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This chapter unpacks the tension between secular, modern values and conservative, Islamic interpretations within the Indonesian middle class by taking the consumption of Turkish popular cultural products as a case. The chapter explicates the social responses towards the first Turkish television drama aired on terrestrial, private television in Indonesia: The Magnificent Century (Muhtesṃem Yüzyıl/Abad Kejayaan). This chapter understands the reproduction of secular and conservative Islamic values, while in contestation, as a response to broader global, market-capitalist developments. It finds that in response to audience criticism regarding the “un-Islamic” portrayal of the epoch in the drama—specifically the depiction of women as concubines—television stations enlisted the services of Muslim clerics to correct or justify the representation of historical facts. This reveals that market-driven self-censorship has opened up ways for Muslim clerics to influence television content. As such, the chapter argues that market-capitalist forces discursively use Islamic authority as a way to legitimise the halal consumption of Turkish drama among Indonesian Muslim audience at the expense of programme diversity.

This book examines the role of 24/7 television news channels in Bangladesh. By using a multi-sited ethnography of television news media, it showcases the socio-political undercurrents of media practices and the everydayness of TV news in Bangladesh. It discusses a wide gamut of issues such as news making; localised public sphere; audience reaction and viewing culture; impact of rumours and fake news; socio-political conditions; protest mobilization; newsroom politics and perspectives from the ground. An important intervention in the subject, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of media studies, journalism and mass communication, anthropology, cultural studies, political sociology, political science, sociology, South Asian studies, as well as television professionals, journalists, civil society activists, and those interested in the study of Bangladesh.

This chapter examines the intersection of popular culture and populism in Turkey by focusing on the TV show Payitaht Abdulhamid. Our motivation to analyze the recent TV series Payitaht Abdulhamid stems from our interest in the instrumental mobilization of popular culture for the Turkish government’s dual desire to both establish cultural hegemony and consolidate its populist style of government. Our analysis reveals that television, especially in the Global South, still plays a central role in governments’ desire to reconstruct history and establish cultural hegemony. This is particularly important as Turkey is going through a crisis of hegemony since the public is completely divided in its support for the government. Within the context of this hegemonic crisis, televised popular culture is vital, perhaps more than ever. Specifically, the show reduces a complicated history into easily understandable dichotomies and projects them on to contemporary politics in order to consolidate support for the government. Through televised popular culture, the government mobilizes history for purposes of cultural hegemony and populist politics flavored with nationalist, Islamist, and anti-Western motifs. Ultimately, the TV show presents yet another moment for understanding the mediated nature of 21st-century politics outside Western contexts.

African television is at the crossroads. This chapter surveys, describes, analyzes and explains the major changes that have taken place in the African television landscape since the 1990s. It focuses on three major developments that have marked the African television landscape: (1) liberalization of the television space to keep abreast of international developments, and the tension between entrenched governmental public broadcasting systems and newly licensed “independent” TV stations, (2) the process and impact of the analogue to digital TV switchover shepherded by the International Telecommunications Union, and (3) the diffusion of Chinese electronic technology, television, and film content on the African television market as part of the Asian giant’s “soft power” diplomacy and State capitalism. African television is constrained by political regimes that restrict freedom of expression, and regulatory agencies that preside over systems in which the law takes precedence over rights.

Fist-fights in television studios, dwindling media autonomy, sensationalism, fake news, religious hate, abusive trolls, political spin ... How did we get here? Three decades ago, before economic liberalization, came the expansion and privatization of Indian television. Technological innovation and easing of government controls offered the prospect of journalistic independence, artistic creativity and an empowered citizenry. This was rendered illusory by runaway growth and untrammelled commercialization. In that thwarted promise of the late 20th century lie the seeds of Indian democracy's current crisis. Telly-Guillotined: How Television Changed India tells the story of how technology was usurped, first by propagandists, then by the market. Going behind the scenes of the world′s greatest media explosion, this book describes the impact of consumerism on the newsroom, the shaping of a new cultural politics and the rise of a new politics of seduction. In a landscape of technological innovation, blurred boundaries and sensory overload, Amrita Shah paints a picture of the Fourth Estate′s challenging future.

