Broadcasting Regulation: on the Side of the Angels?

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Uploaded 12 November 1999

The study of broadcasting regulation has started to creep into the edges of the media studies curriculum, born on the wind that wafts across the campus from the Schools of Law and Politics. And perhaps this small wind of change should be welcome if it helps us to understand some of the forces that are shaping the potential for public communication in the twenty-first century.

The literature on media regulation is still predominantly produced by legal scholars and has expanded significantly in the 1990s, following the publication of Eric Barendt’s comparative study of broadcasting law[2] . In 1995 Serge Robillard offered a descriptive account of the bodies regulating television in thirty five European countries and Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem looked in considerable detail at the procedures for licensing and supervising broadcasting in three European countries as well as in the United States and Canada [3] . More recently, in 1998, David Goldberg and colleagues have studied the supra-national regulation of media in Europe and edited a collection of essays reviewing developments on three continents (Europe, North America and Australia) [4] . Shalini Venturelli’s book on de-regulated European media and the associated threat to political rights appeared in the same year, and was accompanied by two other studies which placed an emphasis on the link between regulation and political rights [5] .

In this short article I shall be concentrating on broadcasting regulation and saying nothing about those properly wider concerns of media regulation which deal with telecommunications, computing and the internet.

Regulation involves intervention by the state in areas of economic, social or cultural life according to whatever political norms are characteristic of that nation state. In different sorts of societies, regulations may be issued by Presidential decree, by religious prescription or by legislative action within a system of representative democracy. And they may be administered through terror, through more or less transparent and well-resourced bureaucratic systems, or through statutory agencies that enjoy some degree of independence from the government of the day. There are also examples of supra-national regulation deriving from such bodies as the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the International Telecommunication Union.

In the case of broadcasting, at the most basic level, regulation involves the granting of a permission or licence to broadcast. These licences may be costly to acquire (with finances flowing correspondingly into the national Treasury), or they may be cheap or free. They are normally granted for a fixed period of time and they may incorporate few or many conditions. Licence-holders will also be bound to observe a variety of other laws of the land and may be constrained by specialist laws proscribing certain kinds of ownership. It will be apparent from the above description that I am avoiding, in this article, the use of the term “regulation” considered in the Foucauldian sense where it is close to the concept of social or ideological reproduction[6] .

In this article I shall try to address some of the sharper questions that are rightly asked about broadcasting regulation. Is it a form of censorship, a kind of restraint of trade, a block on freedom of expression, an enabler of cultural and political rights? The answers are necessarily informed by different and often conflicting political beliefs and priorities, and by different philosophies of social life and of communication. I hope to arrive at some answers in a relatively indirect way by exploring a few selected examples of the philosophy and practice of regulation, and by drawing my examples from different periods and different countries, specifically from Britain and from the United States of America. I hope it will be apparent from these examples that regulation is subject to a changing political and social context and I suggest that we might see these changes in terms of a kind of ebbing and flowing of regulatory practice in the twentieth century.

I hope to show that broadcasting regulation is both dependent upon cultural norms and contributes to shaping these norms, and that it can at times have a significant impact upon the form and content of programmes and the economic and organisational structures of broadcasting. Without some understanding of regulation we may not understand the conditions within which programme makers work, and with this understanding we may arrive at a fuller account of both the cultural norms and the political economy of this industry.

Approaches to broadcasting regulation in the United States of America

Broadcasting, with its use of the public resource of the airwaves, has always been seen as different from the press. For several centuries, well before the advent of universal suffrage, some governments had accepted that the press should be permitted to disseminate ideas, free from state control. In Britain, for example, state licensing of the press was ended in 1694. And while it is important not to read too much into this early freedom of the press – in practice it was read by an elite and reflected an extremely limited social knowledge base – nonetheless it came to be seen as the “fourth estate”, a key feature of the bourgeois revolution and a new facilitator for public expression and the formation of public opinion, escaping the grasp of the various other “estates” or branches of government.

