Media,Culture & Society

This article considers the suspension of the Fairness Doctrine in the USA and the legal instatement of the professional practice of impartiality in Britain as examples of two very different approaches to the regulation of broadcasting. These developments are located within the context of the shifts and changes of the post-Cold War period and are considered in terms of the highly differentiated unfolding of the bourgeois revolution in these two countries. It is also suggested that the practices of impartiality on the one hand, and of broadcaster advocacy or editorializing on the other, may be key factors for the outcome of a democratic process which seeks to identify the public interest and to foster the expression of public opinion.

The transformation of radio in the 1920s from amateur wireless into broadcasting reopened questions of the gender of radio, just as the suffrage movement had succeeded with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Wireless had been an overwhelmingly male hobby. But radio manufacturers and broadcasters made explicit efforts to feminize radio, moving it from a masculine technical sphere to a domestic sphere. The domestication of radio has been documented in the USA and elsewhere. Before they were successful, however, there was a period in the mid-1920s when various discourses explored radio's gender. This article focuses on this previously unexamined moment of exploration. The discourses can be read in the several radio magazines which sprouted in the early 1920s with the birth of broadcasting. They included not only feminists, but also male mainstream writers, advertisers and cartoonists who `played' with gender categories in this period. Among these diverse voices are representations of gender sameness and of difference. Assertions of sameness challenged male hegemony of technology. Representations of difference were more diverse. Some reduce men's use from mastering technology to playing with toys. Others linked women's use to their domestic roles. The confusing mix of discourses on gender was characteristic of the unsettled terms of living in 1920s America. This case illustrates one aspect of the process through which feminism was reabsorbed into American culture in the 1920s while not threatening the fundamental gender categories.

This article analyses the role which advertising discourses play in the construction of a `New Indian Woman' in her multiple avatars of homemaker. Given the new economic climate of liberalization that has been sweeping over India, the urban Indian woman is now an important consumer who, for the first time, has choices available to her. Consequently, advertising now adroitly combines both ideologies of feminism and femininity within discourses of consumerism. The article also argues that advertising discourses and the construction of gender and women's subjectivities are all inherently interrelated, and that they administer and moderate each other. Adopting a modified Foucauldian approach in locating the subject, the woman is seen both as constituted and formed by discourse, as well as resisting it. Moving away from reception-based analyses, the article concentrates on the ideas that producers of media texts have about their targeted audience. It goes on to show how, interestingly enough, women's spaces of resistance are created by advertisers themselves, even if that may not be their primary aim. Finally, the article examines how these spaces of resistance have to be understood as part of the entire dominant social structure.

The main focus of this article is the discursive analysis of internationalism. Within communication scholarship, the term `international' has primarily been treated as the sum total of already existing nation formations, each understood in terms of political, economic and administrative institutions and practices. This approach neglects the practices of signification through which international communities are constructed and legitimized. Analysis of discourses of internationalism is important because they are powerfully constitutive of people's identities, and also provide important insight into the contemporary reproduction of the `nation-form'. The article illustrates this by examining how the idea of a humanitarian community of nations is deployed by transnational agricultural corporations.

The 1995 Rugby World Cup was held in South Africa just one year after the country's first democratic elections. Throughout the tournament, the importance of competition victory for the South African team — playing under the banner of `One Team, One Nation' and endorsed by President Mandela — was articulated by the team, the local media, politicians and by its supporters in terms of its centrality to the project of nation-building. This discourse dominated all others. What made this articulation of the event all the more remarkable was the historic connection of the game with Afrikaner popular culture and with the political interests of the previous apartheid regime. Drawing on Dyan and Katz's (1992) model of the `media event', the article examines the processes behind this attempt to rearticulate the meaning of `South African rugby' away from narrow, race-specific interests towards those of the newly elected non-racial ANC-led government's nation-building project.

New and extended rights for performers have been introduced into UK copyright law as a result of EC Directives. It is widely supposed that they will make performers better off. In this article we attempt to test that assumption by analysing these changes with the focus on the music industry. We discuss the role of collecting societies in implementing these rights, and speculate on the costs of collection, the potential value of the rights and who will pay for them. Evidence is presented for the UK with references to Denmark and Sweden. We conclude that it is not obvious that all performers will be better off as a result.

Time-honoured distinctions between public service and commercial broadcasters are eroding. A chief driver of these changes is a rise in the prices of programmes and of the cost of television sports rights in particular. Many contemporary instances of these trends were foreshadowed in an early example of cooperation between European public service broadcasters and their commercial rivals in the 1980s. The EBU-sponsored satellite television channel Eurosport was a notable example. Eurosport was established in partnership with News International's Sky Channel in the late 1980s, a partnership that was brokered by the BBC. The history of Eurosport exemplifies the erosion of long-established distinctions between public service and commercial broadcasters in Europe. This process of `convergence' between public and commercial broadcasters will make special arrangements to protect and foster public service broadcasting difficult to sustain.