17

Mending the Gaps

Connecting Media Policy and Media Studies

Victor Pickard

Media studies and media policy would appear to be natural allies with deep affinities. But a number of barriers frequently hinder what should be a fruitful interaction. Bridging this divide would mutually benefit both areas. While media policy debates occasionally have been enriched by scholarly input in the past, the proliferation of media-related challenges facing society today calls for much more engagement from the academic community. Indeed, at perhaps no other time in living memory have both the stakes for such debates been as high and the opportunity for scholars to intervene as great.

The field of media studies would also benefit from such a symbiotic relationship on at least two levels. First, the professional realm of media policy – including research positions at regulatory agencies, think tanks, nonprofit advocacy organizations, congressional offices, and other policy-oriented institutions – could serve as a viable career choice for PhDs who increasingly are seeking alternatives to academic jobs. Second, for the field of media studies to remain politically engaged in ways that affect people's everyday lives, and to encourage public scholarship, scholars must be in conversation with key media policy debates – debates ranging from the future of journalism to core Internet policies like net neutrality. Institutions connected to media policymaking stand to gain from an influx of academically trained professionals who command a strong foundation in historical and theoretical orientations – a kind of training that only rarely comes with law degrees and other areas of expertise. Unfortunately, persistent ideological constraints, both inside and outside the academy, too often undercut these potentials.

The following chapter will address some of the challenges and opportunities for scholars to engage with media policy debates in the coming years. The primary focus will be on the US academic and media policy scenes, but much of the analysis could also apply to global relationships like Internet governance issues and neoliberal policy regimes (Pickard, 2007). Media studies and communication scholars arguably have a special role to play in advancing policy that creates greater democratic benefit for all. In particular, they can perform a number of roles and functions, ranging from pedagogy to advocacy, that can help connect dots and mend divides between theory and praxis, and between the academy and the political sphere of media policy.¹

Historicizing the Disconnect and Revising the Revisions

The divide between media studies and more politically engaged policy projects stems from several historical, institutional, and political factors. Tracing back to the origins of the field, scholarly interventions into the US media system have been discouraged by a “dominant paradigm” favoring scientific approaches to media processes that concluded media had little effect on public opinion and behavior. Although sometimes scapegoated as a convenient straw man, this “limited” or “minimal effects” tradition arguably has helped depoliticize media scholarship by relegating larger questions about ideology and power to the field's intellectual margins. Notable exceptions, as well as revisions to familiar critiques, are increasing. For example, Pete Simonson (2008) notes that those who wish to dethrone the minimal effects model are too quick to ignore the richness of the research produced by the Bureau of Applied Social Research, much of it by women like Thelma Anderson, Thelma McCormack, and Joan Goldhamer, who conducted qualitative, particularistic, and multi-method research. Furthermore, Paul Lazarsfeld and, in particular, Robert Merton (Simonson, 2006) included more critical descriptions of media influence early on in their work that official histories of the field often neglect. They identified, for instance, that significant social functions of mass media, such as “status conferral,” “enforcement of social norms,” and the “narcoticizing dysfunction,” helped encourage conformist behavior (Lazarsfeld & Merton, 1948).

Nonetheless, these critical observations of how media serve as mobilizing agents largely receded as minimal effects became sanctified within the field. All too infrequently noted, however, is that the minimal effects model, codified in the discipline's DNA by both detractors and defenders, was not foreordained. This is especially true when considering C. Wright Mills's reservations toward some of the same data that girded Katz and Lazarsfeld's (1955) conclusions that media, after all, had relatively little impact on people's opinions and behavior – that instead, media effects were socially mediated and influence was transacted from media via “opinion leaders” in a two-step flow process through interpersonal networks. Mills, the leading researcher on the so-called Decatur study, questioned the interpersonal communication processes emphasized in what became the foundational book Personal Influence. Noting the lack of analysis related to social “stratification,” Mills drew on some of his more critical observations to pen his 1956 classic The Power Elite, which emphasized the role of concentrated, hierarchical power in US society that was largely missing from the Decatur study. Indeed, more recent work on the Decatur study's origins – particularly Mills's role – suggests a largely ignored alternative history (Sterne, 2005, pp. 71–76; Summers, 2006, pp. 33–37).

