Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

4 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating perspectives from political
economy, political theory, as well as postcolonial and feminist studies.
In this chapter, we explore the most significant, visible parameters in
the shaping of policy, technology and the state, and situate them within
the macro-level of increased market integration and trends in the globalization
of capital. We define the political contexts that will shape our
study in the following pages. Finally, we discuss the communication and
media policy areas that have attracted most attention from scholars in
communication studies.
‘People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not
neutral but in favor of the status quo.’ (Max Eastman)
In Selling the Air: A Critique of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States,
Thomas Streeter points out that it is only in the English language, that
there is a distinction between the words ‘policy’ and ‘politics’ (1996: 125).
Whether this is strictly the case, as none of us can claim knowledge of
more than a few world languages, it is certainly true that most European
languages, such as French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
and Russian, use the same word, variations of the Greek πoλιτική (politike)
to express decisions and the decision-making process as inseparable
from politics. The implicit ideological assumption of the neutrality of the
policy-making process is expressed perhaps most clearly in the words of a
pioneer of Media Studies in the US, Harold Lasswell, who wrote in 1951:
‘ “Policy” is free of many of the undesirable connotations clustered about
the world political, which is often believed to imply “partisanship” or
“corruption” ’ (1951: 5). Lasswell spells out the moral superiority of an
apolitical bureaucratic, administrative process – the policy-making process
– separated from the tainted world of politics in a fashion that is
a peculiar and resonant feature of Anglo-American political culture. In
the contemporary arena of US broadcasting, for instance, conservative
Republicans have been successful in dominating public discourse about
liberal bias as a pernicious legacy of the 1960s ‘politicization’ of regulatory
bodies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In
the UK, the renaissance of ‘evidence-based’ policy bears the assumptions
of a modernist ‘scientific’ approach that holds the ‘truth’ irrespective of
interests and persuasion. Meanwhile, these same politicians who claim
neutrality promote apolitical remedies for market expansion through the
deregulation and intensified privatization of broadcasting policy.
Removing politics from the policy-making process in areas ranging
from basic telecommunications services and the broadcasting and cultural
content to the trade in digital media content is one of the most significant