Defining the nation, defining public television: discourses of publics on public service television in post-communist Latvia

Institutional and political economy approaches have long dominated the study of post-Communist public broadcasting, as well as the entire body of post-Communist media transformations research, and the enquiry into publics of public broadcasting has traditionally been neglected. Though media scholars like to talk about a deep crisis in the relationship between public broadcasters and their publics in former Communist bloc countries across Central and Eastern Europe, little has been done to understand the relationship between public broadcasters and their publics in these societies drawing on qualitative audience research tradition. Building on Hirschman’s influential theory of ‘exit, voice and loyalty’, which made it possible to see viewing choices audiences make as an act of agency, in combination with theoretical tools developed within the framework of social constructionist approaches to national imagination and broadcasting, my study focuses on the investigation of responses publics of the Latvian public television LTV have developed vis-à-vis its role as contributing to the nation-building project in this ex-Soviet Baltic country. With the help of focus groups methodology and family ethnography, the thesis aims to explore the relationship between the way members of the ethno-linguistic majority of Latvian-speakers and the sizeable ethno-linguistic minority of Russian-speakers conceptualize the public broadcaster LTV, as well as understand the concept of public broadcasting more generally, and the way they define the national ‘we’. The study concludes that what I call publics of LTV employ Hirschman’s described exit mechanism as a voice-type response. Through their rejection of public television which, for a number of complex reasons they consider to be a state broadcaster serving the interests of those in power they voice their protest against the country’s political establishment and in the case of its Russian-speaking publics also against the government’s ethno-nationalistic conception of the national ‘we’. I also find that though having exited from the public broadcaster LTV, its publics have not abandoned the idea of public broadcasting as such. At least at a normative level the public broadcasting ideals are recognized, accepted and valued, though they are not necessarily associated with the country’s de jure institutional embodiment of public broadcasting LTV. Rejection of the public television has also not made its non-loyal publics ‘less citizens’. The commercial rivals of LTV, be they national or, in the case of Russian-speaking audiences, localized transnational Russian television, have allowed their viewers to exercise citizenship and be loyal nationals day in day out in a way that is more liberal and flexible than the hegemonic form of citizenship and national imagination of the public television LTV can offer.

Guiding public protest: assessing the propaganda model of China’s hybrid newspaper industry

This dissertation presents an account and analysis of published mainland Chinese media coverage surrounding three major events of public protest during the Hu-Wen era (2003-2013). The research makes a qualitative analysis of printed material drawn from a range of news outlets, differentiated by their specific political and commercial affiliations. The goal of the research is to better understand the role of mainstream media in social conflict resolution, a hitherto under-studied area, and to identify gradations within the ostensibly monolithic mainland Chinese media on issues of political sensitivity. China’s modern media formation displays certain characteristics of Anglophone media at its hyper-commercialised, populist core. However, the Chinese state retains an explicit, though often ambiguous, remit to engage with news production. Because of this, Chinese newspapers are often assumed to be one-dimensional propaganda ‘tools’ and, accordingly, easily dismissed from analyses of public protest. This research finds that, in an area where political actors have rescinded their monopoly on communicative power, a result of both policy decisions and the rise of Internet-based media platforms, established purveyors of news have acquired greater latitude to report on hitherto sensitive episodes of conflict but do so under the burden of having to correctly guide public opinion. The thesis examines the discursive resources that are deployed in this task, as well as reporting patterns which are suggestive of a new propaganda approach to handling social conflict within public media. Beside the explicitly political nature of coverage of protest events, the study sheds lights on gradations within China’s complex, hybrid media landscape both in terms of institutional purpose and qualitative performance.

Kevin Barry and the Anglo-Irish Propaganda War

Most Irish people, when asked what they know of the life and death of Kevin Barry, will pause for a moment while they recall the words of a famously maudlin ballad. A few points will emerge: ‘a lad of eighteen summers’ … ‘British soldiers tortured Barry’ … ‘refused to turn informer’ … ‘hanged him like a dog’ … ‘another martyr for old Ireland, another murder for the crown’. That they know anything at all about Kevin Barry is testimony, among other things, to the power of popular music for the making of political propaganda. Along with Father Murphy, Seán South and Fergal O’Hanlon, Kevin Barry figures in the pantheon of nationalist Ireland’s popular historical heroes, largely because somebody happened to write a good song about him. In many ways this is unfortunate, for Barry and the rest were once living people, and the process of iconographifying them in popular balladry, like all forms of political propaganda, serves not to clarify their roles in the historical events in which they played a part, but rather to obscure and distort them. So it is worth reconsidering the story of Kevin Barry, for a number of reasons. To begin with, his short life reached its climax at a vital moment in the long struggle for Irish self-government, a moment when the violence unleashed in 1916 burst forth again with renewed savagery on both British and Irish sides, involving in the Barry case the deaths of four young men aged between fifteen and twenty.

‘The voice speaking, desired, awaited’: Jack Lindsay’s 1649, Textual Form and Communist Historiography

This article examines the 1938 historical novel 1649: A Novel of a Year by the Anglo-Australian communist polymath Jack Lindsay in the context of the politics of the Popular Front, and identifies the aesthetic and historiographic debates questions that inform Lindsay’s inventive rendition of the historical novel. The novel may be considered in light of what Lindsay later called his desire ‘to use the novel to revive revolutionary traditions’, as well as his ‘struggle to achieve an understanding of the Novel while writing novels’. Lindsay’s novel figures a reality becoming prosaic: it reproduces contemporary textual sources – tracts, pamphlets, newspapers – as part of its meditation on a nascent print culture whose products circulate in processes that mirror the increasingly conspicuous flow of commodities. In this sense, the novel offers a marxist reflection on its own conditions of possibility in emergent bourgeois culture, as well as intervening in the vexed question of the Civil War as a ‘bourgeois revolution’. The novel however seeks to capture a dialectical method of representing the revolution that acknowledges defeat while rearticulating the utopian content of the defeated radicals, a practice integral to Lindsay’s vision of popular history as a transhistorical dialogue. That utopian content is transmitted through two forms: popular song, which acts to supplement political writing; and the heroic portrayal of the Leveller John Lilburne on trial, whose conduct exemplifies praxis conceived as a unity of word, thought and action.