Such revisionist histories are on the rise but often do little to challenge the overall depoliticized trajectory of communication studies. Historically within the field of communication and media studies, more critical explanations of structural relationships such as those advanced by the Power Elite often have been neglected in favor of research that remains largely descriptive, noncritical, and micro-phenomenal. As chronicled in Lent's book A Different Road Taken (1995), for the few radicals in the field's early days like Herb Schiller and Dallas Smythe, being critical scholars was a lonely battle. A similarly forgotten trajectory can be discerned in Dallas Smythe's memoirs, in which he wrote the beginnings of an oppositional counternarrative to the seminal Four Theories of the Press (Siebert, Schramm, & Peterson, 1956). While his University of Illinois colleagues in the newly founded Institute of Communications Research (ICR) held forth on the social responsibility model, Smythe challenged them publicly and wrote screeds privately, characterizing their work as public relations for the commercial press, “equivalent in class and political economic terms to the press doctrine in the Soviet Union” (Smythe & Guback, 1994, p.96).

Paradoxically, red-baiting would serve a role in both containing radical critiques and forcing radical scholars into the academy to escape political repression. Smythe had been red-baited by reactionaries in DC for his progressive views and again when he first arrived at the University of Illinois.² Around the same time, another red-baited figure from postwar media policy battles, Charles Siepmann, took refuge in the academy. An early BBC pioneer and the primary author of the infamous Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Blue Book, Siepmann helped found a communications department at New York University (Pickard, 2011a). That at least two of the first communication departments not only were engaged with media policy but also harbored radical scholars dedicated to a critical orientation toward media studies suggests a heterodoxy of alternative, radical traditions not contained within official narratives. Nonetheless, it is this dominant paradigm, driven by social science research focused narrowly on media effects, which ascended, and has continued to figure centrally in histories of the field of communication.

This trajectory was not inevitable. Both Dan and Herb Schiller note the strange irony that at the exact moment the US national security state was enlisting liberal intellectuals and communication scholars to create a propaganda apparatus for nascent overseas Cold War efforts, some of these very same scholars were advocating that media have limited effects on public opinion. This contradiction would not be as glaring if it were not for the scale of their propaganda projects, as Holly Shulman (1990) describes in her history of the Voice of America. Brett Gary (1999) chronicles the debates among the “nervous liberals” who decided to keep the propaganda apparatus intact after World War II. Chris Simpson (1994) goes so far as to suggest that the field of communication would not have been institutionalized if it were not for the massive influx of governmental monies for propaganda purposes. Dan Schiller (1996) describes how “the purportedly ‘limited effects’ of the mass media were elevated by mainstream research only as the structural underpinnings of institutionalized communication were willed off limits” (p. 59). Noting how such a narrow focus keeps concerns about social relations at arm's length, Herb Schiller observed that “[minimal effects'] usefulness to existing power is obvious” (1991, p. 146). He also asserted that even the model's proponents acknowledged that such findings pleased media owners who felt absolved from accountability (p. 137). In response to the rise of active audience research, Herb Schiller argued, “theories that ignore the structure and locus of representational and definitional power and emphasize instead the individual message's transformational capability present little threat to the maintenance of the established order” (p. 156). Moreover, he noted how limited effects emerged as the dominant explanatory model for media within the United States precisely at the same time that a model of powerful or “strong effects” was being deployed outside US borders. Todd Gitlin (1978) similarly noted how the focus on propaganda techniques seemed oddly discordant with the overall limited effects thrust of the field, yet he observed that this “strange conjunction of events is not without its logic” (p. 205).

Gitlin's well-known intervention against the dominant paradigm underscores the fraught relationships between media scholars, their models, and larger political economic structures. Gitlin cast the role of mainstream communications scholars, especially practitioners of the dominant tradition of minimal media effects, as serving the hegemonic power of capitalist society by playing a role in its reproduction and managing the status quo. In mainstream communication scholarship, he sees an allegiance to the status quo embedded in positivistic, quantitative methods, which have, according to Gitlin,

Gitlin saw Lazarsfeld's conception of “effect” as defined narrowly to lend itself to measurement in a strict behavioral and replicable sense, thereby erasing connections to larger sociopolitical meaning and decontextualizing political relationships. Gitlin uncovered a list of what he saw as faulty assumptions underlying such work that looked for effects that were the least likely to manifest:

Gitlin also criticized the focus on “reinforcement” without expanding on ramifications such as long-term, ideological effects.

