Media Work and Public Value: Producing Public Service Television under State Control in Colombia

This project, based on a study of television producers in Colombia, is an ethnographic exploration of the working conditions of cultural production within a highly contextualized environment such as public service television under state control, using Señal Colombia TV channel as case study. I examine how cultural production is affected by governmental structures and dynamics, whilst exploring the conditions and processes of public service television production, and how television producers experience these processes at an individual level. My primary question is to determine how the production of public service television under state control impacts producers’ practices and perceptions regarding the value and outcomes of their work. In this context, precariousness, autonomy, good work, power and public value have emerged as central areas of constant tension. I link issues regarding cultural work and public value in a media production analysis, obtaining direct empirical data that provides an in-depth description of the current public media production context under state control in Colombia. To explore these intersections, the project brings together interviews, focus groups, and participant observation. The findings exposed that the internal dynamics of both the nation and the organisation significantly affect the concept of public value, making it an ambivalent, uncertain and ill-defined notion. Where governance is state-driven, workers, regardless of their role, subscribe to dominant narratives and discourses that justify their work, and thus contribute to keeping themselves under prescribed creativity. In general, the present study provides a holistic account of cultural work study, focusing on what occurs to cultural work in various contexts of control, and the individual reactions to these contexts. The analysis of cultural work in this context, also broadens current knowledge on the concepts of network sociality and good work under clientelism, and in a non-free-market.