EUROPEAN SCIENCE FOUNDATION Standing Committee for the Social Sciences - Call for Proposals 2001
31 -Professor Van Zoonen Liesbet 14/05/2001
Project Leader:
Professor Van Zoonen Liesbet
Institution:
Org: Address:
Amsterdam School of Communications Research, University of Amsterdam Oude Hoogstraat 24 1012 CE Amsterdam The Netherlands
Tel: Fax:: Email: Web:
00 31 20 525 3980 00 31 20 525 3981 vanzoonen@pscw.uva.nl home.pscw.uva.nl/vanzoonen
Topic:
Topic D - Open element Keywords: public broadcasting, popular culture, normative theory
Title of Project Proposal:
The changing meanings of popular culture in European public broadcasting
Proposed date and location of workshop:
01/06/2002 Amsterdam
Budget estimates:
Travel: Accommodation: Logistical Costs: Administrative Costs: 6000 6150 950 1250 14350
Estimates Total:
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EUROPEAN SCIENCE FOUNDATION Standing Committee for the Social Sciences - Call for Proposals 2001
31 -Professor Van Zoonen Liesbet 14/05/2001
Abstract of research proposal:
Faced with the consequences of deregulation, digitisation and convergence, public broadcasters in Europe have turned to popular programming to maintain audience shares and therewith legitimacy. This strategic move has, however, not been accompanied by a systematic and thorough analysis of the public qualities and values of popular programs, of the public standards they could and should live up to and of the question - ultimately whether popular programming could be more than a means to and end but a public goal in itself. This workshop will address these questions and aim at developing a normative framework that enables European public broadcasting to maintain its own standards in the face of popularisation and to turn popular programming into a viable public resource.
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EUROPEAN SCIENCE FOUNDATION Standing Committee for the Social Sciences - Call for Proposals 2001
31 -Professor Van Zoonen Liesbet 14/05/2001
Research Proposal:
In the past decade, public broadcasting in Europe has been confronted with numerous changes and challenges that result from deregulation, digitisation and convergence. Deregulation has opened the European media landscape to commercial broadcasters who have drawn large audience from their public colleagues. Digitisation has produced an increase in available channels - both general and thematic - and enabled a personalization of television services through various means of pay-tv. Convergence, thirdly, will restructure the media landscape further because of its ensuing broadcast options for new content providers like cable and internet operators. In these times of media abundance the viability, legitimacy and mission of public broadcasting have come under siege. Steemers (1997:55), for instance, claims that: "the combination of the commodification of television together with the technical and economic convergence of broadcasting and telecommunication has served to reinforce the priority of economic over cultural policy goals." Broadcasting audiences are increasingly addressed as consumers instead of as citizens, by public and commercial stations alike. To maintain legitimacy in the multimedia abundance, public broadcasting needs to have a firm grounding in society; it needs large audiences, as many public broadcasters in Europe are now acknowledging. Commercial discourse has therefore become part of European public broadcasting, as testifies the fact that most of its stations are now "branding" their output as signifying unique values such as diversity and quality, complete with accompanying logos and advertising slogans (cf. Ellis, 2000). Popular programming is another means through which public broadcasters have taken on commercial competition. Dutch public broadcasting, for instance, has singled out one of its three channels as a vehicle for popular programming (NOS, 2000) thus fighting commercial broadcasters partly with their own means. This is only one of four strategies that have been observed by Achille and Miege (1994). A second one is that of maintaining or strengthening the status quo because the traditional public mission is thought to be most profitable in facing the competition. This is what German public broadcasters like ARD and ZDF appear to do. The BBC takes another road to maintain its position and has adopted a commercial mode of scheduling including an increase in popular fiction. That oppositional strategy is complemented with a renewed emphasis on public goals in particular with respect to information and education. A fourth strategy mentioned by Achille and Miege is that of Italian public broadcaster RAI who has confronted commercial