Media Policy, Audiences, and Social Demand

Abstract

Recent changes in the technological and economic environments have been accompanied by a series of policy developments at international and national levels. An important implication of these changes has been an impasse for policies that articulate public interest with respect to the media. This impasse, we argue, strongly indicates a need for qualitative research that can be used as a new basis for legitimacy of public policy in communications. To address this, a research agenda centered around the idea of 95 Authors' Note: This is one of a series of three articles based on research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (see also Raboy and Abramson 1998; and Proulx and Raboy forthcoming). The authors wish to thank Marcus Breen, Peter Dahlgren, and Line Grenier for their comments on earlier drafts, as well as Tatsuro Hanada, Kevin Robins, and participants at an International Association for Media and Communication Research working group meeting in Glasgow, 1998, for their helpful suggestions regarding the research.

Power to the People? The myth of television consumer sovereignty revisited

“…Leaving aside research into viewer assessment -itself undertaken in a pretty quantifying fashion -researchers are only sporadically interested in viewers' degree of satisfaction with the (Raboy et al 2001). …”