Nazi Wireless Propaganda: Lord Haw-Haw and British Public Opinion in the Second World War

This is the first book devoted exclusively to the analysis of the Nazis' radio effort against the United Kingdom during the Second World War. It traces the development of the German propaganda service and looks to erode the myth surrounding Lord Haw-Haw -the 'superpropagandist'. Propaganda is presented in context: the purposes behind it, the changing patterns, themes, styles, and techniques employed, and the impact upon the target audience and its morale. An analysis of the Nazi wireless broadcasts to Britain for the whole of the Second World War reveals a sophisticated and intelligent propaganda assault on the social and economic fabric of British society. In the end the British failed to succumb to the stupefying effects of Nazi propaganda and they traditionally congratulate themselves upon the national unity which immunised them against it. The author argues that this traditional view disguises a more complex, less appealing reality. Free CD Includes a CD of 24 German wartime broadcasts to Britain Key Features: *Exposition of organisational structure of Nazi wireless for the UK *Detailed analysis of style and content of propaganda broadcasts *Careful and critical re-appraisal of British domestic morale and national unity *CD insert of 24 recordings of Nazi broadcasters including William Joyce, John Amery, Edward Dietze, Norman Baillie-Stewart, Edward Bowlby and 'Black' propaganda broadcasts

The battle of Cable Street

This witness seminar on the events in the East End of London of 4 October 1936, traditionally known as the ‘Battle of Cable Street’, was held at the Institute of Historical Research on 1 May 1991. It was chaired by Professor Geoffrey Alderman and introduced by Noreen Branson. The participants were Sid Bailey (former member of the BUF), Dr David Cesarani, Tony Gilbert, Charlie Goodman, Joyce Goodman, Professor Colin Holmes, Frank Lesser, Kevin Morgan (biographer of Harry Pollitt), Phil Piratin (Communist MP for Mile End 1945–50), Michael Quill, Jack Shaw, Harold Smith, Ronald F. Webb (former member of the BUF) and Len Wise (former member of the BUF). Yvonne Kapp was unable to attend but she sent a short account of her recollections of the event and this has been included with this transcript.

“An Absurdly Quiet Spot”: The Spatial Justice of WW1 Fraternizations

Recent research on WW1 shows that incidents of fraternization across enemy lines took place regularly. However, fraternization remains a taboo in many contexts. The fact that the 2005 film Joyeux Noel by Christian Caron, which explicitly deals with the subject, encountered resistance from the authorities, is an indication of the kind of difficulty associated with the issue. I am drawing my inspiration from the way fraternizations are depicted in the film and in the literature in order to explore the concept of spatial justice. I define spatial justice as the question that emerges when a body desires to occupy the same space at the same time as another body. Defined like this, the question of spatial justice opens up in the dread of No Man’s Land and in particular the exchange of affects, objects and narratives that went on during fraternizations. I trace the movement of spatial justice as one of withdrawal from the asphyxiating atmosphere of the war and the propaganda machine. This withdrawal is not one of unpatriotic stance but of a courageous and difficult detachment from the supposed legality of the war that could only function on the basis of hate and demonization. While fraternizations did not end the war, they allowed for the possibility of spatial justice to emerge, as an opportunity to reorient the space and the bodies within.

The Turtle Garden: Tan Kah Kee’s last spiritual world

This paper explores the role of diasporic subjects in China’s heritage-making through a case study of the Turtle Garden built by Tan Kah Kee in Xiamen, China. Tan is the first person with Overseas Chinese background who built museums in the P.R. China and has been regarded as a symbol of Overseas Chinese patriotism. This paper argues that the Turtle Garden, conceptualised as a postcolonial ‘carnivalesque’ space, is more than a civic museum for public education. It reflects the owner’s highly complex and sometimes conflicting museum outlook embedded in his life experience as a migrant, his encounter with (British) colonialism in Malaya, and integrated with his desire and despair about the Chinese Communist Party’s nation-building project in the 1950s. Rather than a sign of devotion to the socialist motherland as simplistically depicted in China’s discourse, the garden symbolises Tan’s last ‘spiritual world’ where he simultaneously engaged with soul-searching as a returned Overseas Chinese and alternative diasporic imagining of Chinese identities and nation. It brings to light the value of heritage-making outside centralised heritage discourses, and offers an invaluable analytical lens to disentangle the contested and ever shifting relationship between diasporic subjects, cultural heritage and nation-(re)building in the Chinese context and beyond.

A Social Institutionalist Perspective on HR Diffusion: Histrorical and Cultural Receptivity to HRM in a Post-Comminist Context

This research considers cross-national diffusion of international human resource management (IHRM) ideas and practices by applying an emergent frame of sociological conceptualisation – ‘social institutionalism’ (SI). We look at cultural filters to patterns of diffusion, assimilation and adoption of IHRM, using Romania as a case study. The paper considers the former Communist system of employment relations, suggesting that through institutionalisation former ways of thinking continued to influence definitions and practice of people management in post-Communist Eastern Europe. The paper provides a new perspective on HRM by discussing the value of SI as a general model for understanding cross-cultural receptivity to HR ideas, sensitising the HR practitioner and academic to institutionalised culture as a historical legacy influencing receptivity to international management ideas.