Documentary reality television's privacy problem

<p>Documentary reality television is hugely successful. The genre, which includes shows like Police Ten 7, Coastwatch and Border Patrol, consistently outperforms other television formats and fills free-to-air television schedules. In these shows ride-along film crews and body-worn cameras record agencies as they go about their tasks. Often these agencies are public authorities and their tasks are statutory functions. The purpose of this paper is to examine the genre’s privacy implications. It concludes that the genre is systemically unlawful. It is unlawful because it breaches the privacy rights of involuntary participants. The paper considers the privacy implications by examining the genre against the shared features of the publication tort and the Privacy Broadcasting Standard. Both of these consider that it is a breach of privacy to broadcast material subject to a reasonable expectation of privacy, where that broadcast is highly offensive unless there is an applicable defence. While the material broadcast represents the work of agencies, it also represents the personal stories of everyday people going about their lives. Often the moments captured are significant life events and intimate moments for those people. By agreeing to contribute to the genre, agencies agree to broadcast these life events without the active involvement of the participants. Research has also found that this is often occurring without informed consent. While the focus of this paper is on the private law implications of the genre, it identifies that some public authorities’ involvement in the genre may also be ultra vires. The paper finishes by considering why, if the genre is systemically unlawful, people are not suing. It considers that general issues with access to civil justice and the powers of the Broadcasting Standards Authority stand in the way of potential complainants. It finishes by considering some solutions that could improve the situation.</p>

Documentary reality television's privacy problem

<p>Documentary reality television is hugely successful. The genre, which includes shows like Police Ten 7, Coastwatch and Border Patrol, consistently outperforms other television formats and fills free-to-air television schedules. In these shows ride-along film crews and body-worn cameras record agencies as they go about their tasks. Often these agencies are public authorities and their tasks are statutory functions. The purpose of this paper is to examine the genre’s privacy implications. It concludes that the genre is systemically unlawful. It is unlawful because it breaches the privacy rights of involuntary participants. The paper considers the privacy implications by examining the genre against the shared features of the publication tort and the Privacy Broadcasting Standard. Both of these consider that it is a breach of privacy to broadcast material subject to a reasonable expectation of privacy, where that broadcast is highly offensive unless there is an applicable defence. While the material broadcast represents the work of agencies, it also represents the personal stories of everyday people going about their lives. Often the moments captured are significant life events and intimate moments for those people. By agreeing to contribute to the genre, agencies agree to broadcast these life events without the active involvement of the participants. Research has also found that this is often occurring without informed consent. While the focus of this paper is on the private law implications of the genre, it identifies that some public authorities’ involvement in the genre may also be ultra vires. The paper finishes by considering why, if the genre is systemically unlawful, people are not suing. It considers that general issues with access to civil justice and the powers of the Broadcasting Standards Authority stand in the way of potential complainants. It finishes by considering some solutions that could improve the situation.</p>

THE MEDIA INFLUENCE OF TELEVISION FORMATS ON THE VIEWER’S MIND

The purpose of the article is to examine and assess the role played by television in modern society in defining the classification of entertaining television formats and the television formats influence on the recipients’ minds. The methodology of the research is based on the selection of the actual material on the suggestive properties study of television is based on the domestic and foreign scholars’ concepts, as well as on the philosophers views, sociologists, semiotics, cultural scientists, art critics, who consider television as a phenomenon of modern culture. The scientific novelty of the work lies in that the semantic properties' perception of reality on TV has got a tendency to withdraw from person’s conscious control and society, pushing the subconscious of the viewer to mythological stereotyping. Conclusions. In practice, everyone is influenced by various media. Creating the whole picture of reality with all its contradictions can bring us to a comprehensive understanding of the world in all its diversity, which will help, in our opinion, overcome the crisis on a television screen, where today a vivid visual image often covers the lack of spirituality and the screen’s aggressiveness.

The gastronomic show in the TV program grid: typological features

Gastronomic culture is becoming more and more evident in the media sphere. Taking different forms – aesthetic, imagistic, stylistic, informative-communicative, this kind of content is situated among the most rated programs that form the broadcasting of television stations, especially commercial ones. Culinary shows are among the most popular television programs to which the local public has access. The purpose of this research is to establish the structural-discursive particularities of culinary programs, as well as to realize a typology of these television formats. The gastronomic shows placed on the broadcast on the local and retransmitted television stations that have at least one gastronomic show on the grid were subjected to a content analysis.

Transnational Television Distribution and Co-Production Challenges

This article explores the production and distribution process for television co-productions and explains the potential benefits and risks compared to other media joint ventures, like television formatting. Using a detailed case study of one television series within a larger co-production agreement between a German rights trader and a Hollywood studio, the author analyzes production and distribution challenges and complex contractual arrangements within the context of global media trade. Co-productions are situated in between, and as a transition from, acquiring rights to canned television programs, and acquiring rights to television formats. The author contends that a range of difficulties in co-productions has contributed to a turn to television formatting, where the production process is more easily controlled and customized by the partner acquiring the property, leading to more predictable and successful distribution outcomes.

Glocalization of the Television Format in China

For the past two decades, global television formats have received more attention in academia. Being theorized as mass-produced transnational cultural products, global TV formats have been articulated as dynamic junctures of cultural imperialism, media imperialism, and cultural homogenization in the realms of media and popular culture. These theoretical approaches, however, adopt a dualistic understanding of globality and locality, ignoring the multi-relational interactions between discourses of the global format and the local context constrained by specificities of global TV formats’ importing countries. Compared to the notion of globalization, glocalization attends more to the dialectical relationship between the global and the local, with its emphasis on postmodern understanding of local contents’ reproduction or repackaging within the framework delineated by global TV formats. With global TV formats’ transnational flow, these cultural commodities have gone through complex reproduction or adaptation in order to fit importing countries’ specific cultural, social, and even political milieus. Besides adaptation, global TV formats are inevitably subject to incompatible constraints in importing countries and thus exposed to disputes that may bring damages to their sustainability outside of their countries of origin. In order to present a comprehensive review of cross-border transaction and glocalization of global TV formats, it is necessary to examine this phenomenon’s origin and global expansion and explore its entrance into China. This can be done by analyzing the rise and fall of The Voice as a representative case and as one of the most successful global TV formats in the Chinese context within the framework of glocalization.

The 'angelification' of girls: Winx Club as a neo-liberal Catholic project

This article examines and contextualizes the socio-economic model and values system from which the transmedial, transnational text that we call the Winx Project derives and in which it is produced. The Winx Project centres on an animated television series for girls and tweens, Winx Club, produced in Italy and distributed in 150 countries worldwide, but includes spin-off television formats, films, live and interactive entertainments, an amusement park and merchandising and fashion to compose a multifaceted, multiple 'text'. This plural text is employed to measure the functionality of the Winx Club within a global and transnationalized discourse of neo-liberal economics on the one hand and, on the other, a local context that reaches deep into the regional character of Social Catholicism to purvey on a global scale its ethics and values system.