This thesis explores the increasing representation of sexual dissidence on contemporary Italian mainstream television from 1990 to 2012. It argues that TV programming and regulations have been historically influenced by notions of an ideal family audience assumed to be traditionally nuclear, patriarchal, heterosexual and normative. The visual representation of sexuality in the media has been the subject of considerable international debate which has problematised the historical invisibilisation and misrepresentation of sexual dissidents, particularly in film and with an almost exclusive methodological emphasis on Anglophone texts. Less attention has been given to more integrated and empirical approaches to the representation, circulation and reception of dissident sexualities on TV. This study combines historical examinations of sexual portrayals on Italian television with two online ethnographies targeting non-heterosexual and heterosexually-identified respondents, discursively analysing whether and how these samples of viewers have engaged with this increasing TV visibility. The majority of participants seem interested in these portrayals and disagree with restrictive decision-making by networks. Nonetheless, a considerable portion of respondents appears to be problematically influenced not so much by the content of programmes as by perceptions of the views of others. The thesis demonstrates that audience research is an under-explored, yet very productive, field of enquiry in Sexuality Studies. Further research in this direction could have implications for network recommendations, transnational policy-making and new theoretical approaches.

This is a study of news production by eight major news organisations in the UK and Canada. Through observation of daily routines and semi-structured interviews, 124 journalists were included in the final sample. The overall aim of this research was to explore the interrelationships between new technologies, the potential autonomy accessible by journalists and the structure of constraints under which they operate. The news marketplace has become congested while audiences have fragmented and public news-producing behaviours have soared, facilitated through the ubiquity of new media. These developments were crucial to the analysis of mainstream news production within a media environment that has left news organisations struggling to retain audiences and their own credibility. New technologies adopted by news organisations have altered routines both within newsrooms and out in the field. News values have shifted towards ‘live’ coverage while workflow has been improved and convergence become the norm. At the same time, new media available within the public realm – including the internet, online publishing tools and advanced mobile phone technologies – are also available to individual journalists. However, it is those journalists already familiar with technology who are more likely to incorporate them into their own daily routines, along with the wider range of sources now available within the information producing strata of society. Research findings relate to the specific locations in the news production process at which new technologies, journalistic autonomy and constraining factors have the most impact. For this purpose, a model was developed along with an autonomy-constraint ratio. Key findings are that the transmission phase of news production presents the least amount of autonomy for journalists while the newsgathering phase offers the greatest amount of autonomy. Due to the temporal and theoretical limits of previous research frameworks, an autonomy-centred approach is proposed as a means of complementing the existing constraints-based approaches that have tended to dominate news production studies.

This is a case study in the microsociology of knowledge conducted in the London-based News Division of the British Broadcasting Corporation during 1972-3. The data was gathered by fieldwork in Broadcasting House and Television Centre. The study falls into two parts. The first, after a review of relevant literature, presents a detailed account of those dimensions of the organisational milieu necessary for an understanding of broadcast news production. These are: the hierarchical control structure which determines policy for news coverage; the everyday production routines which structure “news” as an organisational product; the system of advanced planning through which news stories are identified. This section also locates the legitimising role played by the BBC’s editorial philosophy and power structure, and considers implications of the broadcaster’s conventional distinction between “news” and “current affairs”. The second part of the study develops the idea of news producers as constituting and epistemic community whose work skills, organisational location, and occupational knowledge give them a distinctive cognitive orientation. Newsmen’s characterisation of their thought and practice as “professional” is analysed as a mode of conferring authority upon the production process, and the product “news”. It is then argued that newsmen’s primary framework of reference is the organisation within which they assert their complete autonomy from the audience, while at the same time asserting their unique capacity to determine its needs for news. Next, “impartiality” is analysed as a distinctive corporate conceptions drawn from a model of the political consensus represented by the major Parliamentary political parties, and is presented as illus-trating the BBC’s accommodation to the realities of State power. Newsmen’s claim to be accurate is next considered. It is shown how they support their claim by pointing to empiricist methods of authentication. The specific character of these is demonstrated by showing how news production is heavily condition-ed by the temporal imperatives of the daily news cycle. The study then concludes after considering newsmen’s time-conscious-ness; their professionalism in this context is analysed as being in control of the pace of often unpredictable work.