This book explores Vietnamese popular television in the post-Reform era, that is, from 1986, focussing on the relationship between television and national imagination. It locates Vietnamese television in the experiences of everyday life and the prevailing network of power relations resulting from marketization and globalization, and, as such, moves beyond the clichéd assumption of Vietnamese media as a mere propagandist instrument of the party state. With examples from a wide range of television genres, the book demonstrates how Vietnamese television enables novel conditions of cultural oppression as well as political engagement in the name of the nation. In sharp contrast to the previous image of Vietnam as a war-torn land, post-Reform television conjures into being a new sense of national belonging based on an implicit rejection of the socialist past, hopes for peace and prosperity, and anxieties about a globalized future. This book highlights the richness of Vietnam’s current culture and identity, characterized, the book argues, by ‘fraternity without uniformity’.

The aftermath of Japan's 1945 military defeat left its public institutions in a state of deep crisis; virtually every major source of state legitimacy was seriously damaged or wholly remade by the postwar occupation. Between 1960 and 1990, however, these institutions renewed their strength, taking on legitimacy that erased virtually all traces of their postwar instability.How did this transformation come about? This is the question Ellis S. Krauss ponders in Broadcasting Politics in Japan; his answer focuses on the role played by the Japanese mass media and in particular by Japan's national broadcaster, NHK. Since the 1960s, television has been a fixture of the Japanese household, and NHK's TV news has until very recently been the dominant, and most trusted, source of political information for the Japanese citizen. NHK's news style is distinctive among the broadcasting systems of industrialized countries; it emphasizes facts over interpretation and gives unusual priority to coverage of the national bureaucracy. Krauss argues that this approach is not simply a reflection of Japanese culture, but a result of the organization and processes of NHK and their relationship with the state. These factors had profound consequences for the state's postwar re-legitimization, while the commercial networks' recent challenge to NHK has helped engender the wave of cynicism currently faced by the state. Krauss guides the reader through the complex interactions among politics, media organizations, and Japanese journalism to demonstrate how NHK television news became a shaper of Japan's political world, rather than simply a lens through which to view it.

"Pretty Liar" explores the rise of language and gender politics on Lebanese television to tell the untold story of the co-evolution of Lebanese television and its audiences and how the civil war of 1975-1991 affected that co-evolution. The shift in public interest in television has been widely acknowledged and interpreted within an institutional context as a victory of the neo-liberal entrepreneurship of a new, agile brand over the government inefficiency of Lebanon's national station, Télé Liban. Yet, the role of the Lebanese Civil War in reshaping national television and broadcasting in Arab media following the emergence of the Lebanese Broadcasting Company in 1985 has been unexplored. Based on empirical data and grounded in theory by Arab and global researchers, "Pretty Liar" offers textual analyses of five Lebanese fictional series, three major and several additional periodicals, and nine literary works, and provides context from unscripted interviews with television administrators, anchors, actors, and freelance contributors, print journalists, and audience members. Khazaal seeks to offer new insight into how entertainment television became a site for politics and political resistance, feminism, and the cradle for post-war Lebanon due to the shift in practices and standards of legitimacy. The history of television in Lebanon is not merely the history of technology and business, Khazaal argues, but rather the history of a people and their continuing quest for a responsive television even during times of civil unrest.

