The Handbook of Global Media and Communication Policy

Robin Mansell, Marc Raboy, Robin Mansell, Marc Raboy

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444395426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Handbook of Global Media and Communication Policy offers insights into the boundaries of this field of study, assesses why it is important, who is affected, and with what political, economic, social and cultural consequences.

• Provides the most up to date and comprehensive collection of essays from top scholars in the field
• Includes contributions from western and eastern Europe, North and Central America, Africa and Asia
• Offers new conceptual frameworks and new methodologies for mapping the contours of emergent global media and communication policy
• Draws on theory and empirical research to offer multiple perspectives on the local, national, regional and global forums in which policy debate occurs

1

Introduction: Foundations of the Theory and Practice of Global Media and Communication Policy

Robin Mansell and Marc Raboy

Introduction

In this introductory chapter, we locate “global media and communication policy” studies historically, highlighting some of the key touchstones that have given rise to intense discussion in a variety of policy arenas. These arenas are populated by heterogeneous actors – governments, firms, and civil society organizations – whose actions reverberate through settings encompassing the local and the global. The consequences of these actions have major implications for the media and communication industries and for all those whose lives are mediated by them. The significance of this policy field stems from the pervasive cultural, political, and economic implications of media and communication. Our focus in this Handbook is primarily on the political framing of these debates, on their histories, and on their different articulations.

Media and communication policy emerged as an identifiable field within the broader domain of Western media and communication studies in the 1950s. During this period, scholars were studying the relations between different types of media and communication and raising questions about economic and social development, mainly at the country level, and with an emphasis on tensions between autonomous and dependent development paradigms. In the 1960s and 1970s, challenged by young, critical scholars and the postcolonial context, the field began to be characterized by comparative studies and the policy implications of unequal North–South communication flows started to be examined. From the 1980s, there was increasing awareness that media and communication policy must be considered in reference to the transnational – as a level of policy debate and as a context – and to the role of nongovernmental actors. “Global” media and communication policy emerged as a field over an extended period and it did so in parallel with processes of technological and geopolitical change.

In the 1990s, while tensions remained around development strategies, policy discussion started to focus on local or indigenous problems within a globalizing information society. In the media sphere, a key political touchstone became the contestation over relationships between state and market and the obligations of the social welfare state (public service broadcasting (PSB) being a good example). These discussions intensified as digitalization of information and communication technologies (ICTs) fostered convergence within the media and communication industries and policy encouraged a more commercial and diverse media. Debate focussed on market liberalization, culminating in the 1995 G7 meeting where development objectives were framed as the achievement of a Global Information Infrastructure (GII) and in the mid-2000s, where a global information society policy agenda was formulated at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

Denis McQuail (1998: 224) wrote presciently that the idea of the information society will provide “a central organizing pillar” for future media and communication policy.¹ Clustered around this pillar are the keywords “convergence” and “governance.” a topic which did not exist ten years ago is now at the center of global media and communication policy: Internet governance. If there is a public interest in media diversity and the communication infrastructure that underpins it, then the questions are how and by whom is that interest understood? What policies and practices are consistent with that understanding?

Global media and communication policy (GMCP) as an emerging field of study needs to take into account technological innovation, institutional dynamics, democratization, and processes favoring inclusiveness and plurality, rather than exclusion and inequality. Hamelink and Nordenstreng (2007) argue for a new “enlightenment,” insisting that policy analysis must embrace formal mechanisms of the state – legislation, regulation, and prescriptive practices – and informal settings offering opportunities for non-state actors to express their opinions about the ideals (e.g., affordable and universal access to networks or diverse content) to which the media should aspire. These ideals are being contested by those favoring market-led solutions and commercial services, the libertarian ethos of the early Internet, conflicting notions about the idea of democracy (Hafez 2007), and, indeed, visions in which the media’s embrace of “imperial globality” (Escobar 2004) is necessarily disempowering for most of the world’s population.

In an early eponymous reader on the topic, Ó Siochrú et al. (2002: xiv) ask whether:

the institutional structures and regulations emerging will operate genuinely, impartially, transparently and democratically to the benefits of all, or whether they will succumb to powerful sectoral interests, becoming yet another means to support the interests of the powerful over those of the majority.

We build on their work, positioning GMCP studies within a multi-level, complex, and highly politicized system. In this system, the boundaries separating local from global and the different media industry sectors are permeable. Understanding the significant consequences of global developments in this field requires an analytical framing that admits the political significance of this system; a system comprising many levels, actors and institutions, in a dynamic milieu of unequal interdependence (Raboy and Padovani 2010).

As a prelude to the reader’s engagement with the new contributions to the field of GMCP that are presented in this Handbook, we set out our own critical synthesis of key paradigms and contestations. First, we focus on how we should regard technology in the framework of GMCP – an essential positioning in the light of an unhealthy tendency to see in the “digital” either the problem or the solution to challenges in this field. Second, we locate GMCP analysis within specific scholarly traditions of policy analysis that emphasize political interest. This provides a framework within which to consider GMCP from an historical perspective, which we discuss third, differentiating between the carriage and content industries. Fourth, we consider the tensions leading to policy destabilization, concluding with an assessment of the forces and opportunities for a GMCP regime, consistent with public intervention in the name of a democratic public sphere.

Technology and GMCP

The analysis of media and communication policy often begins and ends with technology. We set aside such deterministic accounts, although we acknowledge that the astonishingly rapid transition from analog to digital communication cannot be ignored. The implications of the shrinking of time and distance for societal practices of many kinds are raising new issues for social actors everywhere. Digital ICTs are implicated in policy-making, whether we focus on newspapers, television, personal computers, telecommunication, or other digital devices. Winograd and Flores (1986: 23) observed that “tools are fundamental to action, and through our actions we generate the world,” a view later echoed in Lessig’s (1999) idea that “code is law.” These technologies are implicated in how we become who we are in the world.

