The subject matter of this thesis is the 1974-75 reorganisation of the French state broadcasting services which abolished the ORTF and the consequences of this reform for the relationship between the Government and broadcasting during the early years of the Giscardian presidency. The originality of the thesis lies in the fact that this reorganisation is placed in an explicitly political context, the election of the first non-Gaullist President of the Fifth Republic and the ensuing conflict between the Gaullist and Giscardian components of the governing coalition. The thesis also makes a significant contribution to the limited amount of academic literature on French broadcasting in general. Placed within the framework of the debate about the role of broadcasting in liberal democracies, the thesis examines the applicability of two antithetical models, the "fourth estate" and "state control" models, to the French broadcasting system since 1974. Neither is found to be satisfactory. Our detailed study of government-broadcasting relations since the reform demonstrates that the political executive, and within the executive particularly the President of the Republic, has at its disposal a variety of means through which to control those aspects of broadcasting in which it has an interest, ranging from determing the legal framework of the state monopoly to appointing political sympathisers to key decision-making posts. Neither the broadcasting staff, the management or the boards of governors of the separate companies set up by the 1974 reform has the freedom of manoeuvre necessary for broadcasting in France to be regarded as a "fourth estate." On the other hand, the "state control" model is too vague and monolithic, unable to allow for change except of a totally radical kind. On the basis of a wide variety of published and unpublished material and interviews with members of broadcasting management, staff, journalists, politicians and civil servants, this thesis shows that government-broadcasting relations in France have altered greatly in form and to a limited extent in substance since 1974. For example, the direct, overt controls which were so much of a feature of de Gaulle's presidency have given way to a reliance on indirect controls, particularly via partisan appointments within the broadcasting companies. This is especially the case with control over news output which has been largely internalised within the radio and television companies.

During the 1990s the notion of the heritage film has become a taken for granted category of British cinema. Rather than dispute the merits of particular films that lie within this genre I question the construction of the relation between the idea of heritage and contemporary British film and television. Using the critical literature established by the contending cultural histories that address the rise of heritage in British culture, I highlight other, frequently personal and national engagements with inherited pasts. The concentration upon inheritance lends a greater emphasis to what is passed on from the past and endures in the present. The modes of articulating these inherited pasts are formally distinctive and constructed out of the vocabulary of documentary and fiction. The corpus of texts begins with the apparently radical avant garde film-making of Derek Jannan and moves through the work of the Black Audio Film Collective to the apparently conservative television documentaries of Alan Bennett. These key voices are then situated in relation to the hegemonic definition of heritage and current debates concerning British film and television. The persisting opposition which defined British cinema during the 1980s posits an unofficial cinema characterized by dissent and urban decay against an official cinema represented by the heritage film. My corpus of texts challenges this opposition. The different engagements with inherited pasts take place from different speaking positions and represent a diminishing publicly funded tradition of film and television production. The range of positions from margins to centre reveal that there was a contestation of the cultural sources which are aggregated into the construction of heritage during the 1980s and 1990s.

This is a descriptive study of Chang Nam Fung's Chinese translation of Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay's Yes Prime Minister, a text characterized by British political humour. Adopting a target-oriented approach, it aims primarily to uncover the regularities which mark the relationships between function, process and product of the translated text, thus adding to the limited inventory of case studies in the field. Targeted mainly towards readers in mainland China, the translation was done at a time (1987-1992) when the political scene in the People's Republic went through cycles of repression and relaxation in the face of a democratic movement, while the translation tradition remained one that upheld the primacy of the original -- a poetics that is determined by the ideological concept of loyalty. Working under the constraints of the ideological and poetological norms dominant in China, the translator nevertheless wished to produce a text with artistic value and a potential to function as a political satire in the Chinese context, posing a challenge to those norms. This skopos has determined the use of manipulative strategies in the translation process, The translation product is thus found to have been overdetermined by the interplay of a large number of factors besides the source text: socio-political conditions, literary and translation traditions, and the translator's poetics and ideology. Finally, the findings are brought to bear on a number of translation theories, especially Polysystem theory and other cultural theories of translation in whose frameworks the study has been carried out. An augmented version of the polysystem hypothesis is proposed, the gist of which is that the political and the ideological polysystems, each consisting of competing systems, normally assume central positions in the macro-polysystem of culture, issuing norms that influence norms originating from other polysystems, and that translation activities are governed by norms originating from various polysystems. It is hoped that this tentative 'macro-polysystem hypothesis, after refinement by theorists and test by researchers, can better accommodate investigations into the role of the translator together with other socio-cultural factors involved in translation, especially the power relations.

