond Williams account of televisionas technology and cultural form; Canadian communications theory as developed by Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan;and post-Foucaultian cultural histories developed by Ian Hunter and Tony Bennett.
5 It is important to note that such developments do not necessarily negate nationalism as a political force, but rather promote the circulation of ideas outside of defined territorial boundaries. Harold Innis drew attention to this in consideringthe significance of radio to the territorial ambitions of the Nazis in the 1930s:
In Europe an appeal to the ear made it possible to destroy the results of the Treaty of Versailles as registered in the political map based on self-determination. The rise of Hitler to power was facilitated by the use of the loud speaker and theradio. By the spoken language he could appeal to minority groups and to minority nations. Germans in Czechoslovakiacould be reached by radio, as could Germans in Austria. Political boundaries related to the demands of the printing pressdisappeared with the new instruments of communication. The spoken language provided a base for the exploitation of nationalism and a far more effective device for appealing to larger numbers. Illiteracy was no longer a serious barrier. (Innis
1951: 81)