Future Paper:

Directions for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

A bibliography with some annotations

A Swinburne University Research Report for Friends of the ABC 

Media and Telecommunications Centre; July 1994

Preface

This bibliography has been produced as reference material as commissioned by Friends of the ABC. Its prime purpose is to highlight key issues of changes in public broadcasting. The broadcasting order (comprising both radio and television and when the term is used here without qualification, it means either or both media) is undergoing change in nearly all parts of the world, both in policy reforms and in the broader context of a shift towards globalisation.

The need for a project such as this was raised after an address given to the Annual General Meeting of the Victorian Branch of the Friends of the ABC on 12 September 1993 by the president Janet Powell. In this address, Trevor Barr suggested three key contemporary pressures on public broadcasters to develop as frames of reference:

• international changes, especially privatisation
• fragmentation and compromise against comprehensiveness
• responses to 'technologies of abundance'.

This associated project, was undertaken by researcher Brenda O'Connor and has focussed on these changes within Western industrialised countries, especially the UK, USA, Canada, Europe and Australia. The comparative nature of the analysis is not simply a listing of country-by-country systems and approaches, but seeks to identify and explain the similarities and differences, remembering that every nation is faced with a paradox between broadcasting as a universal, international medium and broadcasting as a uniquely national medium. Nations have always looked towards other countries' solutions to common broadcasting problems, hoping both to avoid mistakes and to benefit from the successes of others.

Common problems are faced by all broadcasting systems. 'Every system, no matter what its setting, must deal with the basic, universal demands and dilemmas of the medium. The inherent attributes of broadcasting itself, interacting with the circumstances of a particular national setting, leave policymakers and managers with relatively few options in deciding how to finance, regulate, deploy, organise, manage, afford access to, and program their systems.'* The aim of the material included here is to synthesise theory and practice in the new broadcasting order for a futures strategy for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Head, S., World Broadcasting Systems: A Comparative Analysis, Wadsworth Publishing Company, California, 1985, vi.

Copies of the full paper are available from the FABC office.