This thesis contributes to our understanding of the role of European Union policy in national level governance of the audiovisual media sectors in small states in South East Europe. It compares the Republics of Slovenia and Macedonia, two countries of similar size and population that emerged from the same former-Yugoslav media system. Slovenia is a new EU member state and Macedonia is a candidate country, therefore both are formally bound by EU audiovisual media policy. Europeanization research, particularly in new Member States and candidate countries, has focused on compliance with transposition deadlines and the implementation of specific EU Directives. This study takes a bottom-up approach, making media governance its object of study based on a conceptualisation of governance by Jan Kooiman (2003), but still focused on identifying the role of the EU within that national level governance. It draws on interviews with stakeholders in both countries, examination of secondary data available on the respective media markets, and accounts from civil society actors and regulators to arrive at an overall picture of media governance. It finds that in these two cases the role of Europeanization, defined in this thesis in relation to the EU, centres on the use of EU rules by domestic actors in order to forward their strategic interests. It argues that the media sectors in these two cases are largely resistant to Europeanization because of their small size and the particular relations between media and political elites. This thesis suggests that the media sector may be different from other sectors such as transport, environmental protection, or labour in terms of Europeanization and governance because the role of media in domestic politics. However, this is not a simple story of the democratic and governance failures often attributed to Southern European countries. This thesis shows the complexity in which Europeanization takes place, and highlights the importance of market conditions and market players to this process.

This thesis explores the identity of translation as its power of reference through an analysis of transformations of biblical narrative from their written form to audio-visual versions made for television. The central problematic of translatability between word and image is examined through the "translation strategies" used by producers and translators. These strategies reveal the philosophical binarisms that underpin an assumption of source and target texts as autonomous entities. The polarities of binary thinking are implicit in a perception of translation as a representation of a prior text The language of representation that is central to theories of representational equivalence raises the question to what does representation refer. This question forms the focus for a critique of the epistemology and ontology of representation and its artificial separation of language and vision, or word and image in our perceptual experience of the world. The criticism is essential to an exploration of the referential power of translation understood in semiotic and narrative terms as its ground of interpretation. This exploration describes the symbolic or semiotic value of translations, or the contexts in which they acquire contemporary coherence and significance. The central descriptive part of the thesis employs three conceptions of context: the context of texts themselves as narratively and semantically coherent units; their cultural contexts, or the irreducible intertexuality on which they depend for the recognition and interpretation of their significant features; and the social and economic conditions which underpin the work of production and provide the social contexts within such works circulate. In rejecting the notion that translations are an image, however impure, of an antecedent text, my thesis excludes a notion of conventional limits to translation based on structuralist conceptions of semantic or narrative form as the principal carriers of meaning. It concludes that the limits of translation are defined by its possibilities.

This thesis investigates the relationship between media and identities in contemporary Greece. Acknowledging the diversity of Greek society, the study follows the circulation of discourses about the nation and belonging and contrasts the articulation of identities at a local level with the discourses about the nation in the national media. Through a series of case studies I examine how people of Greek, Cypriot and Turkish origins living in Athens articulate their identities through everyday practices and media use. At the same time I investigate the television news discourse which is nationalized, largely projecting an essentialist representation of identity that does not reflect the complexity of the society it claims to describe. The study follows the shifts in peoples' discourses according to context and observes that it is in their encounters with the news media, compared to other contexts, that some of the informants express a more closed discourse about difference and belonging. This points to the power of the media, through a number of practices, to raise the boundaries for inclusion and exclusion in public life. Hence, while for the majority of the Greek speakers the news is a common point of reference, for the Turkish speakers it is often a reminder of their `second class citizenship' and exclusion from public life. Public discourse, much dominated by the media in the case of Greece, is a complex web of power relations, subject to constant negotiation. This is an interdisciplinary study that draws upon a number of theories and approaches by means' of a theoretical and methodological triangulation. The thesis aims to contribute primarily to two literatures, namely media and audience studies —particularly the developments towards a theory of mediation — and the literature that addresses the relationship between media and identity. In the light of the analysis of the empirical findings the study argues that neither of the hitherto dominant paradigms in theorising the relationship between media and identity (namely, strong media/weak identities and weak media/powerful identities) is adequate to describe what emerges as a multifaceted process. What is proposed is an approach that takes into account both a top-down and a bottom-up perspective. Media and identities should be understood in a dialectical fashion where neither is foregrounded from the start. The concepts of culture and the nation are understood through a historical perspective that recognises their constructedness and diversity. Identity is conceptualised as relational and performative rather than fixed and stable.

