How and Why do Governments seek to Regulate the Realm of Broadcast Television.

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How and Why do Governments seek to Regulate the Realm of Broadcast Television.

In order to try and answer the question of why and how governments seek to regulate the realm of broadcast television we must look at what motivates various governments and why their particular ideologies may come into conflict with the mass media. What compels them to introduce regulation in one form or another? We can then look at how they go about regulation.

First of all let us begin by looking at why governments may want to control the realm of broadcast television. This may have something to do with a government's ideology and the discourses at play within a particular political party at any given time. The first Director General of the BBC Sir John Reith argued that public service broadcasting had a duty to educate and reform but this became a cultural strategy that imposed a blinkered and somewhat elitist high brow culture on a socially diverse nation. This was very much in keeping with British political thinking at that time which was patriarchal and traditional.

Over many decades the cultural field of leisure in general in Britain as elsewhere in the western world has been subject to different kinds of regulation. However, the onset of neo-liberalism and globalization in the market place has led to increasing demands for de-regulation. For instance, during the 1980s Margaret Thatcher's conservative government with its neo-liberal, free market ideology denounced state organized broadcasting because of its high cost and the fact that in their eyes it prevented the free flow of information by restricting advertising and dis-allowing choice. State protected media for the New Right of the Thatcher era imposed its elitist ideas and tastes on the rest of us. The de-regulation of institutions such as the BBC would give the public more choice and the market would become more responsive to their preferences.

The BBC a public institution often considered immune form direct government interference became the focus of Thatcherite attention. It was reduced in size and the licence fee was temporarily frozen. This forced the BBC out into the market place. It already made money from selling programmes around the world, but it was now forced to pay more attention to sales, including sales of airtime. The 'Peacock Commission' was set up to investigate new ways of financing the public service broadcasting and it's report offered an alternative view, including advertising and 'pay-per-view'. Not all of its proposals were taken up by the Thatcher government but the BBC did have to change its ethos by adopting a more commercial way of operating by raising its own money rather than being dependent upon the public purse. Thatcherism it appears was attempting to impose its capitalist ideology on what was after all a public institution.
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Organizations such as the BBC had been seen by many as institutions with some degree of independence from the state and its economy. They addressed the public as citizens rather than just consumers and allowed many different social groups to communicate with each other.

On the other side of the coin the BBC has also been seen as patronizing, non-representative and condescending to its audience. It has been accused of having too close a relationship to the ruling classes because its Board of Governors is hand picked by the government. In the case of Thatcher this ...

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