Communications, Corporatism, and Dependent Development in Ireland

The Role of Education in Irish Public Service Broadcasting

“…The creation of this post refiected the Catholic view of women as natural carers of the Irish family. Education's role in broadcasting was to assist in the development of an Irish civil society within the Catholic-based ideology of cultural protectionism and Irish nationalism (Bell 1995). This positioning of education would seem to indicate that education would gain a high status in Irish broadcasting, buttressed by state and institutional support.…”

“…What this national culture was, and how RT6 was to set about developing it, was not clear. On the one hand, it could be defined narrowly as the Gaelic, Catholic culture that Bell (1995) outlined. A more open approach was taken by RTfi, who defined it in terms of its general contribution to national identity.…”

“…The weak economic situation of the new nation had necessitated the adoption of commercial values. A policy of interventionism was introduced in the 1920s, followed by economic protectionism in the 1930s and 1940s in an attempt to consolidate Irish independence and industry (Bell 1995). Broadcasting's main purpose was still to be a public servant, albeit one that should pay its own wages.…”

Horizons of the State: Information Policy and Power

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Conceptions of the state underlie all information and communication policy,' for the state uses policy as tools of power. This is true whether those conceptions are well or poorly formed, understood or not, explicit or implicit-but, as Bell (1995) points out in this issue, failure to understand the state leads to an inability to analyze policy. Historically, however, policy analysis has tended to treat the state generally as a venue, a justification for particular positions, or one institutional player among many.

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“…Mody (1995) and McDowell (1995) both look at India, finding differences in the policy-making histories of, respectively, telecommunications and the software industry. And Sparks (1995) and Bell (1995) both analyze the relationship between public service broadcasting and the state, Sparks doing so from the perspective of an imperial power in decline, and Bell from the point of view of a state historically dependent on that same imperial power.This symposium provides lenses that range in focus from the Sussman (1995) and Jakubowicz (1995) macroviews (for Sussman across media and administrations, for Jakubowicz across states), through studies of policies for specific media within individual states (Barrera, 1995;Bell, 1995;McDowell, 1995;Mody, 1995), to Sparks's (1995) microview of a particular discourse within a specific policy discussion (within an individual state). Almost all of the articles deal with peripheral nation-states; though the Sparks piece is the one exception, the Britain of his article shares with the developing world a concern with movement away from the center.These articles, as discussed below, provide further elaboration of the framework offered here by illuminating particular features of states in the developing world, the emergence of the network state, and tensions between the nation and the state.…”