This article is concerned with key policy interventions in relation to the issue of violence in the Australian media. Media panics about violent events or violent media events, new media technologies and executive government inquiries are argued to be important elements in our analysis of policy formulation. We examine the recurring patterns in Australian regulatory policies governing media representations of violence from 1983-97. Media image regulation, at the close of the 20th century, is in part characterized by liberalizing and self-regulatory tendencies and that regulation inevitably has a strong commercial and market orientation. There exists a trajectory from state- to self-regulation, even though tensions still exist between these two regulatory impulses. Older media, television and video, have been subject to renewed attempts at state regulation, whereas emergent media policies display a clear industrial or market orientation.
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