Radio broadcasting, from its inception, was recognized as a medium with educational possibilities. The decision of the Privy Council in 1931 to vest control of broadcasting in the federal government, therefore, invited Dominion participation in radio education. With the establishment of the CBC, and the implication that it was to develop radio's educational potential, the possibility of having national radio education became more real. National radio education developed in response to four general forces. First, as the depression closed, the CBC was able to stabilize its financial situation, evolve a policy on controversial programming, establish co-operative relations with certain voluntary educational associations, and sponsor a national investigation into school broadcasting. Second, the arrival of the Second World War created a fervent nationalistic feeling and provided the conditions for an increase in the power of the federal government. The result was an interventionist-nationalist policy, on the part of the Dominion Government, which found cultural expression in national radio education schemes, such as "Young Canada Listens" and "Farm Radio Forum." The third force involved in the development of national radio education was related to a general programme shift in Canadian broadcasting from light entertainment to a more serious fare. Besides the use of more abstract content, this programme shift was characterized by the creation of radio programmes to suit specific audience groups, various attempts to overcome the passivity of the radio audience and the use of the radio as a medium for artistic and creative expression. The growth of national radio education in the early 1940's both reflected this general programme shift and provided another channel within which it could be conveyed. Finally, national radio education developed because of a desire, on the part of provincial educational authorities, to co-operate with a federal agency, the CBC, in the production of educational broadcasts. This desire to co-operate stemmed, in part, from a renewed sense of confidence in the national broadcasting authority and a wish to secure the educational benefits presented by the radio. Co-operation was achieved eventually on three levels of radio education - inter-provincial, Dominion-Provincial and international. The fruits of such co-operation in educational broadcasting were programmes, such as "Young Canada Listens," "Kindergarten of the Air," "National Farm Radio Forum," "Sports College" and "National Citizen's Forum." The CBC emerged from the 1940's as a national clearing house for Canadian education. Through its radio broadcasts, publications, and co-operative relations with provincial and voluntary educational organizations, the Corporation helped to provide Canadians with a national educational experience. The CBC also provided the Canadian Government with a useful instrument in international radio education affairs. Radio's role in education also became firmly established in the 1940’s. Broadcasting functioned as an educational aid and was to be integrated into the traditional learning situation. No new methodology or philosophy accompanied the radio into the classroom. True to an early prophecy, the radio had expanded the range of possible experiences available to the learner, but that was where its educational influence terminated. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

Using a theoretical model incorporating recent work in the field of historical epistemology and Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality this dissertation reconsiders key moments in the history of Canadian audiovisual policy as sites for examining the production of knowledge about national cultural activity. Drawing upon archival records, interdisciplinary research and a discursive analysis of policy documents, I argue that the resolution of questions regarding the nature of cultural expertise and the evidentiary value of different forms of knowledge accompanied changing state rationale towards film and broadcasting and foreshadowed the refashioning of Canada's audiovisual sector. / To illustrate, I focus on a period between the establishment of the first Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting in 1928 and the institution of Canadian content regulations for television in 1960. During this period there are important shifts in the ways the federal government conceived of and administered the audiovisual sector. In the 1920s and 30s, broadcasting and film production were nationalized and placed within publicly funded institutions such as the CBC and NFB. However, less than twenty-five years later, policy rationale towards the audiovisual sector had shifted, with measures put in place to support the development of the cultural industries. The CBC's dominance over broadcasting and regulation had been replaced by a new structural arrangement involving both public and private broadcasters regulated by independent agencies using content quotas to ensure Canadian programming on the airwaves. In Canada's film sector, the NFB's expansion into feature film and television production was halted through policy shifts encouraging the development of the independent film production sector. / Using case studies that explore the historical context behind the emergence of key administrative techniques I document the declining influence of cultural nationalists and humanistic approaches to cultural issues and the rising influence of accountants, statisticians, and scholars from the nascent field of communication studies in the policy process. These developments run concurrently to shifting government rationale towards the audiovisual sector away from developing "national consciousness" towards the creation of a "national economy" for broadcasting and film drawing on previous industrial development models borrowed from the automotive sector and 19th century National Policy. / Although scholarly attention in the field of cultural policy studies has generally focused upon understanding why these shifts occurred, this thesis is devoted primarily towards understanding how such shifts took place. Attention to these questions moves the field of study away from the pragmatic issues of policymaking and towards larger questions surrounding the triangulation between knowledge, state, and cultural production.

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The ten year debate over the introduction of pay television in Canada is addressed using the concept of external signals to examine the interactions between the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the players in the regulatory environment. / A critique of the notions of "public interest" and of regulatory "capture" precedes the analysis. An historical overview establishes the key issues shaping the nature of the CRTC as a signal-sending and signal-receiving institution. / The evidence demonstrates that the CRTC was not a passive receptor of external signals, but actively shaped and directed or deflected incoming signals according to its own public priorities. The conclusion holds that the traditional capture model does adequately describe the CRTC's behaviour as it attempted to manage the complex political and technological forces surrounding the pay television issue.

The CBC Current Affairs program Sunday Morning is used as a case study to develop an appropriate theory and conceptual apparatus for the understanding of the relationship between the organisation of news-production and news-product. This relation is first identified as critical to the field of mass media studies in general, and news-research in particular. On the basis of this review a new model of news-as-discourse is proposed. In the examination of the radio program Sunday Morning this model and its conceptual categories are further developed and linked with other research in the sociology of news, the structuralist analysis of narrative, and the cultural study of artistic forms and practices. Sunday Morning is shown to employ discursive practices and formations, and production practices which result in power format radio.

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