The throne we honour is the people's choice-Sheridan, PizarroUnto everyone that bath shall be given, and he shall have abundance, but @om him that bath not shall be taken away even that which he bath-Matt. 25~29The past decade has seen a widespread assault on the importance, even legitimacy, of public service broadcasting in the major industrialized democracies. From the close of the Second World War until the late 1970s, public broadcasting organizations had stood in powerful, resilient opposition to commercial systems, and they dominated the cultural geology of the societies from which they had been formed. (The only major exception to this pattern was in the United States, where public broadcasting had been much slower to develop and had far fewer resources.) Political problems faced even the strongest of these institutions, but as an intellectual, cultural, and creative construction, the edifice of public service broadcasting seemed permanent and inherently stable.By the closing years of the 1980s that edifice was widely seen to be crumbling. Public broadcasting institutions and the notions of cultural and political discourse that undergird them seemed everywhere to be under serious attack. Public TV and radio were created in Canada to provide our best creators and our bestpe@ormers with an opportunity to express themselves and to allow citizens of Canada acces to the best creations, the best ideas, the best traditions and intellectual values-whether we 're talking about theatre, literature, music, dance, science, technology, economics, things social or things politi-After leaving the FCC, Brenner was appointed by President Reagan to the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

No abstract

No abstract

strong contemporary movement to develop and find a place in the academy for programs or even formal departments known as "telecommunications." This tendency is in part a natural outgrowth of an increasing academic awareness of the importance of communications technologies in modern society and a desire to create more intellectual space for their study and interpretation. The tendency is likewise driven by the professional training imperatives of the university-to explore the opportunities for developing degree programs in fields of applied practice that will continue to tie important aspects of economic and cultural life.To many in communication research and teaching, this new arena is seen as an extension, perhaps just another subfield, of the interdisciplinary mix of interests that have over the decades fostered an increasingly central place in the academy for the various programs associated under the communication rubric-journalism, speech, media studies, broadcasting, advertising, film, and mass communication. In that light, telecornmunications is understood as part of the liberal arts nexus, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, that have informed all aspects of comniunication study and to which the field itself has made significant contributions.Little recognized, however, has been that aspect of the development of telecommunications that has emerged quite independently of the arts and sciences heritage, a strain that is lodged much more thoroughly in the applied professional realms of such other fields as engineering and business. Because such programs tend to be more technical and management oriented, they attract a strongly applied, vocational student interest and corninand relatively rich sources of support from the principal relevant industries (e.g., telephone and computer) and from those state and federal

No abstract