Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

STUDY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA POLICY 7
actually occurred in altering state–market dynamics in the longer history
of the modern market economy (Hirst and Thompson 1995), most argue
that we need to examine how the role of the state has changed, while recognizing
that nation-states remain integral in global governance (Held
1997). Historically, national governments have regulated communication
and media industries, assuming that communication goods represent
some kind of ‘public good’ both as a technological resource and as culture.
Recently, scholars have turned their attention to how specific states
have responded to global pressures from TNCs and multilateral bodies
such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) precisely because communications
as an object of public policy remains vital to both economic
and political national interest. For many critics of rampant liberalization,
the nation-state remains the most effective institutional actor capable of
public accountability. Drawing on the legacies of public service and public
interest in Western democracies, these scholars point to the affirmative
role of nation-states in ensuring equity, access and diversity (Beale 1999;
Winseck 1998).
As political economic and technological changes transform the traditional
bounds of state intervention in matters of policy-making, it is
important to recognize that control over communications industries is
directly related to the economic well-being of any modern nation-state
in the form of foreign investment, export and taxable revenues and the
generation of employment, among other factors. Thus governments increasingly
link communication policy to economic interests – from enforcing
intellectual property rights to ensuring that private firms have
access to the latest telecom infrastructure, to promoting information and
communications technology (ICT)-based exports, to subsidizing foreign
investment in communications-related industries as a development strategy.
Beyond economic interests, ‘governments retain the capacity to control
the media to reinforce legitimacy or fortify a regime’s hold on power’
(Waisbord and Morris 2001: xi–xii). The latter form of state control over
communications should not be seen as a feature restricted to ‘backward’
authoritarian regimes in the Third World, but rather a growing feature
of contemporary debates about communication and media policy in the
‘developed world’, especially in light of the ‘War on Terror’. Today, the
US government marshals new restrictions over freedom of information
and media content domestically through the Patriot Act while simultaneously
policing and silencing foreign commercial media content that is
seen to ‘promote terrorism’ – the controversial case of Al Jazeera is only
one example of this trend (Miles 2005).
According to the Privacy and Human Rights Report (PHR) 2004 (Privacy
International & ERIC), in the aftermath of 11 September 2001