challenge by a vigorous popular programming of its own scheduling primarily light entertainment and popular fiction (strategy of identification). Although these four strategies differ in many respects, three of them have an increased emphasis on popular programming in common. In the strategy of partial confrontation that is expressed by reserving a special public channel for popular programming. In the oppositional strategy an increased amount of popular programs is scheduled in a way that optimises audience shares. In the identification strategy public broadcasters have produced an almost completely popular output. The increased use of popular genres in public broadcasting has, however, not been accompanied by a thorough rethinking of the particular and possible public qualities of this kind of programming. Although the historic disdain for popular genres so typical of European public broadcasting until the 1990ies (Ang, 1991) has disappeared, popular programmes are still often considered a necessary evil that might endanger the vulnerable values in broadcasting (cf. Blumler, 1992). At best popular programming is seen as means to public goals. One of these goals is to increase the audience share in order to maintain legitimacy; another one is to lure the audience into watching other public output. As the Dutch president of public broadcasting recently said: "Popular programs are locomotives that pull the carriages that matter into the station" (Wolffensperger, 2001). With the increased if not indispensable importance of popular programming in current public broadcasting, it has become imperative to address the public qualities and values of popular genres, to address which public standards they could and should live up to and to address – ultimately - whether popular programming could be an end to pursue for its own sake in public broadcasting. Such issues are largely ignored by normative media theory, debate and research alike. McQuail (1996:67) has claimed, for instance: "There is (...) little of relevance in any of the varieties of the theory which might realistically be applied to the cinema, or the music industry, or the video market, or even a good deal of sport, fiction and entertainment on television, thus to much of what the media are doing most of the time." This lack of normative theories about popular programmes is a hardly recognized threat to contemporary public broadcasting. Whereas the challenges resulting from the new communication technologies and the resulting fragmentation of audience behaviour and needs have been discussed in much detail (e.g. Chalaby & Segell (1999), popularisation seems to have slowly overtaken public broadcasting without much consideration as to whether and how it contributes to public goals. Public value is in fact not really expected let alone considered necessary as long as popular genres draw the audiences necessary for legitimacy and for adjacent programmes with 'real' public values. Thus, despite its crucial strategic relevance for public broadcasting, popular culture has not acquired an analogue substantial importance in normative debate. To talk about the possible public values of popular programming might seem a contradictio in terminis at first sight. Public broadcasting, generally considered one of the core institutes of the public sphere together with journalism and representative politics, is firmly rooted in the modern tradition of the enlightenment which is distinguished by a belief in rationality, progress and the capacity of people to take control over their own destiny. Popular culture, on the other hand, has its origins in folklore and oral culture and has in today's times been articulated with leisure and consumption rather than with engagement and citizenship (cf. Van Zoonen, 1998). In addition, the legacy of the Frankfurter Schule, has ensured a reputation of various popular genres as deeply perverted by commercial interests, as lacking authenticity and creativity and as numbing and dumbing public and individual consciousness (cf. Jensen, 1990), thus - in sum - lacking precisely those values that public broadcasting holds high. If, in such a
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EUROPEAN SCIENCE FOUNDATION Standing Committee for the Social Sciences - Call for Proposals 2001
31 -Professor Van Zoonen Liesbet 14/05/2001
