From ‘Taste and Standards’ to Structural Pluralism: Activism in the Australian Media Policy Process

Abstract

This paper traces the emergence of media policy reform activism in Australia around media content regulations for commercial broadcasting, from 1953 to 1976. Its focus is on processes of participation in public inquiries, and the ways in which these were manifestations of what Anna Yeatman (1998) has termed ‘activism in the policy process’. It finds evidence that such processes facilitated the emergence of more wide-ranging campaigns for media reform in the 1970s, but also finds that the extent to which such trends can be seen as applying a logic of ‘governmentality’ to broadcast media has in practice been limited by the predominantly commercial nature of the Australian broadcasting system, the conduct of regulatory agencies and their proneness to ‘regulatory capture’, and the extent to which the demands of media critics could be translated into implementable policies.