Page 212 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media convergence, communications regulation 191

We now have a growing literature on media policy activism (Hackett and
Carroll 2006). My own involvement has been with the Campaign for Press and
Broadcasting Freedom, a UK media reform organisation established by media
trade unionists, whose work has of necessity become more internationalist and
networked since its foundation in the late 1970s. Media reform agendas engage
with the specificity and complexity of local policy-making but there have been
many efforts to co-ordinate global responses and articulate common demands.
One such effort has been the coalition, Voices 21, described as ‘a global movement
for People’s voices in Media and Communication for the twenty-first century’.
This association of media activists and academics set out a reform agenda under
various themes (Voices 21 2002: 261–73) including:

1 access and accessibility: ‘Participation in social communication presupposes
access: to big media, to community media, to computer networks, to information
sources and to other tools’
2 right to communicate: ‘Around the world, new and old forms of state and
commercial censorship are rampant, they threaten not only the independence
of conventional mass media, but also the right to communicate through new
channels like the Internet. Universal access to media means little in the
absence of adequate public space where information, opinions and ideas can
be freely exchanged and debated.’
3 diversity of expression
4 security and privacy
5 cultural environment: global media foster a ‘culture of violence, discrimina-
tion, exclusion and consumerism’.

Media reform agendas generally seek to establish some degree of citizen control
over the controllers of communication as well as asserting rights in communication
space. For CPE there is a vital and close link between the academy, radical
media practice and policy activism (chapter nine). There are also often tensions
too, between and amongst NGOs, activists, community media, labour groups
and academics. These include tactical tensions between ‘insider’ strategies to win
credibility and support within policy networks and strategies to build popular
support for more far-reaching reforms which are marginalised or dismissed by
elites. McChesney (2013) reflects on the failures of the Obama administration,
the corporate capture of politicians and regulators as well as the difficulties faced
by the media reform movement he co-founded, Free Press, to sustain widespread
popular support. At a time of crisis, and opportunity, when debates in the
decade ahead may settle the contours of communication control for the century,
reform cannot succeed while governments are doing the bidding of capital.
While there have been important victories, like stalling Stop Online Privacy
Action (SOPA), the coalition of people power needed to win the big Internet
policy fights has not yet been assembled and remains an immense challenge.