Journal of Communication Inquiry

This paper explores the emergence of the media reform movement in the state of Florida in 2008. Focusing on the development of a statewide coalition, the paper details the tensions between local and national policy agendas, the barriers faced by local activists as they attempt to build support for the concept of media reform in their communities, and the diversity of interests represented under the banner of media reform. This case study also reveals an ideological bias toward the left among the movement activists currently working in Florida, signaling a need to harness the broad-based dissatisfaction that exists across the political spectrum.

In recent years, many practitioners, policymakers, and scholars have embraced participatory politics in communications policymaking at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with the expectation that mass involvement by the public will—and should—influence regulatory outcomes. However, calls for participation may not be sufficient; a commitment to public-spirited decision making among agency officials is also needed alongside procedural safeguards for participation. The following analysis uses a Habermasian framework to move beyond participatory politics and advocates for a deliberative understanding of the role of the public and policymakers in producing legitimate outcomes. Looking at legal and legislative history of the Commission and of administrative procedure more generally, the article reconsiders the value of agency discretion and turns attention to the importance of public participation in debates about communications regulation outside the rulemaking system. If members of the public generate, circulate, and make audible their opinions in a public sphere and agency officials are open to and active listeners of a public sphere, agency discretion can guide officials towards public-spirited rather than narrowly interested decisions. Overall, Habermas's model suggests that policymakers and public coproduce legitimacy in a process that is doubly challenging but arguably more profound.

Most existing assessments of local Wi-Fi projects have concentrated on either top-down, government-driven endeavors, or bottom-up projects developed by volunteers or community organizations. In both Canada and the United States, existing local Wi-Fi projects—both top down and bottom up—have failed to fulfill expectations that they could increase digital inclusion. Current policy frameworks may play some role in these failures. This article argues for a policy approach that favors hybrid public broadband that is neither completely bottom up nor top down, and for the development of policy frameworks that support hybrid public broadband.

For more than 30 years, Sweden’s media policy has relied on positive incentives to promote diversity. That is, competition law has rarely been used to prevent dominant newspapers from acquiring smaller ones, but rather press subsidies have been used to increase survival rates and promote independence among the latter. Internationally, the broad trend toward concentration in newspaper markets has been of concern to policy makers, and the Swedish model has attracted considerable interest as a possible path to a more heterogeneous media landscape. However, over the last decade, ownership distribution on the newspaper market has started to change at an accelerating pace, and Swedish media policy stands at a crossroad—to increase reliance on subsidies or to make way for something new. The arising questions regarding how to reshape media policy have several parallels to the ongoing international debate. This case study explores the performance of subsidies from the perspective of pluralism and discusses alternative political responses and future policy directions.

Understanding the social dynamics shaping the internet is vital as media power takes on new dimensions in the digital realm. The internet is increasingly necessary for participation in social life yet corporations continue to shape the online architecture to suit their own narrow commercial interests. In their drive to enclose the internet, online media companies create synergistic membranes with prescribed circuits that constrain user freedoms. Taken together, these synergistic membranes form a new layer of the internet — the Google layer, which constrains and commodifies users' range of motion within a narrow, privatized slice of the world wide web. This jeopardizes the creation of a commons-based communications system with a public service orientation, something that is essential to participatory and democratic dialogue. The open architecture of the internet, characterized and supported by free and open source software (FOSS), defends the digital commons against cyber-enclosure. Social practices and values that distinguish FOSS comprise a liberatory praxis as well as an alternative vision of social organization offline that prefigures a more democratic media system, and broadly construed, a more democratic society.

Media reform is a vital component for sustaining public access to information, and supports libraries in fulfilling their mission as what educator Robert D. Leigh termed “a public agency of communication,”. In many ways, the struggles for media democracy are waged side by side with those of librarians. Like media activists, librarians are deeply concerned about issues related to information production, dissemination, and access. In this article, the author will describe how American librarianship complements a democratic media system and will provide examples of how libraries have played a key role in providing public access to independent media (i.e., alternative, noncorporate, or small press) in print and electronic formats. Finally, considering the interdependency of their goals and interests, the author wishes to advocate for greater collaboration between the media reform movement and library activists.