To be fair, Katz (1987) and others have countered that media effects models have not remained static and continue to develop alongside competing alternative theories. Lending weight to Katz's observation is the fact that scholarship over the past 20 years has gone far in updating the minimal effects model and clarifying its limitations. These modifications and corrections to the earlier minimal effects model range from agenda setting to framing to priming. More recent meta-analysis suggests that despite the conventional narrative that effects research has evolved according to three distinct phases (powerful, minimal, not-so-minimal), “the research corpus in media effects documents a very impressive range of effects from no effect at all to very large effects” (Neuman & Guggenheim, 2011, p. 173).

Demonstrating how quantitative methods can produce radical research is the exemplary work of George Gerbner (1980) who pioneered work on long-term, cumulative media effects, such as those demonstrated by what he termed the “mean world syndrome” – that repeated, long-term exposure to violent television imagery led to a skewed view of the outside world as inordinately hostile. His work had a profound impact on policy debates and would culminate in the “cultural environment” movement. Similarly, quantitative approaches to media analysis were also prominent in early radical communication research – including Smythe's content analyses of broadcast media – and continue to be a mainstay in media reformers' efforts to illustrate how media fail to adhere to prescribed public interest obligations.

In short, even from a critical point of view, pluralistic approaches to media studies are necessary to encourage diverse conceptualizations of power. Although the cultural turn in communication studies prompted a number of radical scholars to argue that the field's depoliticization only worsened (McChesney, 2007), radical scholarship on the whole has arguably become more entrenched in recent decades. To be sure, tensions continue to play out among various critical traditions – for example, in their call for a “critical media industry studies,” Havens, Lotz, and Tinic (2009) felt compelled to dismiss academics located in the Schiller and Smythe traditions “who maintain an unreconstructed Marxist theoretical framework” (p. 237). On a similar note, Henry Jenkins (2006) criticizes media reformers, whom he dubs “critical pessimists,” as relying too much on “melodramatic discourse about victimization and vulnerability” and thus ignoring the “complexity of the public's relationship to public culture” and thereby siding “with those opposed to a more diverse and participatory culture” (pp. 247–248).

But these critiques notwithstanding, it would be fair to suggest that many of the old schisms have begun to recede. In their place, one may hope, is a more constructive approach to social problems that draws from a variety of media studies traditions. In the end, nearly all media policy research should be welcome, but there is a special role to be played by what can be termed “critical media policy studies,” an approach rooted in several of the field's obscured critical traditions.³

A Call for Critical Media Policy Studies

A critical orientation can help galvanize a more activist intervention in media policy debates. By critical orientation I mean “an explicit skepticism toward dominant institutions, ideologies and social relations and implicit commitment to a more democratic, egalitarian, and human social order” (McChesney, 1993, p. 98). A related term is “radical,” describing scholarship that penetrates to the roots of core power relationships. Uncovering the normative foundations of power, particularly as they relate to media, should be the first objective of critical media policy scholarship – an objective very much in line with classical democratic theory. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson issued this important warning: “A democracy will not long endure without frequent return to fundamentals” (quoted in Siepmann, 1948, p. 27). In looking at the role of media in a democratic society, returning to some fundamental democratic theory could be useful, beginning with classics put forth by the likes of Locke, Milton, and Jefferson, and including more recent work by scholars like Starr (2008) and Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, and White (2009). Where the latter discuss media's normative underpinnings, Paul Starr (2008) puts forth a typology of three democratic theories of the press.

