Page 52 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Audiences 35

insulating them from the necessity of making choices between competing
(and potentially conflictual) religions and religious claims. In this way,
broadcast policies on religion reified formally what had been the case
with prior media cultures informally (particularly the prodigious religious
publishing industries): a preeminent place for formally constituted and
established religious authorities at the center of the culture and of media
culture (Rosenthal 2007). The role of audiences in this conception was as
more or less peripheral participants in the public arena.

The religious “marketplace”

There was, of course, religious publishing and later religious broadcasting
and religious film production that took place alongside and outside this
system. Beginning with independent and nondenominational pamphlets,
tracts, and other educational and inspirational materials in the nineteenth
century and later as the evangelical impulse in (particularly American)
Protestantism motivated increasingly independent and paradenominational
publishing and radio and film production in the twentieth century, a
parallel system of religious supply began developing audiences for this more
informal, alternative material. These audiences then aggregated around
media materials (and material culture) whose functions spread beyond the
kind of paternalism that defined the material produced by the established
institutions.
This system and these assumptions began to change in the 1970s with the
advent of new video production and transmission technologies. Technology
interacted with broadcast policies in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere
intended to increase audience “choice” in screen media and intended to
encourage the economic development of new screen media industries. There
was growing dissatisfaction with the relatively limited range of television
options (limited to a few commercial broadcast channels in North America
and a few public service channels elsewhere), and advocates of broadcast
deregulation were able to point to evidence of potential audiences and
markets that would flourish under a new structure and regime.
The proliferation of channels and services that resulted significantly
undermined the centrality of the former system wherein commercial and
public service broadcasters largely determined practice both in overall
philosophy or approach and in its execution. The alternative or parallel
religious mediascapes also came into play in this era, as evangelical
Protestant broadcasting, for example, found new platforms and markets in
North America (and increasingly in Europe as well) and emergent audiences
for these materials became accustomed to a range of religiously inflected
materials available in the screen media marketplace.