The Politics of Expertise in Congress: The Rise and Fall of the Office of Technology Assessment. Bruce BimberTwenty Years of Science in the Public Interest: A History of the Congressional Science and Engineering Fellowship Program. Jeffrey K. Stine

Isis ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-322
Author(s):  
Bob Filner
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Shepperd

Abstract Through detailed archival analysis of personal letters, this article examines how the “public interest” mandate of the Communications Act of 1934 inspired the formation of the Princeton Radio Research Project (PRRP), and influenced Paul Lazarsfeld’s development of two-step flows and media effects research. Buried in federal records, a post-Act Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Pursuant that mandated analysis of educational broadcasting additionally turns out to be the causative reason that Theodor Adorno was brought to America by the Rockefeller Foundation. Crucial to the intellectual history of media and communication theory, Lazarsfeld invited Adorno not only to develop techniques to inform educational music study, but to strategically formulate advocacy language for the media reform movement to help noncommercial media obtain frequency licenses. The limits and pressures exerted by the FCC Pursuant influenced the trajectory of the PRRP research, and consequently, the methodological investments of Communication Studies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-101
Author(s):  
Dina I. Waked

This article proposes the use of antitrust law to reduce poverty and address inequality. It argues that the antitrust laws are sufficiently malleable to achieve such goals. The current focus of antitrust on the efficiency-only goals does not only lead to increasing inequality further but is also inconsistent with the history of antitrust. This history is presented through the lens of the public interest that emerges into the balance between private property and competition policy. Tracing the public interest at different historical moments, we get to see how it has been broad enough to encompass social welfare concerns. Over time, the public interest concern of antitrust was narrowed to exclusively cover consumer welfare and its allocative efficiency. Once we frame antitrust as public interest law, in its broadest sense, we are empowered to use it to address inequality. A proposal to do so is exposed in this article.


2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (S1) ◽  
pp. 156-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafał Niżankowski ◽  
Norbert Wilk

In 1989, Poland started to slowly release itself not only from the burden of a half-century of communist indoctrination and soviet exploitation, but also from the consequences of the Semashko model of healthcare organization: low doctors' salaries, primary care based on multispecialty groups, overdeveloped hospital infrastructure, and limited access to sophisticated interventions overcome by patients' unofficial payments.A few years after the 1998 workshop on health technology assessment (HTA) in Budapest, the first HTA reports were elaborated in the National Center for Quality Assessment in Health Care, which could mark the beginning of HTA in Poland. Several individuals and organizations have been involved in developing HTA, both from noncommercial and commercial standpoints.A goal to establish a national HTA agency appeared among the priorities of the Polish Ministry of Health in 2004 and was realized a year later. The Agency for HTA in Poland published guidelines on HTA and established a sound and transparent two-step (assessment-appraisal) process for preparing recommendations on public financing of both drugs and nondrug technologies. The recommendations of the Agency's Consultative Council were warmly welcomed by the public payer. However, the recent major restructuring of the Agency and new drug reimbursement decisions aroused doubts as to keeping transparency of the decision-making processes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Janis Teruggi Page

To illustrate the interdisciplinary breadth of public interest communications (PIC), this study explores the societal importance, engagement strategies, and public impact of La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, CA, an internationally known nonprofit organization founded in 1975. It responds to Downes’ (2017) advice on approaching PIC investigation and his call for “research readily informed by those ‘in the field,’” (p. 34), or those engaged in actual social/cultural changes resulting from PIC consciousness. Drawing from past scholarship on practices in community-based social justice organizations and public interest communications, interviews with La Peña’s leaders, the author’s own experiences as one of its founders, and source materials from its documentarian, this study encapsulates La Peña’s 44-year history of serving as a change agent through amplifying marginal voices.


This chapter traces the history of public service television. The history of British public service broadcasting policy in the 20th century is characterized by a series of very deliberate public interventions into what might otherwise have developed as a straightforward commercial marketplace. The creation of the BBC, the launch of an ITV network required to produce public service programming, and the addition of the highly idiosyncratic Channel 4 gave the UK a television ecology animated by quality, breadth of programming and an orientation towards serving the public interest. At each of these three moments, the possibilities of public service television were expanded and British culture enriched as a result. The 1990 Broadcasting Act and the fair wind given to multichannel services may have ended the supremacy of the public service television ideal. However, public service television has survived, through the design of the institutions responsible for it, because of legislative protection, and as a result of its continuing popularity amongst the public.


1977 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 474-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Gantz

On September 22, 1976, the United States and the Government of Peru signed an agreement resolving the nationalization of the Marcona Mining Company’s Peruvian branch. The settlement, the intergovernmental negotiations leading up to it, and the expropriation itself are of more than passing interest. The settlement has been characterized by the U.S. Government as providing, when fully implemented, prompt, adequate, and effective compensation through a package—a combination of cash and long term sales relationship—which represents a relatively beneficial arrangement economically and politically for the Government of Peru. These arrangements were the more remarkable for having been concluded with a leading Third World country that has a long history of nationalization of foreign investment. In light of the frequency of expropriations of American-owned property abroad, and of the fact that in one or more ways such expropriations involve issues of the public interest as well as those of private U.S. companies, the Marcona settlement has implications for the handling of other investment disputes.


2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-332
Author(s):  
Joe Wallis

This paper treats the “war on terror” as a battle to engage the hopes of a target population. bounded by shared “conspiracist” beliefs. These are seen as countering the cognitive dissonance arising from a history of perceived humiliation. A small militant minority within this target population will have a tendency to perpetrate acts of terror both as an expression of their “apocalyptic hopes” and to evoke such hopes among their potential or latent members within the target population. In reacting to these acts through a preventive “war on terror” that is unrestricted in time and space, the superpower is setting itself the ambitious goal of extinguishing these hopes. Questions must therefore arise as to whether the pursuit of this option rather than “a more focused, restrained international response” can be explained in terms of a dispassionate assessment of the public interest being over-ridden by the passions provoked by a sense of superpower humiliation or by private considerations of political interest.


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