Government Intervention in the Twenty-First-Century UK Broadcasting Ecology

This chapter explores how government intervention has been framed, defined and construed in the British broadcasting sector since the turn of the twenty-first century. The interest will be to scrutinise justification for rather than implementation of how government intervention has been defined and legitimised, and will not necessarily focus on its regulatory instruments and avenues. The analysis of the 2003 and 2013 broadcasting regulation reviews will help to demonstrate how political justification for government intervention has not undermined but actually bolstered the latter’s central position in the British broadcasting environment, despite the broader neoliberal tradition.