This book examines the representation of blackness on television at the height of the southern civil rights movement and again in the aftermath of the Reagan-Bush years. In the process, it looks carefully at how television's ideological projects with respect to race have supported or conflicted with the industry's incentive to maximize profits or consolidate power. Sasha Torres examines the complex relations between the television industry and the civil rights movement as a knot of overlapping interests. She argues that television coverage of the civil rights movement during 1955-1965 encouraged viewers to identify with black protestors and against white police, including such infamous villains as Birmingham's Bull Connor and Selma's Jim Clark. Torres then argues that television of the 1990s encouraged viewers to identify with police against putatively criminal blacks, even in its dramatizations of police brutality. Torres's pioneering analysis makes distinctive contributions to its fields. It challenges television scholars to consider the historical centrality of race to the constitution of the medium's genres, visual conventions, and industrial structures. And it displaces the analytical focus on stereotypes that has hamstrung assessments of television's depiction of African Americans, concentrating instead on the ways in which African Americans and their political collectives have actively shaped that depiction to advance civil rights causes. This book also challenges African American studies to pay closer and better attention to television's ongoing role in the organization and disorganization of U.S. racial politics.

Before the liberalisation of television in 2000, Pakistan had one terrestrial channel.The Pakistan Television Corporation (commonly known as PTV) had been the statebroadcaster since 1964 and thus PTV content reflected the policies of differentgovernments. Liberal governments relaxed control over gender on screen – womencould be seen without dupatta – while religiously inclined governments brought intheir own agendas with restrictions on appearance of women, such as the dupattapolicy (see, for example, Ali, 1986; Suleman, 1990; Kothari, 2005; Nasir, 2012).1 In2002, the Independent Media Corporation launched its channel Geo News fromPakistan, followed by other networks, marking the formal launch of the policy ofliberalisation of media on television. Presently, five media groups have control of thePakistani media industry, including electronic and print media. These are Inde-pendent Media Corporation, Pakistan Herald Publications, ARY Group, WaqtGroup and Lakson Group (see for example Proffitt and Rasul, 2013). The broad-casting industry in Pakistan follows an advertiser-driven model that is run through asystem of ratings. At the time of the fieldwork reported here (October-April 2011),Media Logic and Gallup were the two operators that determined the popular tastesof consumers through ratings.2

Established in 2004, Maori Television has had a major impact on the New Zealand broadcasting landscape. But over the past year or so, the politics of Maori Television have been brought to the foreground of public consciousness, with other media outlets tracking Maori Television's search for a new CEO, allegations of editorial intervention and arguments over news reporting approaches to Te Kohanga Reo National Trust.Based on a Marsden Grant and three years of interviews with key stakeholders – staff, the Board, other media, politicians, funders and viewers – this is a deep account of Maori Television in its first ten years. Jo Smith argues that today's arguments must be understood within a broader context shaped by non-Maori interests. Can a Maori broadcaster follow both tikanga and the Broadcasting Standards Authority? Is it simply telling the news in Maori, or broadcasting the news with a Maori perspective? How can it support te reo Maori at the same time as appeal to all New Zealand? How does it function as the voice of its Maori stakeholders?Offering five frameworks to address the challenges of a Maori organisation working within a wider non-Maori context, this is a solidly researched examination of Maori Television's unique contribution to the media cultures of Aotearoa New Zealand.

It is near impossible to have a discussion of black women in reality television without mentioning the infamous Angry Black Woman (ABW). In fact, some critiques have argued reality television is damaging for black women since many shows focus heavily on this character. 1 This stereotypical characterization of black women is long-standing, due largely to its constant inclusion in media messages. As noted in chapter one, audiences were first officially introduced to her in the 1920s as Sapphire Stevens from the Amos ‘n’ Andy Show ; and her character continued to resurface throughout the years, across several different genres. Despite the many time periods through which this image has traveled, the key characteristic of the Sapphire— her unexplainable anger and aggression— seem to resonate in many modern day images of black women.

Since the late 1990s, there has been a crucial and substantial transformation in China’s television system involving institutional, structural and regulatory changes. Unravelling the implications of these changes is vital for understanding the politics of Chinese media policy-making and regulation, and thus a comprehensive study of this history has never been more essential. This book studies the transformation of the policy and regulation of the Chinese television sector within a national political and economic context from 1996 to the present day. Taking a historical and sociological approach, it engages in the theoretical debates over the nature of the transformation of media in the authoritarian Chinese state; the implications of the ruling party’s political legitimacy and China’s central-local conflicts upon television policy-making and market structure; and the nature of the media modernisation process in a developing country. Its case studies include broadcasting systems in Shanghai and Guangdong, which demonstrate that varied polices and development strategies have been adopted by television stations, reflecting different local circumstances and needs. Arguing that rather than being a homogenous entity, China has demonstrated substantial local diversity and complex interactions between local, national and global media, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese media, politics and policy, and international communications.