context, the public values of popular genres are discussed it is in terms of anti-social and anti-public merits rather than pro-social and pro-public ones (e.g. McQuail, 1986). Nevertheless, the current strategic relevance of popular culture for public broadcasting makes it is necessary for contemporary public broadcasting to withstand the common dismissal of popular genres and to articulate its possible and necessary contribution to the public mission. In general terms, various authors have pointed out positive social, political and moral values of popular culture with John Fiske (1990, 1992) being its most outspoken advocate. According to Fiske, popular culture represents and reconstructs the authentic experience of the people who have no voice in the official culture of the public sphere nor (by implication) in public broadcasting. He sees various popular genres varying from quiz shows to tabloid journalism as producing a counter ideology to the "demure respectability" and the "confines of good sense" enforced by official culture. In a Fiskean perspective then, popular culture might be seen as having the capacity to transform public broadcasting from the elite instrument it would be conceived to be, to a voice of and platform for the experience of ordinary people. However, it is hard to see from this perspective what would distinguish public popular programming from commercial popular programming and whether such a distinction would make sense at all. Popular culture in this approach intrinsically derives its value precisely from the fact that it is popular among the people whereas other forms of culture are seen has having instrumental value only, as mainstays of the social elite. Precisely the diversity of cultural forms that is essential to public broadcasting would disappear under the reign of popularity. A less radical appreciation of popular culture has pointed at specific social, political and moral values arising from particular genres in particular contexts (cf. Van Zoonen, 1999). Particular kinds of popular talk shows, for instance, have been acclaimed and recognized as new fora for public discussion, allowing ordinary people of different gender, ethnicity, class and other backgrounds to take their share in public debate, to have their voice heard (e.g. Linvingstone & Lunt, 1994). However, other work on talk shows has made clear that not all of them function in such a "public" way while many of them propose private, individual solutions rather than social debate (e.g. Rapping, 1996). Similarly, soap operas have been shown to carry social values and be of use in educational projects (e.g. Vink, 1988). They have also been criticized for their stereotypical representation of gender, for upholding consumerist values and celebrating the lifestyle of the rich and famous (e.g. Modleski, 1984). A third example of the contradictory values of popular genres is offered by the category of sports programming, of national football teams in particular. Whereas on the one hand, extreme nationalism and racism are core ingredients of watching national teams, on the other hand national teams are seen to provide a common focus to otherwise dispersed societies and a source of pride for nations in diaspora or under oppression (cf. Brown, 1998). The contradictory political, social and moral values of talks shows, soaps and televised football have been observed in other popular genres like pop music (e.g. Stapleton, 1998), reality television (e.g. Van Zoonen, 2001), police series (Wayne, 1998) and even advertising (Costera Meijer, 1998). The problem with such assessments, however, is that they invariably have been observed post hoc, with the benefit of hindsight when researchers or journalists are able to recognize what political, social or moral merits programs have had. Such post hoc insights have not been translated into normative theory and concepts about popular television that can guide public program policy and production, and that could provide criteria to judge popular performance in public broadcasting afterwards. A similar problem arises from Skovmand and Schroder's (1992) attempt to formulate specific quality criteria for television that encapsulates the specific features of popular programming. He argues that the usual aesthetic and ethical criteria to assess the quality of cultural products do not suffice in the case of television. The authors therefore propose a third category of ecstatic value that captures the capacity of popular television in particular to evoke deep and varying emotions among its audiences. The triad of ethics, aesthetics and ecstatics would then have to provide the criteria to gauge the quality of television programming. Notwithstanding the relevance of ecstatic value for thinking about the merits of popular programming for public broadcasting, it is a value that can only be derived from audience reception afterwards. It does hardly provide easily applicable frameworks or guidelines or program policy and production. The ESF exploratory workshop proposed here will work towards developing the normative