Abstract
Over the past two decades, advocates for media reform in the United States have fought for, and achieved, much greater visibility and even success. With Donald Trump’s ascendency to the White House, however, new obstacles loom large. Trump’s election is simultaneously symptomatic of myriad failures of the US media system as well as a manifestation of the fallout of neoliberal imperatives. Taking stock at a global level is long past due, and the editors of this book provide valuable service towards that end. The authors featured remind us that media reform has been an historical and pan-geographic constant, one best understood, as McChesney argues in the pointed preface, ‘as being concerned with providing a core element of the infrastructure of democracy’ (p. xiii). Well-chosen academicians provide theoretically grounded and methodologically diverse studies alongside similarly well-situated policy activists who speak across myriad struggles and conjunctures.
In each of four expansive sections, scholars lead off with theoretically based analyses of particular struggles, followed by shorter pieces by practitioners that provide lessons learned from their struggle; valuably, many of the scholars are deeply involved in reform initiatives themselves. Each chapter commences with the author’s summary of key takeaways from their case study and finishes with clearly described lessons for activism. This structure serves the reader quite well. An introductory section outlines media reform as a concept, offering as well reflections on intersections between the policy-world and the academy. ‘Internet activism for media reform’ provides contributions regarding use of online platforms to influence policy debates largely in North American and British contexts. This said, included is a fascinating piece on the establishment of the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition charter within the Internet Governance Forum – an effort that pushed the envelope by inserting human rights law into computer engineering and software design principles themselves. ‘The power of the media reform movement’ expands the book’s purview tremendously, exploring deliberate strategies undertaken by agents of reform across a wide swath of political settings. Finally, ‘Media reform as democratic reform’ draws attention to the mutual constitution of communication-policy reform and (sometimes, but not always) democratic governance processes across the globe.
Several aspects make this collection particularly valuable. For one, it highlights struggles to obtain liberal ideals of unencumbered and pluralistic expression alongside more radical objectives. The pitfalls of liberalized, commercialized media are among the barriers to these in different ways across settings. The chapters by Abraham-Hamanoiel on broadcast and telecommunications reform in Mexico, by Tsai and Lo on hyper-commercialized journalism and pushback against mega-mergers in Taiwan, by Karikari on the Media Foundation for West Africa’s monitoring and defence of journalistic practice, and Brooten’s absolutely sparkling historical contextualization of media in the Philippines, Thailand and Myanmar, all explore settings in which liberal models were in conflict with either commercial imperatives or more authoritarian histories. Brevini and Schlosberg explore efforts to negotiate different objectives of reform groups in Britain in the wake of phone-hacking scandals. Abdulla longs for Egypt’s state media to become a properly public broadcaster in the first place. Camp’s brief history of the attempts of Guatemala’s indigenous populations to secure radio frequencies for self-expression in the wake of decades-long civil war (and a law which, realizing the fever dreams of Chicago School partisans, would grant frequencies to highest bidders at auction) finds hope in the many authorized and unauthorized low-power stations which have launched and a relatively new willingness to lobby for change, which would have been quite dangerous not long ago.
The book similarly provides diverse strategies against neoliberal trajectories. This is on full display in Martens, Reina and Vivares’ chapter on Argentina and Venezuela’s remarkable reforms. The work of ‘policy hackers’ described by Hintz, in which activists cobble together best practices from across borders, similarly supplies a unique lens through which to view initiatives as the Hamburg Transparency Law Initiative, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, the Argentinian Coalition for Democratic Broadcasting, and efforts on net neutrality in the European Union (EU). Aaron and Karr describe what they see as a seemingly obvious, yet underutilized ‘inside-outside’ strategy to secure at the US Federal Communications Commission strong (if now tenuous) network neutrality principles on broadband networks; they provide a corrective for pervasive, lazy accounts that describe the fight as only between corporate giants. Reitman performs similar service regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) fights in the United States, and others gesture similarly in Canadian contexts.
The role of scholarship in reform efforts is a common point of return. ‘Media observatories’ provide models for the stimulation of media reform. Lentz argues that graduate students need mechanisms for tangible policy-world experience. Puppis and Künzler explore the role of communications research (and accompanying disciplinary institutionalization) in Swiss media politics. Breitbart’s brief description of efforts to shape the United States’ briefly reinvigorated Broadband Technology Opportunities Program particularly shines; he describes the strategies used by the Open Technology Institute, working as part of coalitions with locally based social justice organizations, to redefine both the bounds of the programme as well as the metrics utilized to gauge need or success – away from often impossible-to-gauge notions of broadband adoption and towards locally measurable figures as rates of unemployment and poverty.
The mantra of organizing broad-based coalitions is stressed uniformly, but Sassaman and Tridish’s intervention is particularly effective in this vein. Writing of their experience with the US-based Prometheus Radio Project, they describe the efforts to open US air waves to new, low-power community stations. Despite powerful commercial (and even public) broadcaster pushback over the course of a decade, in 2010, activists secured passage of the Local Community Radio Act, which cleared the way for new community stations to appear. Prometheus worked with communities that, even with improvements in broader structures of formal democratic governance, would likely still find themselves marginalized: a radio station meant a lifeline and a tool for organization in ways previously impossible. Sassaman and Tridish stress growing strong community structures outside questions of policy so as to build sites of support and, potentially, power: media reform, for them, starts with movements for social justice and expands outward from there. Drawing from such community networks ultimately overcame what had been almost monolithic opposition. Positive politics of policy generation is far more difficult than negative politics of pushback: choosing positive policy goals wisely – ones one could sustain for the long-term – was crucial.
If there were anything one might wish for here, it might be some piece that crafts the beginnings of a cohesive narrative that placed the global media reform environment directly in the context of the uneven and contradictory growth of global capitalism and other power formations. The fact this desire emerged as I read points to the book’s value in provoking or broadening new directions of research. Teachers of courses in media policy and activism, social movements, political science and media studies will find it a welcome resource. For the questions the authors raise and the strategies they describe, this book is a valuable contribution to ongoing debates and the deathly serious struggles to come.