This thesis addresses the interface between producers of new media and their audiences/users as it manifests itself in production. It is based on a case study of NESTA Futurelab (a production-research laboratory in educational new media) conducted in its first year of existence, as its staff sought to define the endeavour —'what it is for' and, more importantly, 'whom it is for'. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS) and media theory, this study challenges models of the producer-user interface which endorse 'technical mediation' in proposing alternatives to its three components — the use bias, overstated co-design and the ontological divide between producers and users. In response to the use bias, the study of Futurelab demonstrates that the producers' perceptions of their audiences (both users and partners) determine from the outset decisions as to the organization's purpose, structure, methodology and outputs. Overstated co-design is countered by uncovering the producers' downplaying of direct user involvement and any pretension to scientific methodology through which they engage the users. This study stresses the more pervasive practice of mediation whereby they represent the absent users. This is further conceptualized through their portrayal as 'experience-based experts' — the producers claim the ability to contribute substantively to production by virtue of their social experience, while minimizing their technical competence. Lastly, the presumed ontological divide between producers and users is contested by illustrating that the spheres of production and reception overlap in the producers' experience, which is reactivated on an ad hoc basis in production. Through notions such as 'reflexivity', 'prior feedback', 'producer-user overlap', `mediated quasi-interaction' and 'experience-based expertise', the producer-user interface is thus inscribed in the continuity of producers' social experience rather than being seen as an interaction purposely and strategically instated at a discrete moment. The most notable instances of continuity are captured by the producers' playing of the synthetic role of producer-user, which rests on the claimed proximity between production and other relevant social situations.

THE TELEVISION MESSAGE AS SOCIAL OBJECT: A comparative study of the structure and content of television programmes in Britain (excluding public affairs, children's television and shorts). The thesis will be both a theoretical and empirical examination of the applicability of the varieties of analysis of symbolic orders which have been advanced by such writers as Levi-Strauss and Foucault. The thesis is an exploration, through the study of the narrative structure of a series of television drama programmes, of the relationship between television, myths and folktales. Following upon work done principally by Claude Levi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp, but also others writing in the field of semiological and structural analysis, a detailed examination of the video-recorded texts of a thirteen part drama series is presented. It is argued in the context of an examination of, respectively, television and language, television and the mythic, and of the nature of narrative, that the television drama preserves the forms which otherwise might be thought of as particular to oral culture and communication. Television, in its preservation of these forms, and in its generally mythic character, gains its effectiveness thereby and must be understood sociologically in such terns. The effect of such an understanding, it is argued, will be to challenge any comprehension of the medium simply as the particular product of a particular historical period and/or an imposition in culture of one world view on an other. The television message is both a collective product and a transhistorical one. It is argued that on both counts it needs to be understood as a genuine expression of a social need, though in its expression of that need it does not necessarily simply act to preserve existing social and cultural conditions.

This thesis unfolds from the observation that, in the years immediately following the defeat of Germany in May 1945, the radio was the best-preserved and most popular medium of mass communication. It explores the implications of the radio's dominance as a medium that both crosses and helps to define the boundaries of nation and region, as well as 'public' and 'private' space during a time when the upheavals of war and occupation were restructuring both the physical space of Germany as well as its political and symbolic spaces. It examines the practices of everyday broadcasting from the Allied-controlled radio stations in the western zones of occupied Germany to show how within the radio programmes, the diverse experiences of radio listeners were able to from part of a larger narrative of 'Germanness' at a time when Germany did not exist. Chapters explore the embedding of the radio within the every mental landscape of Germany, as well as within the private space of the home. It is argued that, in maintaining the relationships between the outside public world and the safe world of the home, the radio not only represented a means of remembering a collective German past, but also one of the primary places for the negotiation of new German identities in the present. Further chapters explore the ambiguities in the visions of these spaces produced by the radio. The production of private space is examined through a discussion of women's programming, showing the way that such programmes structured the debate surrounding women's position in society around their use of the scarce resource of time. A close examination how radio programming addressed the wider space of Germany shows how by imbuing the everyday visions of the broadcast region with the symbols of Heimat, radio programmes created a vision of Germany that at once embraced modernity and gave the impressions of maintaining a link with a usable past.

Circulation and revenue declines affecting the newspaper industry are causing changes in the way local newspapers are run. Journalism has been withdrawing from communities and some local newspapers have closed. The resulting gap in local news and information has been called a news black hole. This research takes one such news black hole – Port Talbot – and examines it longitudinally from the point of view of: 1) the quantity and quality of news in the 39 years before and the four years after the 2009 newspaper closure; 2) changes in newsgathering and journalism practices; 3) the community’s ability to access the information, representation and scrutiny normally associated with fourth estate journalism; and 4) the community’s civic and democratic behaviour before and after the closure. It builds on Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, theorising the existence of local public geo-spheres, and that damage to these at the local level may entail damage to the whole public sphere. This multi-method study finds that the quantity of local news halved after the closure of the newspaper, and that its quality declined from the 1990s onwards. Although the loss of the newspaper was important, so was the gradual withdrawal of journalism from the town, marked by steep declines in journalist numbers and the closure of district newspaper offices. It also finds newsgathering has become more distant from communities and is more likely to use press releases and high status or official sources, and less local and less likely to be witnessed by a journalist. It finds the community under-informed, under-represented, and unable to access timely local information or gain adequate access to scrutiny. The democratic measure of election turnout in particular declined from around the time the district offices closed. Together, these findings suggest damage to the local public sphere in the town.