This thesis examines an exile community’s relation to media. In particular, it focuses on the case of the Cuban-American community and English- as well as Spanish-language media based in Miami, FL. Following the revolution under Fidel Castro in 1959, Miami developed into the capital of the Cuban exile. Over the past decades, the Cuban-American community formed a nucleus which attracted further migration from South America and the Caribbean. The incoming migrants contributed to turning Miami into a flourishing economic urban space. Furthermore, the Cuban-American community was a vital player in creating a vibrant media scene. This thesis is situated in the context of ongoing debates on diasporic communities, notions of exile and liminality and theories addressing the tensions between the local, the national and the transnational. Empirical data for this project has been gathered in three periods of field work in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Journalists, media executives and active members of the Cuban-American community were targeted as key informants in the field. This thesis argues that the locale of a migrant community is of as much significance as national and transnational ambitions. The tensions between and imbrications of the local, national and transnational are evident in the media’s content, aim and scope. By mapping Miami as a place and social space, relations between the Cuban-American and other communities are discussed in detail. The heart of the thesis contains an in-depth analysis of the different media, i.e. the press, radio, television, and the internet. The chapters explore how these media have interacted with early Cuban migrants as well as their relationship to the Cuban-American community today. The findings point towards diverse and complex patterns. Time of migration, cultural background and age are significant factors on an individual’s approach to certain media. In turn, some media outlets clearly cater for specific segments of the community. A key point is that the media’s role in relation to the Cuban-American community is a balance act of local, national and transnational remits. The research contributes to debates on media, migration and communication research. It is the first comprehensive study of the Cuban-American community and their relationship to Miami-based media. Secondly, it takes a holistic view of the broader media ecology. The analysis is informed by the wider historical context. It encompasses detailed analysis of a variety of media and how these are interlinked. Moreover, this thesis employs an innovative research methodology in that it takes an etic, non-mediacentric approach to researching the media of a diasporic group.

At the beginning of the 21st century, British tabloid newspapers, whose circulations were already in steep decline, faced twin existential challenges: a growing tendency by consumers to access free information and entertainment content from the internet, and demands for more stringent regulation of ‘print’ journalists, particularly those employed by, or servicing, ‘tabloid’ titles. The latter challenge was characterised in 2012 by the report of the Leveson Inquiry (Part 1) into the culture, practices and ethics of the press, ordered by the UK government as ‘phone-hacking’ revelations triggered the closure of the tabloid News of the World, then one of the most read English language newspapers in any country, and led to a string of high-profile court cases, one of which culminated in the conviction and imprisonment of the title’s former editor Andy Coulson. For decades, influential media theorists had condemned many aspects of British popular newspaper journalism, a critique fuelled by the Leveson Inquiry and associated criminal investigations. Some analysts argued that Britain would be psychosocially healthier if newspapers such as the News of the World’s sister publication, The Sun, either ceased to exist or were radically revised. However, this work uniquely explores the proposition that British tabloid journalism is driven archetypally by what Carl Jung identified as Trickster, a collective shadow reflecting an ambiguous but necessary principle portrayed in myths, folklore, literature and contemporary media as a disruptive, lascivious, liminoid troublemaker. This thesis investigates and amplifies earlier explorations of Trickster—notably, but not exclusively, by post-Jungian thinkers—and applies its conclusions to a depth-psychological assessment of contemporaneous popular British newspaper journalism. By revealing the archetype behind the tabloid stereotype, I suggest that UK statutory press regulation would ‘castrate’ the tabloid Trickster, rendering it unable to perform its psychosocial function, to the detriment of a society already challenged by a fragmenting post-modern media landscape.