Within Starr's model are, on the one hand, minimalists who favor a libertarian media environment characterized, for example, by adversarial electoral campaigns. Minimalists believe that the market will effectively govern the media system, obviating any need for governmental oversight. At the other pole, according to Starr, are radical democrats who favor greater egalitarianism in media, as in all other sectors of social life, and see a potentially progressive role for state intervention to guarantee this social democracy. “In regard to communications, the radical democrat sees the market as a corrupting influence that degrades political discussion and reinforces what used to be described as the cultural hegemony of the capitalist class and is now usually just characterized as the dominance or ‘monopoly’ of big media corporations” (p. 37). Starr describes the radical narrative as one that “views the rise of commercial mass media under the control of large corporations as a betrayal of the original promise of the public sphere and a free press” (p. 40). Emphasis is placed on the “suppression of alternatives,” including “the voices of marginalized groups and dissident journalists” and of “alternative policies that might have limited the dominance of the corporate media” (p. 40).

In Starr's view, the more sensible model is the third option, one he calls the “liberal deliberative” model. This model “does not presuppose that power must be equally distributed among citizens, nor does it count on high levels of everyday popular engagement in public affairs” (p. 37) According to Starr, “these goals, while admirable, are so removed from the realities of modern society that they cannot be conditions for political legitimacy” (p. 37). Implicit in Star's advocacy of the liberal deliberative model is a critique of the radical approach, although he goes no further than to suggest that equitable power distributions and popular political participation simply cannot, a priori, be considered legitimate options. I would suggest that Starr's position is symptomatic of a major weakness of the liberal view that fails to prioritize contesting long-standing structural inequities. Although Starr gives a fair assessment of the radical political economic view, one more critical piece should be added: the radical approach assumes scholars should engage with the public to advocate for a more democratic media system.

Signs that critical policy studies are being taken more seriously in the field of communication are increasing. In recent years, national associations have held special panels for a critical approach to policy, and a number of pre-conferences and working groups have emerged to create more discursive space and allocate more resources for this growing subfield. An important collection of essays showcasing recent activist and scholarly collaborations around media policy reform is a promising development (Napoli & Aslama, 2011). Another recent edited collection served as an intervention in telecommunication debates during the lead-up to President Obama's election (Schejter, 2009). Nevertheless, critical policy studies remains a relatively minor subfield kept on the field's periphery. Among those few policy scholars working in communications departments, even fewer are conducting policy research from a critical orientation.

The Critical Political Economy Approach to Policy Studies

While critical traditions of all stripes lend themselves to policy-oriented media studies, the “critical political economy” approach is arguably the most obvious vehicle enabling structural interventions. Exposing the roots of social problems, political economists often ask questions that powerful interests – along with most mainstream research and society in general – have determined “out of bounds,” lying beyond normative, polite, and rational debate. A political economy of communications must have at least two components. First, assuming that media are central to any society, it must situate a nation's communication system within larger social relationships and political structures. This includes interrogating how the media system challenges or reinforces power hierarchies and established interests, including how it figures within global regimes of power and imperial projects. Second, a political economy of communications should examine the structure of the communications system, including ownership, profit structures, support mechanisms (e.g., advertising and public relations), and enabling government policies. This last component can be separated out into a third mode of inquiry deserving its own category: an examination of the specific policies that give rise to a particular media system.

Political economy's communication origins can be traced back to primarily two sources: the Institute of Communications Research in the United States and the “Westminster school” in England. Dallas Smythe initiated the former after he, like many radicals before and after him, took refuge in the academy. After essentially fleeing his post as the first chief economist at the FCC in Washington, DC, Smythe taught the first political economy course in the new field of communications. Herb Schiller took his place in the ICR when Smythe departed for an academic position in his native Canada. Smythe and Schiller would go far in establishing political economic inquiry, investigating the commodification of culture, production of media consumers, and media operations vis-à-vis US imperialistic projects.

Nicholas Garnham, James Curran, and other prominent British scholars established the Westminster school in England (Curran, 2004). Garnham's work (1990) was inspired by a previously understudied argument by Raymond Williams, in Marxism and Literature, that media and cultural production should be treated as inseparable within capitalist production. In other words, a political economy of communication should figure prominently in any critical inquiry seeking to make sense of how power is inscribed and reproduced in culture. Around the same time, other British scholars including Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1974) also made the case for a political economy of communications by examining the role of media systems within capitalist market relationships.