The kingdom of Bhutan drew the international spotlight in 1999 when it became the last nation on earth to introduce broadcast television. It was a deliberate and strategic move by a country that for centuries had chosen to isolate itself from the rest of the world, turning inward to nurture its own culture. The small Himalayan country, whose population in 2013 was estimated at just 733,000, 1 sits uneasily between two feisty behemoths  – China and India – each with over a billion people and an ongoing history of border disputes. Bhutan has long been wary of being swamped, either politically or culturally, by these larger neighbours, as well as the world beyond (Penjore  2004 ).

Similar to the other countries discussed in this volume, elite dominance over mass media has been a main characteristic of Filipino history. Foreign-educated Filipino intellectuals from wealthy families founded the early periodicals that demanded reform and/or independence from Spanish colonization in the late nineteenth century (Anderson 1983 ). Today, ‘old rich’ landowning families own and operate television networks, radio stations, and newspapers not only as part of prestigious and profi table media conglomerates, but also in connection with their interests in industries as varied as oil and agriculture to insurance, shipping, and mining.

On 19 September 2006, the fi rst indication many people in Thailand received that the country was undergoing another military coup d’ é tat, the eighteenth such putsch since 1932, was when the nation’s six free-to-air television networks suddenly suspended regular programming and, channel by channel, started to broadcast a generic mix of royal news and light entertainment (Connors and Hewison 2008). Final confi rmation came again via television later that evening in the form of an offi cial announcement, broadcast at regular intervals across all stations from a central feed, in which the armed commanders in chief behind the coup – the awkwardly titled ‘Administrative Reform Group under the Democratic System with the King as the Head of State’ – explained apologetically that they had temporarily taken control of the nation’s airwaves, as indeed of the nation, exhorting viewers to remain calm and reassuring them that normalcy would soon be restored, at which point broadcasting reverted to the same steady flow of innocuous entertainment programming. For all its exceptional gravity, the 2006 coup’s strategic blend of direct state interventionist control of broadcasting combined with a more indirect use of escapist entertainment as populist pacifi er is arguably a structural characteristic of Thai television history writ large.

