Abstract:
This thesis considers New Zealand television’s public sphere role, by analysing three
television programmes in terms of how they enable the exercise of power or resistance. The
programmes 7 Days, Campbell Live, and Shortland Street were used as case studies of typical
public sphere spaces that are available to the New Zealand public. These programmes were
analysed in terms of Foucault’s concepts of power and resistance as active exercises that are
present in all interrelations. The research found that the programmes were sites of both the
exercising of power and the possibility of resistance, as they each worked to circulate
competing discourses that subjects could take up to reinforce existing power structures or to
resist the exercise of power upon them. Despite this conflicted nature, each programme was
found to circulate these competing discourses in a manner that accommodated critical
positions and discourses, as well as reinscribing normative power relations.