In the twentieth century, with the introduction of universal suffrage and the invention of “wireless” communication, most governments took action to reserve to themselves the right to allocate the use of broadcasting frequencies: to “license” broadcasters. And this licensing was done either directly or indirectly through the actions of semi-independent regulatory agencies; the process was different in different countries. But even in the United States of America, often seen as a country whose attachment to the values of individualism and free enterprise ensured a state with limited powers, government licences were eventually issued. Privately-owned US broadcasting was to become one of the most commercially vigorous and profitable in the world, but its potential social role was noted very early on. Thus, in 1924 the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, spoke of radio as a “great public service” [7]  and legislation in 1927 prescribed the famous and famously vague condition that the granting of licences must serve: “the public interest, convenience and necessity” [8] .

In 1776 the American Declaration of Independence had announced that the power and authority of any government should derive solely from the “consent of the governed”. It also invited the people to be ready to “alter or abolish” government should it prove unable to secure for individuals their “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” [9] . And yet, despite all of this radical individualism and deep scepticism about the role of the state, regulation was to become a way of life even in America. One commentator, describing the first thirty years of the twentieth century, noted:

It is a truism that the United States more than any other Western country subscribes to the precepts of laissez-faire. It is also the case that American economic regulation – including legislation, regulatory agencies, and the activity of the courts – is uniquely active, extensive and detailed. [10]

Another commentator writing of the wave of new social regulations in the 1960s and 1970s (and, of course, prior to the de-regulatory emphasis of the Reagan and Bush governments of the following decade) noted that between 1970 and 1979 the number of people employed in regulatory agencies had risen from just under 8,000 to well over 63,000 [11] . Moreover, the Federal Communications Commission was among the top three agency spenders, in the next tier below the National Labour Relations Board and the Interstate Commerce Commission [12] .

The remit of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in licensing and , to a lesser extent, supervising licencees was outlined in the Communications Act of 1934 and updated in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Unlike its current British equivalent, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), the FCC deals with telecommunications, radio and new media as well as with television. In the period after the Second World War, and in pursuit of the “public interest” objective codified in the 1934 Act, the FCC published rules designed to ensure a kind of “right to reply” within broadcasting, and the fair and adequate coverage of controversial issues of public importance. These rules were summarised in a 1949 document which came to be known as the “Fairness Doctrine”[13] , and they were applied to both radio and television.

The provisions of the Fairness Doctrine, implemented by the FCC, have been challenged on a number of occasions. It has been argued that the Doctrine interferes with the free speech rights of broadcast licencees either because it requires them to broadcast views that they may disagree with, or because it absorbs so much research time and screen time in order to represent a controversy that editors avoid controversial issues (this latter point is sometimes referred to as the “chilling effect”). On the basis of such arguments it has been suggested that the FCC’s enforcement of the Doctrine might be in contravention of the First Amendment to the American Constitution, namely the requirement that: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech or of the press”.[14]  This point is difficult to understand in a British context where the impartiality rule prohibits television licence holders from expressing their own corporate view on major issues of public controversy; they are expected to represent not their own view but the views of others. Indeed the very taken-for-grantedness of the impartiality rule as regards broadcasting makes it difficult to appreciate the concept of a corporate right (or, in this case, a licence holder’s right) to freedom of speech.

In 1969 a famous American Supreme Court judgement in the Red Lion case upheld the constitutionality of the Doctrine and provided a useful – though subsequently controversial – account of the particular characteristics of broadcasting and of its social purpose. The judgement quoted with approval an earlier statement in the Senate that:

..broadcast frequencies are limited and, therefore, they have been necessarily considered a public trust. Every licencee who is fortunate in obtaining a licence is mandated to operate in the public interest and has assumed the obligation of presenting important public questions fairly and without bias. [15]

The Court went on to argue that since there would always be more individuals who wanted to broadcast than there are frequencies to allocate, the licensee could not be considered to have a constitutional right to “monopolise a radio frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens”. The argument was concluded with what remains one of the strongest statements on the public service responsibilities of broadcasters:

..the people as a whole retain their interest in free speech by radio and their collective right to have the medium function consistently with the ends and purposes of the First Amendment. It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters which is paramount…It is the right of the public to receive suitable access to social, political, esthetic, moral and other ideas.. [16]

Thus, on the basis that “there is no sanctuary in the First Amendment for unlimited private censorship operating in a medium not open to all” the Supreme Court took the view that the regulations of the Fairness Doctrine:

..enhance rather than abridge the freedoms of speech and of the press protected by the First Amendment [17]

However, this statement of support for public access to a range of ideas and arguments was effectively undermined in 1987. In that year, and in the context of the de-regulatory philosophies of the Reagan Presidency, the FCC suspended the Doctrine, leaving decisions about the coverage of controversial issues to the judgement of individual journalists, station owners and station managers[18] . It is worth noting that deregulatory policies in Britain during the same period differed in one key respect: there the existing impartiality provisions (the British equivalent of the Fairness Doctrine) received legal confirmation.

