Weathering the crisis? Managing democracy at a national broadcaster

Cullinane, Mark

Weathering the crisis? Managing democracy at a national broadcaster

dc.check.embargoformat	E-thesis on CORA only	en
dc.check.entireThesis	Entire Thesis Restricted
dc.check.opt-out	No	en
dc.check.reason	This thesis is due for publication or the author is actively seeking to publish this material	en
dc.contributor.advisor	O'Mahony, Patrick	en
dc.contributor.advisor	McCullagh, Ciaran	en
dc.contributor.author	Cullinane, Mark
dc.contributor.funder	Irish Research Council	en
dc.date.accessioned	2016-05-26T09:14:55Z
dc.date.issued	2016
dc.date.submitted	2016
dc.description.abstract	With post-2008 political and economic crises as its backdrop, this inquiry into the political roles and functions of public service broadcasting (PSB) in Ireland is principally concerned with examining the capacities for and actuality of critical and counter-hegemonic professional journalistic and institutional mediations of crisis. Recognising the diversity of influences on the normative identity of Irish PSB, the dissertation adopts a sociological approach that acknowledges the systemic embedding of media institutions in the broader field of power. An initial tracing of the formative impacts of endogenous and exogenous forces on the democratic horizons of PSB suggests that the present crisis conjuncture does not represent promising terrain for engendering critical crisis and recovery imaginaries. A methodologically diverse intra-institutional empirical research agenda aims to explore at close hand Irish PSB’s contingent navigation of crisis, encompassing ethnographic observation in the newsroom, practitioner interviews and textual analysis of broadcast output. These methods afford close analysis of practices of journalistic production and reflexivity, self-conceptions of the journalistic habitus, and ideological affinities of crisis framings in broadcast output. These analyses are supplemented by a participant observation study of the possibilities for public agenda-building in a key institutional venue of public participation in broadcasting governance. The findings offer an evidential basis for the arguments that the crisis has prompted only minimal changes to professional norms and practices of representation and inclusion; that journalistic crisis framings tend toward effecting hegemonic repair by lending support to neoliberal crisis and recovery imaginaries; and that the institutional openings for the building of public counterpower are highly constrained. The overall conclusion is made that the normative democratic orientation embedded in the professional and institutional projects of public service broadcasting help render it ill-equipped to act as a re-democratising countervailing power against the democratic regressions engendered by the present crisis of democratic capitalism.	en
dc.description.sponsorship	Irish Research Council (Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Scheme)	en
dc.description.status	Not peer reviewed	en
dc.description.version	Accepted Version
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf	en
dc.identifier.citation	Cullinane, M. 2016. Weathering the crisis? Managing democracy at a national broadcaster. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.	en
dc.identifier.endpage	355	en
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/10468/2628
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.publisher	University College Cork	en
dc.rights	© 2016, Mark Cullinane.	en
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/	en
dc.subject	RTÉ	en
dc.subject	Irish media	en
dc.subject	Public service broadcasting	en
dc.subject	Public sphere	en
dc.subject	Journalism	en
dc.thesis.opt-out	true
dc.title	Weathering the crisis? Managing democracy at a national broadcaster	en
dc.type	Doctoral thesis	en
dc.type.qualificationlevel	Doctoral Degree (Structured)	en
dc.type.qualificationname	PhD (Social Science)	en