The construction of a problem, be it a crisis or a moral panic, is an attempt of policing and control, for the maintenance of hegemony and authority (Hall et al. 1978 ). A problem emerges as a problem only when it is out of its proper place, just like dirt becomes dirt only when it is not properly placed in the earth. The elimination of dirt is necessary in maintaining the cleanliness of the social order (Douglas 2002 ). In other words, it is the need for a particular social arrangement that constitutes the existence of a problem. Taiyu, the lingua franca of the Taiwanese, became a problem of dialect (called Minnanyu) to be eliminated when the KMT colonial regime moved to Taiwan, building it as a Chinese nation and instituting Mandarin as the national language. Television is central to the building of the Chinese nation. Taiyu serial dramas were broadcast soon after the fi rst network was established in 1962, but have been constructed as the most problematic and debased genre since the early 1970s when the second TV station, CTV (1969), and the third, CTS (1971), were established and used serial drama to compete for profi t. Accusations directed at the poverty of its quality and the vulgarity of the audiences have characterized mainstream criticisms and constructions of Taiyu serial dramas as problems from the 1970s to the present. This chapter investigates not only the how and what but also the why of this problem-construction, as an attempt to understand the power mechanisms at work in struggling for hegemonic control. It charts two historical moments – the 1970s and from the 1990s to the present – when language has played a signifi cant role in the articulations of serial dramas as problems and explores the changing political, economic and cultural forces that situate them as problems worthy of discussion. I argue that the history of this problem-making demonstrates the centrality of Chinese culture in political domination through cultural means, with ethnic/class politics playing a central role in the maintenance of a hierarchical social order. In the 1970s, Chinese culture was used to create ethnic/class divisions within Taiwan while simultaneously creating the illusion of a symbolic whole under the name of the Republic of China. However, since the 1990s, and intensifying after the 2000s, with the entanglement of democratization and neoliberalization in Taiwan and the rise of China, the ethnic/class tension is not just complicated by confl icted national identifi cations and Chinese culturepromoted by both the KMT Party’s Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, but also for unifi cation purposes. While democratization, which involved the search for Taiwanese identity, led to the rise of Taiyu-based Hsiangtu drama, the neoliberal defi nition of culture as economic resource, which consecrates Chinese culture through capital investment, facilitates this unifi cation process while creating further ethnic/class/national identity divisions within Taiwan. The result is a disparaging of Taiyu-based culture in general and, in particular, Taiyu serial drama as a problem to be reformed.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of media and change in postcolonial Malaysia, a South-East Asian nation of 29  million multicultural people, with a focus on the role of television in the nation’s transformation following independence from British rule in 1957. Despite having inherited the basic democratic institutions of the British political tradition, Malaysia continues to debate the transition from soft authoritarianism to democracy (Means 1996 :  103). Since 1957, Malaysia has been led by a single political party, the Barisan Nasional (BN). While the BN is a coalition of three major ethnic-based political groups, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), it is, in effect, a symbol of Malay-Muslim supremacy (Ketuanan Melayu). UMNO, the dominant group within the party, has, since its formation, aspired to uphold Malay culture as national culture and Islam as the offi cial religion for the country. From the fi rst general elections in 1959 until the 2008 general elections, the BN held two-thirds of the 222 seats in the Dewan Rakyat (House of Representatives). Malaysian media scholar Karthigesu ( 1987 , 1994 ) contends this was largely due to the role of public television, which was launched and promoted by government itself, broadcasting in its colonial service model. In fact, the arrival of state television in 1963 coincided with the formation of the Federation of Malaysia (Moten and Mokhtar 2013 ). In this chapter I argue that television has been pivotal in shaping and transforming the political and cultural landscape of Malaysia as the medium evolved from a strictly national to a loosely global and then fluidly trans-local orientation. While television fi rst enabled the BN to hold its two-thirds majority and build the nation premised on Malay supremacy policies, it subsequently played a part in weakening the BN’s grip over the multiethnic electorate as the UMNO Ketuanan Melayu ideology, layered deep beneath the powdered face of television, surfaced in the digital media era.

One may argue that Chinese television has already received more than its fair share of attention in the study of Chinese media. As compared with radio and cinema, which developed in the socialist era (1949-78), television has been seen as the dominant medium in the decades of marketization and economic reforms since the late 1970s (Zhu and Berry 2008 ). Television has been studied as a metonym for the ongoing tension and complicity between the Chinese state and the market (e.g., Zhao 1998 ; 2008a) and as a metaphor for the contradictions between a legacy of socialist rhetoric and ethos and a neoliberal market agenda. It is precisely these contradictions that make up what is often referred to as the ‘Chinese characteristics’ (Zhao 2008a; Sun and Zhao 2009 ) of China’s television culture.

Soul! was where Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire got funky, where Toni Morrison read from her debut novel, where James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni discussed gender and power, and where Amiri Baraka and Stokely Carmichael enjoyed a sympathetic forum for their radical politics. Broadcast on public television between 1968 and 1973, Soul!, helmed by pioneering producer and frequent host Ellis Haizlip, connected an array of black performers and public figures with a black viewing audience. In It's Been Beautiful, Gayle Wald tells the story of Soul!, casting this influential but overlooked program as a bold and innovative use of television to represent and critically explore black identity, culture, and feeling during a transitional period in the black freedom struggle.