A brief historical review of broadcasting regulation in the USA indicates that the actual powers of the FCC have always been limited. They proved unable, for example, to enforce limits on advertising time in the 1960s or to establish standards for diverse programming of high quality[19] . Reflecting on the history of American television in a 1995 speech, the Chair of the FCC, Reed Hundt, came to the pessimistic conclusion that:

..when we gave out broadcast licences, we made a colossal mistake. In the bargain with broadcasters on behalf of the public we did not ask for specific, concrete and real commitments from broadcasters to serve the “public interest, convenience and necessity”.[20]

I turn now to consider some examples of the regulatory arrangements in Britain where general acceptance of the impartiality rule and of positive programing obligations has resulted in a very different public policy environment and (arguably) in a very different kind of programme service.

Approaches to regulation in Britain 

The Reagan philosophy of deregulation, of rolling back the state and freeing up the market, was echoed by the British Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher [21] . In the latter part of her 11 year period in office (1989-90) the Prime Minister was determined to inject an element of competition into what was perceived as the too-comfortable world of the broadcasting duopoly of BBC and Independent Television (ITV). Here the government’s relative hostility to public services and its advocacy of competition and market provision resulted in a series of attacks on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Although the timing of the BBC’s Charter renewal (valid until 1996) meant that the BBC could not easily be dealt with in the main legislation planned for broadcasting. Thus the 1990 Broadcasting Act said little about the BBC but much about transforming commercial television and facilitating increased competititon through the introduction of independent production as well as new cable and satellite services.

While the Thatcher government set out to make radical changes in the world of broadcasting, it nonetheless retained various policy instruments inherited from a long and relatively consensual tradition of public service provision. The re-statement of existing rules on impartiality, and their inclusion in the Broadcasting Act of 1990, is one example of this [22] . Another is the inclusion within the Act of long-standing positive programming obligations. Thus while the Independent Television Commission (designed as the new “light touch” regulator to replace the old Independent Broadcasting Authority) lost the powers of scheduling and of pre-publication censorship, the Act charged it with ensuring that television services are:

..of high quality and offer a wide range of programmes calculated to appeal to a variety of tastes and interests. [23]

In addition the Act specifically required ITV (“Channel 3”) licence holders to show programmes in the four categories of news and currrent affairs, children’s, religious and regional programmes[24] . Biding their time as the Broadcasting Bill wound its way slowly and noisily through Parliament, the professionals at the ITC used their general powers under the Act to add a further six programme categories. Thus when the tender document, “Invitation to apply for a Channel 3 Licence”, was issued in 1991 the ITC invited applicants to include documentaries, education and arts programmes as well as work in the more obviously popular categories of drama, entertainment and sport[25] . The fact that all applicants duly complied with these proposals can probably be attributed to a continuing consensus (at that time) about programming range and quality, rather than to a fear of falling foul of the regulator.

The ITC was also charged with the more standard business of allocating licences but required to do this under a new “blind” bidding process, where the licence in each television region would be awarded to the highest bidder. This was intended to remove the discretion exercised by the regulator in previous franchise rounds, and to establish a new and transparent system based clearly on the principle of the (estimated) value of the licence to an applicant. In the past, much attention had been paid to the programme plans submitted by applicants and regulatory decisions had been based on an evaluation of the quality of these plans. The proposed licence “auction” for the new Independent Television companies was probably the most controversial element in the new legislation, particularly so within the broadcasting industry itself. A widely-based campaign was developed to seek to change the mind of government on this issue and a compromise was reached with the introduction of a “quality threshold”. The ITC was given the power to scrutinise applicants’ programme plans in relationship to their business plans and only those judged to be of sufficient quality would be allowed to proceed to the licence bidding stage [26] The tradition of positive programming obligations was thus continued, although it has come under increasing pressure in the multi-channel world of specialist and niche markets.