Many scholars of political economy drove home the fact that there is nothing natural or foreordained about media systems; they do not spring forth from Zeus's head fully formed. Instead, they are the direct result of explicit policies that resulted from an intensely political process. It is the job of critical political economists of media to ruthlessly scrutinize these policies, exposing their contingencies and contradictions. A crucial goal of political economists is to emphasize the power structures that produce any given media system. In the United States, or any capitalist society, this means that we must explore the reinforcing mechanisms of class divides, such as the role of corporate lobbying in media policymaking and the conservative onslaught against civil society institutions that has become increasingly mainstreamed in recent decades. A core component of political economists' project is a prescriptive social mission that entails a normative and even ethical commitment: to assist processes of social change aimed at effecting a stronger democratic society. In many cases this means butting up against status quo assumptions and assailing neoliberal capitalist hegemony. Indeed, distilled from the work of leading political economists is the assumption that disrupting orthodoxy is an essential part of the project (Gandy, 1993; McChesney, 2008; Mosco, 1996).

In short, critical scholars should bring to light core injustices in our institutions, power relationships, and received assumptions by exposing the language and narratives that get deployed in ways that recreate, bolster, and inoculate power asymmetries from interrogation. The legitimacy of these enabling narratives should be called into question. As we aggressively scrutinize these social relationships, which so often serve as apologetics for the status quo, we are guided by at least an implicit commitment to social justice. Increasingly, the current system, which perpetuates power asymmetries and primarily serves in the capital accumulation process, is no longer tenable, especially given the increasing economic inequality in the United States, as well as the detrimental impact of corporate power in the wake of developments like the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC.⁴

Contextualizing the Big Picture and Returning to the Normative

In today's context of technological, political, and social change, we have reached a “critical juncture” of historic import (McChesney, 2007). As a prerequisite for engaging with media policy at this juncture, scholars must penetrate through the constraints of the reigning “American media policy paradigm” (Pickard, 2008). This discursive framework characterizes most DC-based media policy discussions, and favors technological and economic considerations at the expense of normative and democratic ones.⁵ Such an orientation tends to systematically neglect the politics of policymaking, thus ensuring that structural understandings and prescriptions for reform are kept off the table. This paradigm was evident when pro-industry groups that were aligned against mandated net neutrality attempted to portray the debate as being primarily technical instead of concerned with core democratic concerns. FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell epitomized this position in a Washington Post op-ed in 2008. Referring to crucial Internet policies, he asserted that “engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.” The reduction of media policy to solely technical concerns and questions of efficiency is an age-old trope, recurring over the decades to contaminate debates ranging from spectrum management policy to the ownership and control of media outlets. This strategic framing has consequences: any project that depoliticizes media policy issues also undermines media reform efforts.

To counteract this misinformation, it is incumbent upon scholars to help bring crucial context to light in discussing media policy – context that politicizes media policy debates.⁶ By insisting that we include politics, history, and normative understandings in policy discussions, scholars help connect media policy to larger matters – matters that typically fall within the purview of scholarly debate. For example, as we account for technological changes in media systems, we can address political economic issues pertaining to the ownership and control of media infrastructure. We can ask historical questions about policy antecedents and recover alternatives while showing that the status quo is contingent on political practices (Pickard, 2010b). Finally, we can pose normative questions and advance policy prescriptions that would benefit the most people by enabling a more democratic communication system.

In addition to recovering crucial context for media policy debates, media scholars can participate in the policymaking process in at least three ways. First, we can draw from our scholarship to contribute to policy proceedings and provide reports and memos to policymakers. For example, public comment periods at the FCC and other agencies provide an opportunity for scholars to submit written statements and even entire journal-length articles that may enlighten policy discussions. Furthermore, staffers in congressional and regulatory offices are often receptive to bullet-pointed summaries of scholarly work explaining policy positions and their anticipated effects. Second, media scholars can publish popular media like op-eds, blog posts, and magazine essays to help clarify what is at stake with specific media policies. Finally, we can help engage our students in the policymaking process, encouraging and enabling their participation. I have found when discussing these issues in the classroom that my students are very receptive if I can show how policy decisions directly affect their everyday lives. For instance, policies regarding intellectual property, net neutrality, and media ownership have a major impact in shaping their daily Internet use. After demonstrating these connections, I set up classroom activities and assignments in which students create their own policy proposals addressing major media-related problems.

