The Press and Public Service Broadcasting: Neville Petersen's News Not Views and the Case for Australian Exceptionalism

Abstract

This article revisits historical rivalries between established and emerging media, namely the press and broadcasting, during the first half of the twentieth century. To this end, the author constructs a dialogue between Neville Petersen's broadcasting research and his own press research over a similar period. In his major work, News Not Views: The ABC, Press and Politics (1932–1947), Petersen (1993) elaborates in detail the ongoing constraints imposed by Australian newspaper proprietors on the fledgling Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in their ultimately unsuccessful struggle to restrict its news supply and influence. Drawing on subsequent press research based on international forums, the author revisits this rivalry, particularly Petersen's thesis that Australian press proprietors exercised disproportionate influence over the national broadcaster when compared with other English-speaking countries, such as Britain and Canada.