Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture

Television Studies

Close ties between the public sector and television in specific localities are reflected in several articles in Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. Two very widely read contributions in WPCC focused respectively on television in Southwest China (Xin Zhang) and on the battle for the control of a local television station (Sun Wusan) in a Northern region of the same country. More recently Chinese news channels operating in Latin America were the focus of Pablo Sebastian Morales's analysis of one strand of international Chinese television strategy well away from local audiences. Policy was also to the fore in Nick Herd's examination of trade liberalisation and the television sector in Australia whereas Susan Bye's reflections on audience innocence and experience is linked to the long arc of Australian national identity creation and consolidation. Indeed the paradoxes of TV policy for a nation 'yet to be born' (the case of Palestine described by Helga Tawil-Souri) highlights how television can be central to debates around 'peripheral' national identities as with research by Mirta Varela linking both to Argentinian modernity in another example of the significant strand of media history evident in the journal's pages. Another is Sharon Sharaf's consideration of the collision of a global sitcom format with debates around Western cultural 'contamination' in Israel, 1982-86. UK television history is reflected in two perennial but still very relevant topics: government interference in the BBC during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and over The War Game (Peter Goodwin) and the silencing and underplaying of womens' contribution to television in the corporation's production and programming for female audiences in the case of Doreen Stephens that Mary Irwin recounts. Television's power to mould opinions and dreams is amply demonstrated in analysis of how watching Italian television (Nick Mai) motivated young Albanians to dream of, and take steps towards, a 'more modern' life overseas whereas Suzanne Franks laments declining Western TV news coverage of sub-Saharan Africa and how what little there was has framed perceptions of the continent only as a tale of 'disaster and conflict'. In the UK a different aspect of televisual power unleashed is discussed in Anthony McNicholas's work on the launch of Eastenders in 1985 , a 'significant moment' in British cultural history when the 'the private lives of relatively minor characters, as much as their on screen personas became public property'. Arguably televisual celebrity has never been the same since.

WPCC has never shied away from the industrial and management aspects of television with research such as articles on China's switch to digital (Michael Starks) and the rise of its independent production companies (Bonnie Rui Liu). As digital technology has ramped up the opportunities and complexities of the television market Sabine Basumann and Tim C. Hasenpusch in 2017 were on hand to consider the business models and definitions relating to multi-platform television services in an entire issue focusing on the disruptions to commercial media environments and their management. An entirely different approach focused was Paul Smith's assessment of the application of competition law to the vexed area of TV broadcasting regulation. Yet how television 'technologies can become so intensely meaningful for people' from a phenomenological angle (inspired by Paddy Scannell's work) is the theme considered in Lars Nyre's reflections on TV technology and 'What Happens When I Turn on the TV Set?'. For the 'experimental' period of television in the 1920s likewise Wendy Davis draws on Scannell's work to debate the idea of its 'liveness' within a WPCC issue considering the media and phenomenology.

As television contends with an increasingly fractured digital media environment WPCC looks forward to further contributions reflecting these varied traditions and an even wider array of approaches, theoretical work and case studies, in issues yet to come.

Research Articles

Could Chinese News Channels Have a Future in Latin America?

Pablo Sebastian Morales

2018-06-13 Volume 13 • Issue 1 • 2018 • 60-80

Also a part of:

Television Studies

Research Articles

Could Chinese News Channels Have a Future in Latin America?

Multi-Platform Television and Business Models: A Babylonian Clutter of Definitions and Concepts

Too Much or Not Enough? Competition Law and Television Broadcasting Regulation in the United Kingdom

What Women Want on television: Doreen Stephens and BBC television programmes for women, 1953–64

Chinese TV Changes Face: The Rise of Independents

Digital Television Switchover: China Goes Its Own Way

Welcome to the Sitcom School: A Globalized Outlook for the Study of Television History

Media History in a ‘Peripheric Modernity’: Television in Argentina 1951-1969

Watching Television in Australia: A Story of Innocence and Experience

Trade Liberalisation and Australia’s Television Cultural Policy: Power and Interest in National Television Policy

Global and Local Forces for a Nation-State Yet to be Born: The Paradoxes of Palestinian Television Policies

Television’s Liveness: A Lesson from the 1920s

What happens when I turn on the TV set?

A Small Chinese Town Television Station’s Struggle for Survival How a New Institutional Arrangement Came into Being

The Concept of ‘Local’ in Local Chinese Television: a Case Study of Southwest China’s Chongqing Television

EastEnders and the Manufacture of Celebrity

Low Conspiracy? – Government interference in the BBC1

Reporting Africa: Problems and Perspectives

‘Looking for a More Modern Life…’: the Role of Italian Television in the Albanian Migration to Italy