The regulatory body also has significant powers in respect of the economic prospects of the licensed companies. We can consider the exercise of these powers in two areas: firstly the setting of new licence fee payment levels and, secondly, the power to fine companies in breach of their licence conditions. While the actions discussed below certainly had an impact on the financial performance of the companies, it is important also to recognise their impact on the day to day culture of broadcasting.

In 1998 the ITC began to renegotiate the licence fees paid by the 15 regional companies making up the independent television network. All these companies are privately-owned, advertiser-funded and offer a free to air service. As outlined above all had been involved, in 1991, in a process of competitive “blind” bidding for ten year licences. In areas where an applicant sensed that there was no local competition it bid a small amount for the licence; while in areas where two or more applicants were competing some very high bids were submitted. The differences in amounts offered and paid by licence winners were considerable. Thus in two areas of roughly similar value one licence applicant without a competitor, Central Television, won on the basis of a 1991 bid price of £2,000 per year, while in a second area the winning applicant, Yorkshire Television, offered a bid price of just under £38 million per year[27]  . These amounts increased annually according to inflation.

One consequence of this process was that some companies had considerably more resources than others to invest in network and local programming as well as to enhance share price. This method of licence allocation, and its various consequences, was subsequently widely discredited, but it was not until 1998 that the regulatory body was legally permitted to renegotiate the fees. In the case of the second company noted above (Yorkshire Television), they were judged by the regulator – in terms of the value of their advertising income – to be paying too high an amount for their licence and payment was reduced by around one third, from £52m to £35m, annually. [28]  . Partly, of course, we might expect such a regulatory change to have clear and positive financial consequences for the value of the company – raising the value of its shares and its profitability. But the wider public benefit of this change, in terms of programme quality and employment, derives from company assurances (if carried out) that significant additional resources will be invested in programme production.

A second example of regulatory intervention which had an impact upon the media economy but was also intended to have consequences for the wider media culture involves the fine of £2 million imposed by the ITC upon Central Television in December 1998. A documentary, The Connection , first broadcast in 1996 and claiming to have discovered a new route for heroin smuggling into Britain, was judged to have been inaccurate and misleading in certain key respects. Scenes were found to have been reconstructed without this being apparent to the audience and, following investigation, certain figures turned out not to be who they claimed to be. These scenes included a drugs “mule” shown swallowing a large quantity of drugs, a man claiming to be the leader of a Columbian drugs cartel and a supposedly dangerous assignment for an interview at a “secret location” which turned out to have taken place in the producer’s hotel bedroom. [29] .

Given the general drive to sensationalism at that time as ITV in particular sought to maintain its share of the peak-time audience, many producers felt that this film had been unfairly singled out, and that there were many other films which used similar techniques of reconstruction judged unacceptable in this ruling. The investigation into The Connection and the detailed attacks on its claims to facticity had initially been developed by a group of print journalists and published in the Guardian newspaper. Some were sceptical of the motives behind the attack and found it inappropriate for one medium to criticise another without apparently being aware of its routine representational practices, specifically the reliance by television upon visual representations and the selection and re-ordering of temporal sequences. For example the print journalists and the ITC had said that “..what was seen as a continuous journey had been filmed in two legs six months apart” [30] . Such re-ordering of temporal sequences is not uncommon in documentary film and television.

Following the very public, journalistic “exposure” of the programme the parent company of Central, Carlton Communications, appointed a fairly distinguished panel, including the President of Trinity College, Oxford (a barrister) and the former Controller of Editorial Policy at the BBC, to investigate the accusations. The Panel found that the ITC’s Programme Code requirement of “respect for truth” was breached and that “..substantial claims in the programme were false”. In addition they recommended the setting up of new procedures to test the “..provenance of source material” [31] . These findings were accepted by Carlton and within two weeks of their submission to the ITC, the regulatory body took the decision to impose the largest, and only the second, terrestrial television fine in its history[32] .

