Media,Culture & Society

Within contemporary New Zealand the political climate is such that market forces tend to be privileged over any social or cultural mandates. This has resulted in a deregulated broadcasting context in which three of the five free-to-air channels are operated as State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), with the remaining two operating as independent commercial operations. However, within this deregulated broadcasting context, there is an attempt to maintain something of a public service ethos. This article examines a New Zealand television documentary series, An Immigrant Nation, and the tensions and contradictions arising in a project that attempts to tell `marginal' stories within the `mainstream' media.

This article examines the disjunctures in representations of indigenous Australian histories in the Australian media. In this article we attempt to align stories of the past with present narratives of nationhood in a radical manner so as to uncover the modes of institutionalized silences which govern public discourses with regard to Aboriginal histories. By focusing on the media coverage of the Port Arthur incident in Tasmania, where a lone gunman killed 35 people, we examine the construction of silences around Aboriginal massacres in the public sphere.

Corporate interests have dominated American radio since the late 1920s, using a commercialized medium to sell business products and ideology. For several decades, organized labor challenged business control of the radio. Unable to compete with business in other areas of the mass media, radio, with its potential for reaching a large audience, held promise for a labor movement hoping to contest business domination of political discourse. This article explores the relationship between organized labor and radio broadcasting from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. During the early part of this period, unions engaged in a fierce struggle for access to radio and began challenging the coverage of labor in the mass media. In the post-Second World War era, organized labor launched an aggressive campaign to utilize radio to promote a working-class political perspective. By the early 1950s, labor's voice was more widely heard on the airwaves than ever before. Organized labor offered at least a modest check on corporate America's command of the mass media.

In this article I use the concept of genre as a notion to look into the relationship between the production and the audience, especially on the production side. The empirical material of the study is a Japanese television family drama called Wataru seken wa oni bakari or Wataoni. Recently the concept of genre - traditionally known from literary theory and cinema studies - has been found useful especially in studies on (news) journalism. In these studies genre is usually defined as a cultural and social contract between the production and the audience, the rhetorical mode of address inherent in genre being a central notion. The mode of address is seen to recommend audience members certain meanings and viewing patterns. Although the idea of `communicative contract' also includes the production side, empirical studies of the rhetorical force of genre in both production and reception are rare.

I propose that it can be useful in an empirical study to look into the ways in which genre addresses both the viewers and the makers. The way the generic mode of address works for each direction may differ, but nevertheless genre also persuades the makers to adopt a certain subject position and meaningful relationship with the programme in question.

The film industry in Argentina has witnessed a recent `boom' in commercial blockbuster movies that is bringing audiences back to see national films. These high budget productions are produced in part by large television channels that are utilizing state subsidies for these projects. While this translates into healthy growth for the film industry, it is transforming the character of national film production from a cultural project to a commercial product. Consequently, smaller, less commercial filmmakers are being slighted in favor of these larger corporate entities; a move that contradicts the original intent of improved film legislation passed in 1994. This tension between film production as a form of national culture or a commercial industry is emblematic of the cultural politics waged in current President Menem's administration - a government characterized by its neoliberal economic reform and ties to global business.