The overarching theme for all these approaches is that media scholars should help clarify policy issues for public consumption while encouraging people to directly engage with the policymaking process. Oftentimes, policy issues are not overly complicated but have been strategically distorted by commercial interests who stand to gain from particular outcomes. Along with net neutrality, the national debate on media ownership is another useful case study of how large sectors of the public engaged to dramatically alter a crucial policy debate. The historical record suggests that if media policy issues are debated openly with an engaged public, the case for media reform becomes paramount. Toward these ends, we must constantly remind policymakers that when we talk about net neutrality, we are not talking about simply the mechanics of a “series of tubes” but rather the future of meaningful democratic communication in US society. When we talk about managing the public airwaves, we are not merely looking to fill gaps in the federal budget by auctioning off monopoly rights to electromagnetic spectrum to the highest bidder, but instead we hope to enable more diverse voices and information within our national discourse. And when we talk about the collapse of journalism, we are not talking about just a bad turn in the market or an inevitability of technological progress but a tragedy that is striking a core institution indispensable for democracy.

Indeed, to take just one example, the future of journalism is perhaps the most important media policy debate facing society today. Daily reports on the state of the press read like obituaries, with newspapers verging on bankruptcy or even closing, hemorrhaging jobs and ad revenue, dismantling foreign and DC press bureaus, and eviscerating local, international, beat, and investigative reporting. Other news media offer little solace, with broadcast and cable news devolving into shrill commentary, and online journalism defying monetization. But often missing from these laments is an even deeper crisis: the institution of journalism is dying before our eyes, a tragedy that goes beyond the decline of newspapers to strike at the foundations of democratic self-governance. Given the systemic failure of advertising-subsidized news and the vacuum left by its demise, it is not hyperbolic to assume that decisions made during this critical juncture will largely determine what news media will look like for decades to come. Assuming that no silver bullet or easy policy fix exists, we must ask the question: What will take the place of traditional commercial news media (McChesney & Pickard, 2011)?

First and foremost, this crisis demands a period of vigorous experimentation (Pickard, 2010a). It is also an opportunity to jettison what is bad with our current news media system, salvage that which is good, and push forward with entirely new models. Scholars can aid this process by recuperating models for possible alternatives. My particular focus in these efforts is to draw from historical and comparative analyses of international models to provide a picture of structural alternatives for journalism that either have worked – or were seriously considered – for some duration in the past, or are in operation somewhere in the world today (Pickard, 2011b). These models include nonprofit, municipally owned, cooperatively governed, and worker-run media, with institutional support and funding through tax incentives, public subsidies, foundation support, and other creative hybrids. This kind of research is a necessary first step in assessing the viability of alternative models and determining the policies and practices that can enable these institutions in ways that best serve the democratic needs of diverse communities.

Moreover, scholars can help devise policies that would benefit the most people (Meinrath & Pickard, 2008; Pickard & Meinrath, 2009). When caught up in ongoing policy struggles, it is easy to lose sight of the necessity of historical perspective. However, historicizing contemporary policy debates is one tangible way that academics can help. Furthermore, they can help move the discourse from developing that contextualization to then communicating it to the public and key stakeholders in a way that can prompt action toward creating a more vibrant and democratic media system.

What Media Scholars Can Do

Media scholars can also help incubate alternative communication models by keeping radical visions alive and advancing them at more opportune moments, particularly during times of crisis. They can also facilitate linkages between the political world of media policy and academic communities. To be sure, while the field of media studies should engage with key media policy debates of the day, this does not mean that every media scholar should be expected to do work that directly intersects with media policy issues. But it should mean that a critical mass of scholars is doing such work. Judging from the florescence of media policy centers, conference panels and workshops, special issues of journals, foundation-supported research, job openings for tenure track media policy positions, and many other signs, a recent surge in academic interest toward media policy is evident. Yet there are still many communication departments that lack a single faculty member who works on such issues.