This study examines the quality of subtitles from English into Arabic. The motivation behind selecting this topic area is that subtitling of English language programmes into Arabic is under-researched. Therefore it is in need of further research in order to enhance subtitlers’ skills and performance. The study explores the main challenges that translators face in the subtitling of English language films into Arabic and addresses the key issues, by examining the common features hindering audio-visual translation and highlighting particular cultural limitations intrinsic to translation for Arabic speaking audiences, assuming that particular fundamentals of translation theory can be beneficial in overcoming the linguistics, technical and cultural challenges. A qualitative approach is adopted in the study. The rationale for adopting a qualitative research approach is related to the purpose of the study, the nature of the problem and research questions. Thus the study data have been collected using a thematic questionnaire for general viewers who are interested in watching subtitled programmes to gauge their perceptions on the current quality of English into Arabic subtitling. The findings of this study have practical contribution to enhance the quality of subtitling. They also benefit academic research through expanding the literature in the field of subtitling which in turn will benefit future researchers.

Since the 1990s, studies within the inter-disciplinary fields of crime, the media and children have been wide-ranging. In spite of this however, to date, research into the media’s reporting on the missing and murdered child has been a neglected area of study. This thesis redresses this gap by providing the first significant study into the missing and murdered child and the way in which the media interrogates this phenomenon within the mediated public sphere. Reflecting on historical and contemporary debates and ideas about the public sphere, the thesis draws on current literature and considers the way in which mediated narratives about the missing and the murdered child, reinforce particular ideological and cultural assumptions about the politics of childhood, motherhood, community and privacy. The thesis considers the way in which the media’s coverage of the missing and the murdered child has contributed to the ‘emotionalization’ of the public sphere. The study examines established viewpoints about the nature of an emotionalized public sphere and the extent to which it undermines Western values associated with liberal democracy. A qualitative textual analysis of two case studies was conducted into the media’s coverage of two high-profile incidents of child murder and abduction- the Soham murder investigation in 2002 and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, 2007. Samples for analysis were drawn from both print and broadcast media including five UK national tabloid newspapers- Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Sun, Daily Star, Daily Express together with an episode of the BBC’S Crimewatch. Findings from this study reveal that a public sphere shaped by emotion provides a vehicle whereby subaltern counter-publics, the voice of ordinary citizens takes precedence. Moreover, I argue that the distinctiveness of this research is that it highlights the way in which a mediated public sphere informed by emotion appears to promote active citizenship and engagement with matters of public concern, of which the missing and the murdered child are but two examples. Finally, I suggest that it is through participation, and perhaps social and political engagement in response to such incidents, that contributes to the reformulation of a mediated public sphere and thereby sustains the very doctrines that underpin the role of the state and civil society.

This thesis argues that the study of narrative television has been limited by an adherence to accepted and commonplace conceptions of endings as derived from literary theory, particularly a preoccupation with the terminus of the text as the ultimate site of cohesion, structure, and meaning. Such common conceptions of endings, this thesis argues, are largely incompatible with the realities of television’s production and reception, and as a result the study of endings in television needs to be re-thought to pay attention to the specificities of the medium. In this regard, this thesis proposes a model of intra-narrative endings, islands of cohesion, structure, and meaning located within television texts, as a possible solution to the problem of endings in television. These intra-narrative endings maintain the functionality of traditional endings, whilst also allowing for the specificities of television as a narrative medium. The first two chapters set out the theoretical groundwork, first by exploring the essential characteristics of narrative television (serialisation, fragmentation, duration, repetition, and accumulation), then by exploring the unique relationship between narrative television and the forces of contingency. These chapters also introduce the concept of intra-narrative endings as a possible solution to the problems of television’s narrative structure, and the medium’s relationship to contingency. Following on from this my three case studies examine forms of television which have either been traditionally defined as particularly resistant to closure (soap opera and the US sitcom) or which have received little analysis in terms of their narrative structure (sports coverage). Each of these case studies provides contextual material on these televisual forms, situating them in terms of their narrative structure, before moving on to analyse them in terms of my concept of intra-narrative endings. In the case of soap opera, the chapter focusses on the death of the long running character Pat Butcher in the British soap EastEnders (BBC, 1985-), while my chapter on the US sitcom focusses on the varying levels of closure that can be located within the US sitcom, using Friends (NBC, 1993-2004) as a particular example. Finally, my chapter on sports coverage analyses the BBC’s coverage of the 2012 London Olympics, and focusses on the narratives surrounding cyclists Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton. Each of these case studies identifies their chosen events as intra-narrative endings within larger, ongoing texts, and analyses the various ways in which they operate within those wider texts. This thesis is intended to make a contribution to the emerging field of endings studies within television by shifting the understanding of endings away from a dominant literary model which overwhelmingly focusses on the terminus of the text, to a more televisually specific model which pays attention to the particular contexts of the medium’s production and reception.

