60 lines
4.9 KiB
Markdown
60 lines
4.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: 'SCMS, Day 1'
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date: '2004-03-04T18:11:00-05:00'
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permalink: /scms-day-1/
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tags:
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- conferences
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---
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What follows are my notes from the first session I attended today. They’re a little sketchy and a little incomplete (I got there about 10 minutes late), but they’ll at least remind me of what I heard.
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## Session 1, Thursday, March 4, 12.00 noon
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### A6: It’s Just Business: Institutional Strategies of Global Media Networks
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#### Jennifer Holt (University of California, Los Angeles), “Regulating Reality: The FCC and Industrial Design”
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- came in on commentary on AOL/Time Warner merger
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- Hollywood logic of removing AOL from corporate name, as if it will hide merger’s failures
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- Viacom/CBS
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- recent revision of network station-ownership rules
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- “there was a media frenzy over the media frenzy”
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- NBC’s parent (GE)’s purchase of Vivendi’s entertainment arm (including Universal)
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- NBC’s purchase of Universal (esp. Law & Order) makes logic of such media mergers clear: why rent when you can own?
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- FTC is reviewing Vivendi purchase; nearly lost the right to do so when Ashcroft declared all media mergers to be solely the province of the justice department
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- since Reagan era, the justice department has viewed consolidation in media realm as benign (or even positive)
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- UHF discount: audiences on UHF stations count as half, not full stations; Viacom and News Corp’s 39% ownership is thus larger than the number makes it appear
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- FCC has become “lapdog” rather than watchdog
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- local market/community broadcasting have become nothing more than theoretical interest
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- large consolidated networks become immune to community protest
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- networks are now just a cog in much larger media machines; mode for advertising rest of conglomerate
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- regulation’s role in determining whether network broadcasting will become tail or dog
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#### Mike Budd (Florida Atlantic University), “Private Disney, Public Disney”
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- Disney “aura”; conflicts between public image created by products and corporate image created by embittered labor relations
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- conflict between public image of company and carefully constructed aura
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- Disney products possess a certain immunity from critique in mainstream US imagination, including difficulty getting students to read critically
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- derives in part from Disney’s appropriation of childhood innocence
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- more people becoming aware of contradictions, however; some have come to view corporation as behaving in greedy fashion; perceptions of corporate hypocrisy
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- shift in print-media coverage of Disney; now at times critical — and the contrast between corporate practices and the aura make such critical stories news-worthy
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- excessive executive pay, exploited workers, aggressive litigiousness over copyright
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- “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” — Lawrence Lessig
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- such stories are more than just headaches for public relations: symptoms of larger issue: skirmishes over boundaries of definition of public and private — Disney’s appropriation and privatization of public spheres, while others attempt to hold the company publicly accountable
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#### Christine Becker (University of Notre Dame), “From High Culture to Hip Culture: Transforming the BBC into BBC America”
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- commercials read like “it’s not TV, it’s BBC America” — ad campaign seems to connect BBC to HBO (brand has previously been connected to PBS)
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- marketing and programming choices that separate BBC from PBS; larger strategies for corporate survival
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- traditional positioning of British TV as superior to American (*And Now for Something Completely Different*); inclusion of British programming on US cable channels as mode of creating sense of cultural value
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- high culture/low culture split created between BBC and US tv as mode of marketing and corporate distinction
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- development of BBC America — began 1998; originally PBS-like; now shifting from an A&E model to an HBO model; airs solely on digital cable
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- explicit distancing from BBC brand in advertising
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- “distinctive” qualities (marketing modes): risk, realism, refinement
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- “The Office” as prime mode of realism; “Faking It” as mode of refinement
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- original BBC mode — bring high culture to masses (“high pop”); mode of BBC America: embrace popular culture, but elevate to higher level of cultural understanding (“poplifting”)
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- BBC America has set forth model for successful digital cable channel — rehetoric of quality separating channel from traditional network broadcasting
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- impact of strategies reverberates back in Britain; BBC under fire there for abandoning original mandate; accused of becoming “too American”; in trying to retain position, argues that only they, as publicly funded, can provide successful (i.e., both popular and culturally important) programming in global era
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- The Office as ultimate success: won Golden Globes; outdoes US programming; couldn”t be done by US networks — BBC thus not becoming Americanized, but instead leading US networks in new directions
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