In view of the agreement by both parties that there had been a serious breach of the Programme Code, the ITC clearly enjoyed the legal right to impose a fine in this case. The fine could be seen as both a kind of censorship and a kind of restraint of trade. However, it is clearly consistent with the tenor of broadcasting regulation in Britain and with its longstanding emphasis on the issue of standards and quality in programme making. In their News Release announcing the fine the ITC drew attention to the process of increasingly casualised employment in the industry and to the attenuation in the chain of responsibility resulting from this (the programme had been made by a producer who was not on the staff of Central Television). They asked Carlton to review its existing “..mechanisms and culture, in so far as they relate to the commissioning and production of documentary and current affairs programmes” and concluded that:

This particular incident must not discourage broadcasters from the objective of providing high quality documentary programmes on international topics. Such current affairs programming is…fundamental to public service broadcasting. [33]

While this fine was levied in response to particular issues of factual inaccuracy in one programme, it can perhaps best be understood in relationship to a more general perception that standards were falling in commercial broadcasting. The writing was, in a sense, already on the wall when in the previous year the new Chair of the ITC had spoken of the “… ‘dumbing down’ of the traditional television services in the UK” and of the responsibility of the regulator to:

..ensure that the commercial broadcasters continue to fulfill their licence commitments in terms of diversity and continued high quality.. [34]

This continuing emphasis on quality and diversity can, and in my view should, be seen as evidence of a regulatory body determined to pursue public interest objectives. In addition, the implementation of impartiality provisions – where these do not reproduce an unacceptably small spectrum of opinion – makes an important contribution to public knowledge and the formation of public opinion. It has not been possible to explore examples of impartiality regulation here, or its general consequences for broadcasting output. But I have noted important differences as regards the acceptance and implementation of this regulation in Britain and in the US. It has been suggested by one political theorist that:

..an unscrupulous use of the media of mass communication has now led to the elected controlling the electors. [35]

Only a vigorously implemented policy on broadcasting impartiality can ensure that the public, as citizens and electors, have access to the diverse views of the public and not only to those of politicians, experts and channel owners.
The enforcement of impartiality regulation, therefore, may be said to enable the claiming of cultural and political rights.

Conclusion

There are plenty of examples from different parts of the world, including Britain, of negative and censorious regulation. From Britain, examples might include the Broadcasting Ban which for several years prohibited certain politicians from Northern Ireland from speaking on radio or television, or the many instances of pre-broadcast censorship by the Independent Broadcasting Authority in the period before 1990.

So it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to produce a general audit of broadcasting regulation; as the saying goes, the devil (as well as the angels) is in the detail. But most users of broadcasting, as well as many media and cultural studies students, remain largely ignorant not only of this detail but also of the bigger picture of state intervention in this field. Nearly 40 years ago Newton Minow, newly appointed Chair of the FCC, identified the need for increased public understanding of the regulatory process and the principles underlying it:

I knew that the people were generally unaware that broadcasting was a public trust, and most of them did not know the extent of their rights to this public resource. I felt that many broadcasters, who naturally had a vested interest in the medium, had, in the flush of enormous financial success, too quickly grown complacent and closed their eyes to their responsibilities and trust. I decided to disturb their sleep.. [36]

In 1999 there may be an increased “rights consciousness” from consumers, but this has hardly translated itself into an understanding of the links between the electoral system and the regulatory process. There is, consequently, little public pressure either on the regulators or on the governments who determine the remit of regulators. The solution to this stalemate of ignorance is not to seek to abolish all regulation, but rather to make regulation more transparently responsive to the various and conflicting public interests that will characterise our societies in the twenty first century.

The political analyst Daniel Zolo speaks of the importance of achieving a political system capable of “..reducing fear through the selective regulation of social risks” [37] . In the case of broadcasting we cannot afford the risk of ignorance or the emergence of a system that increases the divide between information rich and information poor. If regulators are to become (in an obviously exaggerated metaphor) the “angels of enlightenment”, they must seize the opportunity of rolling back the tide of cultural and educational discrimination.