We acknowledge the role of convergent technologies in creating new challenges for GMCP, but are concerned in this Handbook more with how these technologies are articulated in the policy sphere, where political matters and both the intentional and unintentional design of these technologies have ramifications for how we encounter the media and how we communicate. Freeman and Soete (1994: 39) described ICTs as “the biggest technological juggernaut that every rolled,” taking up the idea that these technologies are associated with economic growth and prosperity for all.² However, Freeman and Soete (1997) also argued that paradigmatic changes accompanying the spread of these technologies would not be fair and equitable for all and that innovations in this area would create major challenges for meeting public interest goals.

And, indeed, the spread of digital technologies and networks has led many to question the role of the state in media and communication policy and to advocate market liberalization. Technological convergence was the justification for the move to liberalize media and communication markets in the 1980s (Baldwin et al. 1995; Levy 1999). Overlaid with the political climate marked by the election of neoliberal governments in the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK) and elsewhere, as well as the collapse of the Soviet system, market liberalization and competition were seen as instruments for releasing the potential of both telecommunication and media content markets. The spread of digital technologies and the ease with which these technologies ignored national boundaries expanded the reach of networks such that nation-states were no longer perceived as the only containers for policy measures.

The technological basis for these claims rested on the fact that the integration of networks supporting media and communication services had become feasible. Digital compression techniques were enabling a shift in production capability for voice, data, text, and image services. During the 1980s, there were policy discussions about the deployment of fiber-to-the-home in most wealthy countries, the spread of mobile and satellite networks, and data communication. Policy-makers began to focus on the international implications of these developments and they faced unprecedented pressure from below in the form of demand for greater diversity in media content, access to information services, and participation and transparency in policy development processes. By the mid-1990s, “digital divides” had entered the public discourse in both highly developed and less developed countries, and international trade in media and telecommunication goods and services had become an issue for the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as for regional and national policy-making institutions.

New opportunities for reconstituting the public sphere also started to become apparent as it was recognized that these technologies are not simply given, but instead are constituted through the practices of those who use and govern them. Martín-Barbero (2001: 379) argues, for example, that “the key lies in taking the original imported technology as energy, as a potential to develop on the basis of the requirements of the national culture.” This potentiality is central to whether civil society actors are able to mold the new technologies and applications consistent with values of equality, justice, and democratic practice.

In the emerging GMCP sphere, relations of power are influenced by processes of transaction and translation manifested in texts (standards and scientific papers), in technical artefacts (hardware and software), in the actions of academics, policy-makers, engineers, and civil society actors, and in the growth and distribution of financial resources. As Mattelart (1996/2000: 20) suggested, “the dream of establishing the pre-Babel ‘great human family’ is present throughout the history of the imaginary of communication networks,” but this dream remains elusive. To understand why this is so, we need to position GMCP analysis with respect to the appropriate analytical tools and perspectives.

Analytical Tools and Perspectives

Policy analysis can be understood as the study of bureaucratic organization and the role of authority. In the US, for example, the “public policy movement” claimed to offer a new approach to the problems of government policy. Lasswell’s (1972) early work in the 1950s was aimed at developing knowledge about the policy process and at improving the information available to policy-makers. He warned that policy analysts should not become directly involved with policy-makers, although he was later shown to have been involved in the Cold War counter-propaganda campaigns of the US government (Samarajiva and Shields 1990). Lazarsfeld (1941) had distinguished between administrative and critical research traditions in media and communication policy analysis, stressing the importance of immunity of policy analysts to ideological, political, and other pressures. As Braman (2006) has argued, however, analysts such as de Sola Pool (1974) acknowledged that media and communication policy is shaped by politics and that this needs to be considered in framing research in the field. de Sola Pool had suggested that international – or global – policy is likely to be influenced by the most restrictive regime. Today, we find a mix of relatively open and restrictive policy regimes and this creates a complex intersection of actors, goals and practices, especially when the analytical frame encompasses global developments.

If policy-making is understood as a process involving “many sub-processes” (Hogwood and Gunn 1984: 24), as extending through time, and as consisting of a “web of decisions and actions that allocate … values” (Ham and Hill 1984: 11), then we need to ensure that the analysis of GMCP embraces all the individuals and groups whose values and actions intersect in consensual and conflicting ways. In this respect, policy-making can be regarded as a process of persuasion and argumentation that takes place within a complex system of actors and institutions (Kingdon 1984). The analysis of struggles between actors in the media and communication policy field is exemplified by studies undertaken by the Euromedia Research Group from the mid-1980s. Writing on behalf of the Group, McQuail and Siune observed that in media politics:

no actor is really completely in control; they all share control over issues affecting their interests, and therefore depend on support in order to fulfil their wishes. Any public policy can be considered as an intermediate moment between two successive states of the field that institutional structure has to regulate. (McQuail and Siune 1986: 14)

And, later that:

many different actors want to participate in policy-making and influence decision-making. … Because of their formal positions, some of these are decision-makers, others are in the neighbourhood of decision-making, while some are at such a distance from decision-making authorities that they hardly or seldom can communicate or try to influence the policy-making in any way. (McQuail and Siune 1998: 24)

This may be a circumspect way of describing the three principal social categories involved: state, economy, and civil society. These categories still pertain, but the arena has shifted...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Foundations of the Theory and Practice of Global Media and Communication Policy
• Part I Contested Concepts: An Emerging Field
• Part II Democratization: Policy in Practice
• Part III Cultural Diversity: Contesting Power
• Part IV Markets and Globality
• Part V Governance: New Policy and Research Challenges
• Index