“Extreme care should be taken in dealing with references to or jokes about – Pre-natal influences (e.g. ‘His mother was frightened by a donkey’)”.
This wonderful quote from The BBC’s “Green Book”, or the Policy Guide for Writers and Producers of Variety Programmes. The Guidelines, which date from the fifties, are extremely, unwittingly, entertaining.
Good gossip from Prima Comunicazione on the recent choice of Claudio Cappon as RAI DG. Apparently, Romano Prodi didn’t want Cappon, but instead Antonello Perricone, MD of the editorial house that produces La Stampa. Prodi had counted on peeling off centre-right members of Rai’s Administrative Council, but his point-man, Angelo Rovati, messed up his counts. [...]
Nordicom Review 1-2/2004 – Publication: “Mass Media, Interpersonal Communication or Personal Experience? Perceptions of Media Effects among Swedish Politicians” – is an interesting article demonstrating that politicians are far more likely than the general population to be believe that the mass media is extremely influential slash decisive in forming people’s political views – something I’ve [...]
For some weeks now, Rai Administrative Councillor Angelo Maria Petroni, one of the right-wing members of the Administrative Council, has been threatening to resign. Petroni, along with Chairman Claudio Petruccioli, was nominated by the Italian Treasury in 2005 under the centre-right government, and confirmed by the parliamentary committee which supervises Rai.
Petroni’s resignation threat causes a [...]
Ireland follows the Australian route of providing two (linguistically differentiated) public service broadcasters, as TG4 becomes independent from RTE. The concern for RTE must be that (visibly, incontrovertibly) non-commercial, public service remits are not cherry-picked from RTE, leaving the rump service poorly placed to defend funding through compulsory licence fee.
I’m hoping to include Sveriges Television as one of my cases in my PhD. I had thought that Nordic stoicism might make SVT less interesting than, say, Rai or RTVE. Not if Rapport keeps putting out news like this it won’t be.
Technorati Tags: sveriges+television, svt
Ars Technica has a fascinating report on a major data-mining project involving the Congressional Record. The project uses an unsupervised learning program to automatically code several million speeches as one of forty (automatically generated) categories. The authors show some interesting variation in agenda salience over time demonstrating this method, suggesting that the method is attuned [...]
The media observatory in Pavia regularly collects info on politicians’ time on screen on all Rai channels. Recently, it seems that certain on the right have been complaining about an absence of Berlusconi from Rai’s screens. Mauro Mazza, director of Tg2 – not, I would have thought, a committed centre-left supporter – says some pretty [...]
Quick update on the health of the Prodi coalition:
The Camera has approved the executive’s mini-budget. It goes tomorrow to the Senate, where it will again be the subject of a vote of confidence
The government has already used votes of confidence on seven separate legislative items in three months (according to an interview with Gianfranco Fini); [...]