theories about popular programming necessary for European public broadcasting to maintain its own standards in the face of popularisation and to turn popular programming into a viable public resource. The workshop will stand at the root of a research line developed within the Amsterdam School of Communication Research in which the particular use and relevance of popular programming for a number of European national public broadcasters is compared and which requires the substantial support and feedback of a network of experts in the field. The focus will be on policies and practices of North European public broadcasters (in particular UK, Netherlands, Germany and the Scandinavian countries) because of the relative homogeneity of their broadcast systems and television cultures (cf. Kleinsteuber et al., 1986). The workshop will focus in particular on the popular dimension of core public broadcasting values such as quality and diversity, on the public potential of a popular programming, both in terms of genres and scheduling, and on the potential of popular genres to regain audiences considered 'lost' for public broadcasting, notably youth and ethnic minorities. The papers produced for the workshop will be published in an edited volume with an international publisher. References Achille, Y. & B. Miege (1994). 'The limits to the adaptation strategies of European public service television.' Media, culture and society, vol.16(1): 31-47. Ang, I. (1991). Desperately seeking the audience. London: Routledge. Blumler, J. (1992)(ed). Television and the public interest. Vulnerable values in West European Broadcasting. London: Sage. Brown, A. (1998)(ed). Fanatics. Power, identity and fandom in football. London: Routledge. Chalaby, J. & G. Segell (1999). 'The broadcasting media in the age of risk.' New Media and Society, vol.1(3): 351368 Costera Meijer, I. (1998). "Advertising citizenship: an essay on the performative power of consumer culture" Media, culture and society, vol.20(2): 235-250. Ellis, J. (2000). "Scheduling: the last creative act on television" Media, culture and society, vol.22(1): 25-39. Fiske, J. (1990). "Women and quiz shows: consumerism, patriarchy and resisting pleasures" In M. Brown (ed). Television
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and women's culture. Beverly Hills: Sage, p. 134-44. Fiske, J. (1992). "Popularity and the politics of information" In P. Dahlgren & C. Sparks (eds). Journalism and popular culture. London: Sage, p. 45-63. Jensen, J. (1990). Redeeming modernity: contradictions in media criticism. London: Sage. Livingstone, S. & P. Lund (1994). Talk on television. London: Routledge. McQuail, D. (1986). "Commercialisation". In D. McQuail & K. Siune (eds). New media politics: comparative perspectives in Western Europe. London: Sage, p.152-179. McQuail, D. (1996). 'Mass media in the public interests: towards a framework of norms for media performance." In J. Curran & M. Gurevitch (eds). Mass media and society, London: Arnold, second edition. Modleski, T. (1994). Loving with a vengeance: mass produced fantasies for women. London: Methuen. NOS (2000). Verschil maken (Making a difference). Concessiebeleidsplan 2000-2010, landelijke publieke omroep ('Green paper' Dutch public broadcasting). Hilversum: NOS. Rapping, E. (1996). The culture of recovery. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Skovmand, M. and K. Schroder (1992)(eds). Media cultures: reappraising transnational media. London: Routledge. Stapleton, K. (1998). "From the margins to the mainstream: the political power of hip-hop" Media, culture and society, vol.20(2): 219-235. Steemers, J. (1997). 'Broadcasting is dead. Long live digital choice.' Convergence, vol.3(1): 51- 71. Vink, N. (1988). The telenovela and emancipation. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute. Wayne, M. (1998). "Counter hegemonic strategies in Between the Lines" In M. Wayne(ed). Dissident voices: the politics of television and cultural change. London: Pluto Press. Wolffensperger, G.J. (2001). The future of public broadcasting, Guest Lecture at the masterclass Future of television. University of Amsterdam, May 14. Zoonen, L. van (1998). 'A day at the zoo: political communication, pigs and popular culture.' media, culture and society, vol.20(2): 183-201. Zoonen, L. van (1999). "De maatschappelijke betekenissen van populaire cultuur'. in: J. van Cuilenburg, P. Neijens & O. Scholten (red). Media in overvloed. Over verdwijnende loyaliteiten en wisselende mediacontacten. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, p. 67-83. Zoonen, L. van (2001). "Desire and resistance: the representation of everyday life in Big Brother" Media, culture and society, vol.23(5), forthcoming.
