Category: Media and Communications

Dublin Legal Workshop: Broadcasting Bill

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| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Digital Rights, Media and Communications

TV3 logoAs the regular reader (there is [only]or[at least] one, according to my stats counters) of this blog will know, I am interested in the slow progress of the Broadcasting Bill, 2006 through the Houses of the Oireachtas (Parliament). For that reason, I am greatly looking forward to the next lecture in the evening stream of the Dublin Legal Workshop. Next Tuesday, 13 February, David McMunn, Director of Government, Regulatory and Legal Affairs for TV3, will give a talk entitled

The Broadcasting Bill, 2006. The Tooth Fairy – Judge,
Jury and Executioner.

It will be held in Room 11 of the School of Law, House 39, Trinity College Dublin (a map of College with directions to the School of Law is available here), at 6pm. If you’re interested, please do come along. …

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Paying the Broadcasting Bill …

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| Media and Communications, Politics

.. will soon cost more. Not only are the ongoing hearings on the Broadcasting Bill (mentioned here on Wednesday) likely to result in a broadened definition of television requiring a tv licence fee (even if not so broad that it will catch mobile phones – though it will be interesting to see how effectively this is achieved), but the fee itself is soon to to go up.

Oh joy. …

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Speech Skirmishes

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| Media and Communications

Today’s papers carry two stories with interesting freedom of expression angles. Both cases are in their initial stages, with more to come: one returns to the High Court today and the other to the Circuit Criminal Court on Monday week. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that they have to capacity to test the health of freedom of expression and media rights in Ireland today, and it will be interesting to see how they develop.

These two skirmishes presage potential speech battles ahead.…

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Who Pays the Broadcasting Bill?

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| Media and Communications

The progress of the Broadcasting Bill, 2006 through the Houses of the Oireachtas (the houses of the Irish Parliament) is interesting for all sorts of reasons. It has – appropriately – been a guinea pig for several eGovernment initiatives, including an electronic consultation which drew more than 500 responses, and today’s hearings of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Marine and Natural Resources relating to the Bill are being webcast.

Unsurprisingly, then, there is much media interest in today’s hearings. …

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Broadcast News

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| Media and Communications

Janice Hadlow, Controller of BBC Four, has been named as Oxford University’s News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media (2006-20007), in succession to the satirist Armando Iannucci. The visiting chair affords figures in the broadcast media world an opportunity to explore and explain their understandings of the impact of the broadcast media on society. Hadlow’s four lectures after Christmas promise to be thought-provoking, especially her first (on Tuesday 21 January 2007): ‘The Importance of Being Serious – Why Serious Television Still Matters In The Digital Age’. Let’s hope that Oxford or the BBC might think about doing interesting with the lectures, like broadcasting them online?…

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Welcome

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| Media and Communications

ajilogo.jpgSo, welcome then, Al Jazeera English, the English language service of the (in)famous arabic 24hr rolling news channel Al Jazeera. There will be teething problems. There will be political disagreement about it. It will take time to build the capacity and audience and credibility of CNN and the BBC‘s News 24/World channels. And, quite frankly, there will be some bad or boring television.

Nevetheless, all this aside, today’s launch must be given an unqualified welcome. Diversity in news can only be a good thing. I will therefore be watching online until ntl get around to offering it to their long-suffering Dublin subscribers!…

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Media Regulation

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| Defamation, Defamation Bill 2006, Media and Communications, Privacy

Another day, another conference. Today, the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin hosted a conference on the government’s reform plans relating to the defamation, privacy and broadcasting. I think that it was an important contribution to a crucial debate. Personal highlights included my colleage Eoin Carolan‘s superb conceptual discussion of press freedom in this context (on his birthday, I think; and if I’m right: happy birthday, Eoin!), Dearbhail McDonald’s insights into practical journalism, and Paul Drury’s combative speech that the regulation of the press is a bad idea and won’t work anyway.

I talked about the proposed Press Council from the 2003 Report of the Legal Advisory Group on Defamation (pdf) to the 2006 Bill. …

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