The discourse of ‘the white man’s burden’ that originated in the nineteenth century with missionaries and colonialism still underpins much of the development ideology towards Africa today. The overwhelming assumption that rich Western countries can and should address ‘underdevelopment’ through aid only stigmatizes African reality, framing it to mirror the worldview of the international donors who fund most non-profit interventionist documentaries. In the ‘parachute filmmaking’ style that results, facilitated by financial resources and reflecting the self-serving intentions of the donors, the non-profit filmmaker functions simply as an agent of meaning rather than authentic author of the text. Challenged by limited production schedules and lacking in cultural understanding most donor-sponsored films fall back on an ethnocentric one-size-fits-all template of an ‘inferior other’ who needs to be ‘helped’. This study sets out to challenge the ‘donor gaze’ in documentary films which ‘speak about’ Africa, arguing instead for a more inclusive style of filmmaking that gives voice to its subjects by ‘speaking with’ them. The special focus is on black African women whose images are used to signify helplessness, vulnerability and ignorance, particularly in donor-funded documentaries addressing HIV/AIDS. Through case studies of four films this study asks: 1. How do documentary films reinforce the donor gaze? (how is the film speaking and why?) 2. Can the donor gaze be challenged? (should intentionality always override subjectivity of the filmed subjects?) Film studies approach the gaze psychoanalytically (e.g. Mulvey 1975) but this study focuses on the conscious gaze of filmmakers because they reinforce or challenge ‘the pictures in our heads.’ Sight is an architect of meaning. Gaze orders reality but the documentary gaze can re-order it. The study argues that in Africa, the ‘donor gaze’ constructs meaning by ‘speaking about’ reality and calls instead for a new approach for documentary to ‘speak with’ reality.

A growing literature contends that organisational learning is a source of competitive advantage for firms seeking to adapt their strategies to rapidly changing environments. The 21st Century as the age of learning organisations and knowledge work is an inspiring vision. However, much of the existing organisational learning literature assumes that the locus for learning is within neatly bounded firms. Less appears to be known about the learning issues facing firms that are reliant on external relationships with mobile, contract labour, suppliers and customers. This thesis focuses on learning and knowledge development in the UK television production industry. An industry where ideas realisation occurs across firm divides, in flexible production networks of core employees and freelance knowledge workers. A conceptual tool, The Knowledge Chain, is developed, herein, to highlight the key learning processes arising in such fluid, network production contexts. It is contended, herein, that the network arrangements used to organise production in the UK television industry raise challenges for firms seeking the control of knowledge resources. Indeed, attempts to codify the wide array of knowledge, on which network production builds, may be a futile exercise that squanders scarce resources. However, this thesis suggests that firms operating across such networks can still profit from the learning of a wide array of external production partners by building strategic learning relationships and effective learning contexts that facilitate knowledge sharing, application and development drawing on many more brains than a firm could afford to employ. Facilitating learning relationships with external partners can bring strategic benefits including leveraged learning to outpace competitors, and insurance against strategic myopia and the intra-firm insularity of group-think. Nevertheless, when key workers are not internal employees and production defies firm boundaries, profiting from learning becomes a more complex relational and contextual challenge than much of the existing literature implies.