Footnotes:
[1] I am indebted to Phyllis Bernt and Duncan Brown for letting me have a copy of their unpublished paper: “A tale of two concepts: ‘universal service’ and ‘the public interest'”, following the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996; paper presented to the International Association for Media and Communications Research, Leipzig, 1999.
[2] E. Barendt, Broadcasting Law: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
[3] S. Robillard, Television in Europe: Regulatory Bodies. Status, Functions and Powers in 35 European Countries (London: John Libbey with the European Institute for the Media, 1995) and W. Hoffmann-Riem, Regulating Media: The Licensing and Supervision of Broadcasting in Six Countries (New York: Guilford Press, 1996).
[4] D. Goldberg, T. Prosser and S. Verhulst, eds., Regulating the Changing Media: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) and D. Goldberg, T.Prosser and S. Verhulst, EC Media Law and Policy (London: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998).
[5] S. Venturelli, Liberalizing the European Media: Politics, Regulation and the Public Sphere (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); D. Craufurd-Smith, Broadcasting Law and Fundamental Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) and M. Feintuck, Media Regulation, Public Interest and the Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
[6] K. Thompson, ed., Media and Cultural Regulation (London: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997).
[7] Cited in R. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16.
[8] F. Kahn, Documents of American Broadcasting (New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc., 1984), 417.
[9] V. Wilson, The Book of Great American Documents (Maryland: American History Research Associates, 1993), 15.
[10] M. Keller, “The pluralist state: American economic regulation in comparative perspective”, in T.K.McCraw, Regulation in Perspective: Historical Essays (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981), 56.
[11] D. Vogel, “The ‘new’ social regulation in historical and comparative perspective”, in McCraw, 163.
([12] W.L. Cary, Politics and the Regulatory Agencies (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), 4.
[13] Kahn, 165-78.
[14] Wilson, 48.
[15] Kahn, 283.
[16] Kahn, 286-7.
[17] Kahn, 288 and 278.
[18] For further details see P. Aufderheide, “After the Fairness Doctrine: controversial broadcast programming and the public interest”, Journal of Communication 40, no.3 (1990): 47-72; and S. Harvey, “Doing it my way – broadcasting regulation in capitalist cultures: the case of ‘fairness’ and ‘impartiality'”, Media, Culture and Society 20 (1998): 535-556.
[19] E. G. Krasnow and L.D.Longley, Chapter 7, “Commercial time fiasco” in The Politics of Broadcast Regulation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 105-111; and N. Minow, “The vast wasteland” in L.Laurent, ed., Equal Time: The Private Broadcaster and the Public Interest (New York: Atheneum, 1964), 45-69.
[20] R. E. Hundt, Speech to the National Press Club, Washington,D.C., 27 July, 1995.
[21] See J. Corner and S. Harvey, eds., Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture (London: Routledge, 1991).
[22] See vey, 1998.
[23] Broadcasting Act (London: HMSO, 1990), p.2.
[24] Broadcasting Act, pp.15-16.
[25] ITC Invitation to Apply for a Channel 3 Licence (London: ITC, 1991); extracts reprinted in J.Corner and S.Harvey, eds., Television Times: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), 234-5.
[26] See J. Corner, S. Harvey and K.Lury, “Culture, quality and choice: the re-regulation of TV 1989-91”, in S.Hood, ed., Behind the Screens: The Structure of British Television in the Nineties (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1994), 1-19; and P. Goodwin, Television under the Tories: Broadcasting Policy 1979-1997 (London: British Film Institute, 1998).
[27] A. Davidson, Under the Hammer: The Inside Story of the 1991 ITV Franchise Battle (London: Heinemann, 1992), 297-8.
[28] N. Methven, “ITV licence winners in programming pledge”, Broadcast, 27 November 1998, p.1.
[29] ITC News Release, “ITC imposes £2m financial penalty for ‘The connection'” (London: ITC, 1998), pp.1-3.
[30] ITC, Annual Report and Accounts 1998 (London: ITC, 1999), p.32.
[31] Carlton Communications, “‘The connection’: report of the Investigation Panel appointed by Carlton Communications PLC” (London: Carlton, 1998), pp.37-8 and 41.
[32] ITC News Release (1998), p.3.
[33] ITC News Release (1998), p.2
[34] ITC, Annual Report and Accounts 1997 (London: ITC, 1998), p.4.
[35] D. Zolo, Democracy and Complexity: A Realist Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1982), 108.
[36] Minow (1964), ix-x; reprinted in Corner and Harvey, 1996, 258.
[37] Zolo, 181

About the Author

Sylvia Harvey

About the Author


Sylvia Harvey

Sylvia Harvey is Professor of Broadcasting Policy at Sheffield Hallam University (UK) and is also Principal Associate Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Board Centre for British Film and Television Studies. The new Centre is a consortium of seven university departments under the Directorship of Professor Laura Mulvey of Birkbeck College; it is funded for five years, from 2000-2005. Several of the Centre partners are former members of the Independent Film-makers Association.View all posts by Sylvia Harvey →