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EUROPEAN SCIENCE FOUNDATION Standing Committee for the Social Sciences - Call for Proposals 2001
31 -Professor Van Zoonen Liesbet 14/05/2001
Planned workshop programme:
The workshop will bring together between ten and fifteen scholars with a demonstrable interest in public broadcasting and/or popular culture studies. The workshop will in addition be attended by scholars from the host institution. An attempt will be made to mix experienced and young scholars, and to attain a 50-50 gender representation. Participants are expected to submit papers reflecting on normative guidelines that can be derived from empirical evidence about various cases of popular programming. The workshop will take three days with the following provisional programme: PART I: : popular culture contributing to public values papers addressing quality and diversity as possible realised through popular programming). PART II: public relevance of popular programming (papers addressing public norms for popular genres, such as sports, soaps, reality, entertainment and public norms for popular scheduling). PART III: popular programming and the audience lost (papers addressing the relevance of popular programming for specific target groups, such as youths and etnic minorities) PART IV: synthesising and concluding collective exercise.
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EUROPEAN SCIENCE FOUNDATION Standing Committee for the Social Sciences - Call for Proposals 2001
31 -Professor Van Zoonen Liesbet 14/05/2001
Brief profile of proposed participating teams and/or persons:
Minna Aslama, University of Tampere, Finland. Expertise on talkshows. Jerome Bourdon, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Expertise on European entertainment programming. Hilde van den Bulck, University of Leuven, Belgium. Expertise in public broadcasting and national identity. Peter Dahlgren, University of Stockholm, Sweden. Author of Television and the public sphere (1995, Sage). Kirsten Drotner, University of Kopenhagen, Danmark. Expertise in youth and (multi)media. Christine Geraghty, Goldsmith College, Great Britain. Expertise in national features of soap operas. Denis McQuail, emeritus, Netherlands. Author of Media Performance (1992, Sage), in which existing norms and values in public broadcasting are summarized and organized into encompassing dimensions. Lothar Mikos, Hochschule fur Film und Fernsehen, Potsdam, Germany. Author of Im auge der Kamera (2000, Vistas) about reality television. Kevin Robins, Golding University, Great Britain. Expertise on Turkish television and audiences in Europe. David Rowe, University of Newcastle, Australia. Expertise in various dimensions of media and sport. Kim Schroder, University of Roskilde. Expertise on various quality criteria in public broadcasting John Street, University of East Anglia, Great Britain. Author of Politics & Popular Culture (1997, Polity). Tryne Syvertsen, University of Oslo, Norway. Research expertise in entertainment programming and public broadcasting policy. Gillian Ursell, University of Leeds, Great Britain. Expertise in impact of commercialization of public broadcasting production processes.
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EUROPEAN SCIENCE FOUNDATION Standing Committee for the Social Sciences - Call for Proposals 2001
31 -Professor Van Zoonen Liesbet 14/05/2001
Curriculum vitae of scientific coordinator:
Professor Liesbet van Zoonen (1959) works at the Universities of Amsterdam and Maastricht in The Netherlands in the areas of popular culture, gender and multi media studies. She is the author of various books on media and popular culture (among others Feminist Media Studies, 1994; Media, Cultuur en Burgerschap, 1999; Gender, politics and Communication, 2000) and has published numerous articles in highly rated SSCI journals among which the European Journal of Communication, Media, Culture and Society, and Harvard International Journal for Press/Politics. She is the director of the Centre for Popular Culture at the University of Amsterdam which brings university and industry together in research, teaching and public debate about the values of contemporary media culture. She has received grants from the Dutch Asssociation of Copy rights (BUMA/Stemra) and the Dutch Institute for Popular Music to appoint a special professor in popular music; from the VandenEnde Foundation for PhD research about the social relevance of popular television drama; from the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) for research on gender bending on the internet; from the Dutch Public Broadcasting Association (NOS), the Holland Media Group and Endemol Entertainment for teaching masterclasses about the Dutch television industry. She cooperates with the Dutch Soccer Association (KNVB) in teaching projects about football as entertainment. Professor Van Zoonen is on the editorial board of the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Journalism Studies, the European Journal of Communication, Feminist Media Studies, New Media and Society. She was the president of the Gender Section of the International Association of Mass Communication Research and has served on the international council of that organisation. She is a member of the European Science Foundation research programme Changing Media, Changing Europe.
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