While the stakes for media policy debates and the opportunity for academic interventions are both great, my own participant observations from time spent working on media policy in Washington, DC amply demonstrated that engagement requires more complicated processes than scholars simply jumping into the fray. One barrier is that it can be difficult to match scholars' skill sets with particular policy problems. A second is that many scholars tend to think of policy in more abstract theoretical terms that do not always neatly map onto praxis. But perhaps the most difficult barrier is that the imperatives of the policy world – like rapidly responding to ever-shifting political landscapes and meshing research objectives with legislative and regulatory processes – do not always lend themselves to those of the academy – like publishing in academic journals, teaching classes, and working toward tenure. A major obstacle to academics becoming more involved in the policy process is that, without direct professional benefits, their time spent on these issues can seem like even more unpaid service labor in a sector that is increasingly exploited.

Nonetheless, there is much that scholars can do that satisfies multiple aims. And while we should be honest that academics infrequently produce work directly applicable to lobbying efforts, scholars have resources that advocates do not. They have time, authority, and expertise. They can connect with students and other constituencies. They can draw from a knowledge base that lends itself to a long critical view of policy battles. In general, scholars can help recontextualize and repoliticize media policy debates.

A renewed interest in media policy scholarship has been concomitant with a rising number of think tanks, particularly on the political left like the New America Foundation and the Center for American Progress, which have begun to focus more on media policy issues. Additionally, joining long-standing policy for a like the annual Telecommunication Policy Research Conference is the work of policy centers like Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Yale's Information Society Project, and Michigan State University's Quello Center, to name just a few. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has been centrally involved in media policy reform in recent years, as have groups of scholars at Penn State and the University of Texas, Austin. Media reform organizations, particularly Free Press, maintain strong connections to a number of media studies scholars, temporarily launching the “Academic Braintrust” (a tongue-in-cheek name) to form working groups on various media policy issues. Another interesting experiment that combines media scholarship with hands-on media policy experience is the consortium on media policy studies program (COMPASS, for which I served as a fellow in 2005). Originating with the two Annenberg schools, the University of Illinois, and the University of Michigan, this program coordinates graduate student summer fellows in a number of congressional and mostly nonprofit offices where participants are immersed in the policymaking process (Newman, 2009).⁷

While questions will continue about how media scholars can get more involved in policy and make policy more central to media studies, given the current media landscape of technological and political change, opportunities for structural reform are plentiful. By connecting media policy issues and debates directly to people's everyday lives, scholars can foster good public scholarship and provide analytical tools to the public that encourage their engagement with media policy.

Historicizing Media Policy Debates

When considering how we can design a media system that serves democratic society, we need to look to our past for lessons about the future. We need to be aware of previous policy debates both to understand how we got here and to learn from previous errors. One important lesson comes from identifying a recurring theme found in previous policy debates: the delegitimation of government intervention in general, and of media regulation in particular. The late C. Edwin Baker (2010) noted that the two arguments media industry representatives typically used to discredit public policy interventions in media were the following: first, that the government has no legitimate role in markets, and second, that the First Amendment forbids government intervention in media markets specifically. Both charges are demonstrably false. The government intervenes in markets all the time – usually to aid corporate profit – and, based on important Supreme Court decisions and other interpretations, the First Amendment can be seen as mandating that the government provide the support necessary for a healthy media system. Nonetheless, pro-industry ideological blinders will continue to pose an insurmountable barrier to all progressive media policy unless we dismantle them. And the best starting point for such a project is to turn to our history.

One such historical analysis put forth by the late Tony Judt (2010) illustrates that the deregulatory turn away from social democratic orientations in the latter half of the twentieth century was marked by an emphasis on efficiency to the detriment of ethics. As a society, Judt observed, we stopped asking whether policies are good or just and instead began asking whether they are efficient and profitable. This neo-liberal turn, often traced to the 1970s, actually began in media policymaking as early as the postwar 1940s (possibly even earlier). What was chiefly an unpopular corporate consensus in the 1940s has now been elevated and adopted by a quasi-grassroots social movement in the form of the so-called Tea Party (Pickard, 2011c).

