Reflective essays

Reflective essays

Literature in this second category is often sponsored by special- interest organizations and institutions such as the Council of Europe

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and the National Film Board in Canada, both of which devoted considerable resources to documenting small-scale media in the 1970s and early 1980s. There are literally dozens of Council of Europe studies on, among other things, the financing of public-access channels (Ploman and Lewis, 1977), local radio in Italy (Faenza, 1977), and cable projects in France (Dubois-Dumée, 1973). The reports describe developments and explore policy options, but generally do not have a theoretical objective. Instead, they were intended as materials for policy debate and decision-making by European governments. Since the early 1980s, the Council has ceased supporting studies of small-scale media.

The Canadian National Film Board was active during the same period and published the magazine Access (now defunct), which promoted the use of audiovisual media by community groups. One issue, for example, was devoted to a video and film project with Eskimos in Alaska. The main article (Kennedy, 1973) describes in detail how villagers in the Yukon region were involved in the shooting, editing, and distribution of the film, suggesting the emancipatory potential of the medium: “It [the film] has been a very powerful thing…they [the villagers] have let their feelings be known, and it’s the very first time that that kind of pressure has ever been applied from rural Alaska” (Kennedy, 1973:9). Such work is sometimes referred to as participatory research, which is a form of qualitative research. The objectives may include both concrete political action and general emancipation of project participants. Servaes (1989:6) characterizes this type of research as an educational process for all involved, a “dialectical process of dialogue between the researcher and the community” (see also Chapter 12 in this volume).

A third example of reflective policy research has made a particular contribution also to theory development. During a major assessment of media policy in the Netherlands in the early 1980s, Hollander (1982) was commissioned to chart the development of small-scale broadcasting in western Europe. The country-by-country overview is now dated (for more recent overviews, see Browne, 1988; Crookes and Vittet-Philippe, 1986; Kleinsteuber and Sonnenberg, 1990), but the theoretical chapter remains an important source of inspiration. Different concepts of community and media from German and Anglo-Saxon traditions are compared and synthesized with reference to the descriptive studies. Hollander in conclusion lays out issues

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relevant to policymakers: station financing, the regulation of access to and participation in the stations, and the relation between small- scale and other media. The study, in short, exemplifies the contribution that qualitative studies can make simultaneously to theory and policy formulation.

In addition to such explicitly reflective work, special-interest groups have developed activities and publications comparable to those of the Council of Europe and the Canadian Film Board. These groups include the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers in the United States, the Dutch Organization of Local Broadcasting, and the British local radio association Relay. Whereas their main objectives are to inform members and lobby in political arenas, their publications include an element of qualitative research, to the extent that political strategies emerge from an analysis of events by participants.

A comparable type of qualitative research is the essays published by station managers, staff, and journalists, which, while based on first-hand experience, tend to be partisan; description hence takes a secondary role to argument. One useful exemplar is a monograph on the Bristol community television channel written by the then station manager, what he calls “a retrospective account by a participant observor who, as station manager, was indeed the ‘arch-participant’” (Lewis, 1976:iv). After the station was shut down, Lewis was granted

a fellowship by the Independent Broadcasting Authority to reflect on the project. This allowed him “to rescue some of the history, read relevant literature in an attempt to set the experience in some sort of context, and follow up the consequences of [the cable company] Rediffusion’s legacy of portable equipment to the community” (Lewis, 1976:vi).

A final example of theoretical reflection by involved actors is Local Television: Piped Dreams? (Bibby et al., 1979). As former staff members of the British community television stations Swindon Viewpoint and Channel 40, the authors, like Lewis, were able to write from the insider perspective. Importantly, they provide examples of how the “neutral” access policy of the two stations was, in fact, biased toward middle-class residents and the maintenance of status quo on a variety of community issues. Their work thus has contributed to expanding the theoretical concept of access to include “affirmative access” (see Jankowski, 1988:169).

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