Sunday, September 9, 2012

Portugal examining privatizing broadcast station

I found this article to be very interesting, the Portuguese government is thinking about privatizing their broadcast station (RTP) because of the economic turmoil that has hit the country so hard. The government is trying to plug holes in its finances and the easiest way they believe is to take away some programming from the faithful people. Unlike the United States, Portugal relies on their television broadcasting on for news and more important information. This has the country in an outrage to hear that this is the way they are trying to save money. There has even been more radical options thrown around like cutting (RTP 2) which features arts and cultural programming. Now, we see that there is some similarity between United States and Portugal as we usually cut fine arts first in our society. Some of the opposition say that the privatization could be used as a political angle  for Mr. Passos Coelho to silence a meddlesome critic. But all in all they have yet to make a full decision but they are swiftly trying to make the move to privatize.

If you would like to check out the story for yourself here is the link

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/business/media/portugal-examines-privatizing-public-broadcaster-rtp.html?_r=1&ref=media



Cameron Ratcliff     

1 comment:

  1. Great article, Cameron. It's going to be particularly relevant in class later this week when we talk about media systems that operate under a NON-commercial mandate, and what that means. Definitely bring this up then so we can discuss it as a class!

    Remember that you can turn any link into a hyperlink that is part of the text of your post. If you highlight a word of your text, click on the "new post" toolbar where it says "link." A box will appear and you can just copy and paste the URL of the link there. Then you'll have hyperlinked text, which will make your post look cleaner!

    Also--don't forget to label your posts with keywords. In this case, maybe "Portugal," "privatization," "television" would be good choices.

    Great job!

    ReplyDelete