In short, it is important that we have the intellectual clarity, coupled with political will, to correct the historical record. Among policymakers and pundits it is often noted without much reflection that the “public interest” standard has remained frustratingly ill defined. While it is true that previous attempts to define standards have been fraught with conflict and difficulty, the term “public interest” has not been left undefined by lack of effort. Rather, it has remained ambiguous because industry interests fought aggressively to make it so. Previous policy clashes, where media industries prevailed, resulted in these decontextualized, ahistorical, and depoliticized narratives that, in turn, help perpetuate industry-friendly policy arrangements. Perhaps the clearest example of this phenomenon occurred in the 1940s when red-baiting successfully thwarted a social democratic approach to media policymaking (Pickard, 2010b). This history matters now because, once again, “nervous liberals” (Gary, 1999) are backtracking on structural interventions in deference to industry-friendly media policy proposals. Most recently, the policy debate around net neutrality exemplifies where a great abdication has occurred on the part of regulatory agencies like the FCC. Media ownership issues, exemplified by the Comcast–NBC merger, testify to the corporate capture of the media regulatory apparatus.

Conclusion

To summarize, media scholars can best advocate for reform via their own scholarship and popular writings, and by engaging their students as well as fellow scholars and the broader public. Through publicly engaged scholarship and writing for popular audiences, academics can help clarify what is at stake and provide analyses toward addressing media policy-related problems. Advocating for reform does not mean we must compromise our work; simply providing empirically grounded research accessible to constituencies beyond the academy helps make our work relevant and useful for media reform. By connecting how media policy issues and debates directly affect people's everyday lives, we are doing our job of providing good public scholarship. Given the current media landscape of technological and political change, opportunities for structural reform are myriad. Media policies that will influence our democracy for the coming decades will likely be determined during this current critical juncture. Media scholars have much to contribute to these debates. It is our responsibility to provide analytical tools to the public that encourage their direct engagement with media policy. We must break through the ahistorical and apolitical limitations of the US media policy paradigm if we are to establish an ethical and democratic media system for the twenty-first century.

NOTES

1 Although I specifically address academic involvement in media policy debates, much of this discussion relates to debates about the role of the “public intellectual.” This broader context, although beyond the bounds of this chapter, strikes at the heart of foundational questions about the purpose of knowledge production, universities, and higher learning within a democratic society – all important discussions that deserve much closer attention than I am able to offer here.

2 Smythe's papers at Simon Fraser University indicate that he later discovered that while at the ICR he was being surveilled for the FBI by the departmental chair, Wilbur Schramm.

3 One potentially fruitful conversation is between “critical media policy studies” and “critical cultural policy studies.” Even if they are generally distinct from one another in terms of emphasis, they share some key assumptions, such as the following: “Critical cultural policy studies must concern itself with progressive politics, and take its touchstone as much from social movements as from policy infrastructures” (Lewis & Miller, 2003, p. 8).

4 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 08-205 (2010) was a landmark US Supreme Court decision that determined, based on First Amendment grounds, that corporations cannot be limited in spending money for political broadcasts in support against specific candidates during election campaigns.

5 It should be noted that there are normative implications in the more conservative research. For example, Wilbur Schramm and other founding figures of the field of communication made a case for what media systems in the developing world ought to be like (i.e., like Western media systems, which Schramm and others saw as inherently superior and democratic, precisely because they were defined by and supportive of a capitalist model of development).

6 These efforts to counter a narrowly technical framing of media policy could also benefit from the work of scholars who argue that technologies have politics. See, for example, Langdon Winner (1986).

7 Corporations such as Google have also helped spearhead similar summer fellowship programs that provide policy training. These kinds of fellowships give beneficiaries valuable training and insider experience. Many of Google's policy positions are aligned with those held by nonprofit public interest groups and it tends to maintain a laissez-faire relationship with the nature of the fellowship work, placing fellows in ideologically diverse think tanks and advocacy groups. Nonetheless, these relations also present problems and contradictions inherent in having corporations fund media policy fellowships.

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