[under development]

     ABC and SBS

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) currently embraces a nation-wide free-to-air radio and television production and broadcasting network, online services and a minor retail presence. A clone of John Reith's British Broadcasting Commission - complete with the requirement that early radio announcers wear dinner jackets when reading the news - its now struggling with divergent demands for services and reduced funding. Chief executive Jonathan Shier's vision of partnership with government education departments is unlikely to come to fruition and as of November 2000 we forecast renewed proposals to spin off the ABC Online arm.

The corporation's site offers access to its annual reports, strategic plans, inquiry submissions and other documents. Ken Inglis' This is the ABC (Melbourne, Melbourne Uni Press 84) is invaluable but reflects its origins as an official history of the national broadcaster. Alan Thomas' Broadcast & Be Damned: The ABC's First Two Decades (Melbourne, Oxford Uni Press 80) is a quasi-official history. For radio three studies are valuable: The Unseen Voice: A Cultural Study of Early Australian Radio (London, Routledge 88) by Lesley Johnson, Radio in Australia (Kensington UNSW Press 89) by John Potts and the more popular Out of the Bakelite Box: The Heyday of Australian Radio (Sydney, Angus & Robertson 90). 

Quentin Dempster's Death Struggle: How Political Malice & Boardroom Powerplays Are Killing The ABC (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin 00) is a journalist's account from inside the bunker. Strong on personalties, weak on historical perspective - all national broadcasters are subject to malice and frisky boards - and the changing shape of broadcasting (public or otherwise) in Australia and overseas.  

For that wider perspective - ultimately more useful in understanding the organisation's operation and future - we recommend Jock Given's thoughtful The Death of Broadcasting (Uni of NSW Press, Sydney 99) and Trevor Barr's Newmedia.com.au: The Changing Face of Australia's Media & Communications (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin 00). 

AFR journalist Mark Westfield's blow by blow account in The Gatekeepers: The Global Media Battle to control Australia's Pay TV (Annandale, Pluto Press 00) is of value in understanding the interaction between politicians, bureaucrats, business, consumers and technology. 

Among accounts by ABC staff Tom Molomby's Is There A Moderate On The Roof? (Melbourne, Heineman 91), Inside the ABC (Ringwood, Penguin 88) by former CEO Geoffrey Whitehead and The Things You Learn Along The Way (Melbourne, David Lovell 99) by John Menadue.

Errol Hodge's Radio Wars: Truth, Propaganda & the Struggle for Radio Australia (Melbourne, Cambridge Uni Press 95) deals with the 'overseas service'. Studies of the BBC's overseas activity, noted below, are a useful point of reference. Australian Television & International Mediascapes (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press) by Stuart Cunningham & Elizabeth Jacka asks is there an Australian 'style' and can we export it.

     New Zealand

Consult Philip Day's The Radio Years - A History of Broadcasting in New Zealand Vol 1 (Auckland, Auckland Uni Press 94).

     BBC

Asa Briggs' five volume The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (London, Oxford Uni Press 61-86) is an establishment history on the model of the worthy, irreplaceable but often stupefying official war histories that have disappeared into the remoter stacks of university libraries. 

Colin McCabe's The BBC & Public Service Broadcasting (Manchester, Manchester Uni Press 86) is more independent, as is Paddy Scannell's A Social History of British Broadcasting: Vol 1, 1922-39 (Oxford, Blackwell 91).

John Reith - master of the British Broadcasting Commission (BBC) and Imperial Airways, High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland, self-lacerating calvinist in love with power, pomp and engineer Charlie Bower - was the subject of biographies by the acidulous Andrew Boyle in Only the Wind Will Listen (London, Hutchinson 72) and the gentler Ian McIntyre in The Expense of Glory (London, HarperCollins 93).  

Boyle was responsible for Poor Dear Brendan (London, Hutchinson 74) on 'bounder', supposed Churchill love-child and Financial Times publisher Brendan Bracken, more perceptively analysed in the spritzy Eminent Churchillians by Andrew Roberts. The Reith Diaries (London, Collins 75) edited by Charles Stuart are a long howl of pain over - rightly, we think - disappointed ambition. Hugh Greene, brother of the nasty novelist, provided an anaemic account of his term at the BBC's helm in The Third Floor Front: A View of Broadcasting in the 60s (London, Bodley Head 69). 

Lucy Shankleman's Inside the BBC & CNN: Managing Media Organisations (London, Routledge 00) is a study of corporate cultures, all very upbeat. There's a different tempo in Jennifer Doctor's The BBC & UltraModern Music, 1922-36 (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 99); essential reading if you're into musicology, otherwise not. Tom Hickman's celebratory What Did You Do In The War, Auntie? The BBC At War 1939-45 (London, BBC 96) should be read in conjunction with Sian Nicholas' The Echo Of War: Home Front Propaganda & The Wartime BBC (New York, St Martins 96) and Gary Rawnsley's Radio Diplomacy & Propaganda: The BBC & VOA in International Politics 1956-64 (New York, St Martins 96)

     CBC

Marc Raboy's Missed Opportunities: The Story of Canada's Broadcasting Policy (Toronto, McGill-Queens Uni Press 90) presents a picture of uncertain mission, bureaucratic capture, political interference and ongoing crisis at Canada's national broadcaster. Sound's familiar? There's a more detailed treatment in When Television Was Young: PrimeTime Canada 1952-67 (Toronto, Uni of Toronto Press 90) by Paul Rutherford.

     US Public Broadcasting

A History of Public Broadcasting (Washington, Current 00) by John Witherspoon & Roselle Kovitz is a new overview from within the public broadcasting industry. The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television (Berkeley, Uni of California Press 95) is a thoughtful study by James Day, former president of National Educational Television.

In contrast, Conflicting Communication Interests in America: The Case of National Public Radio (New York, Praeger 99) by Tom McCourt and Made Possible By ... The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States (London, Verso 97) by James Ledbetter and Public Television for Sale: Media, the Market & the Public Sphere ( Boulder, Westview 94) by William Hoynes offer critiques from the right and left. 

There's a more biting examination in Ralph Engelman's Public Radio & Television in America: A Political History (Thousand Oaks, Sage 96) and Telecommunications, Mass Media & Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-35 by Robert McChesney (New York, Oxford Uni Press 93).