Roundtable: Perspectives on Localizing the Transnational in Regional Television History: Introduction

The tendency to focus on television as a national medium has led to a relative neglect not only of the transnational flows of television across national borders, but also of the place of the regional and the local in histories of television. This section brings together four short articles by different authors all addressing the history of regional and local television within a range of national contexts in order to stimulate discussion and research into the place of the regional in transnational television history. Benoit Lafon examines the centralizing tendencies of the development of regional television in France, Edgar Lersch explores how German television was initially developed as a federal system, Juan Francisco Gutierrez Lozano examines the uneven development of regional television in Spain, and Sarita Malik looks at the ways in which national broadcasters and, more recently, transnational channels, have attempted to address diasporic communities. Together these articles demonstrate the important role of the regional in the construction of a range of different national contexts, while also pointing to the instability and variety of the 'regional' within and across these contexts.