Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

STUDY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA POLICY 21
debates on the globalization of communications and media policy. We
trace the broader historical context and normative claims within the
changing field of global communication and media policy to show the
continuities and ruptures between the Fordist and post-Fordist regulatory
eras.
In the second part of the book we explore two major areas where communication
and media policy had a transformative effect on media across
the world. In Chapter 3 we examine telecommunications as the backbone
and infrastructure of the content industry on the one hand and the
nervous system of the digital ‘revolution,’ the carrier of information society
on the other. Although we map the changing discourse of public
interest in this field from a global perspective, we focus on the experiences
of telecommunications reform in the Third World where the pace
and scale of transformation has been the most dramatic. We trace why
the new discourse of the market managed to overwhelm the nationally
defined redistributive role of the state in shaping telecommunications
policy in the 1980s and 1990s. While powerful institutional actors like
TNCs and Northern states play an important role in this transformation,
we contend that claims by citizens for access to the new information
economy only become clear if we pay closer attention to local histories
and practices, which are themselves embedded in the uneven processes of
globalization.
In Chapter 4 we focus on broadcasting policies as they are central to informing
the ways in which publics understand their relationship to their
media and public space and also their histories and cultures. As such, the
story telling capacities of broadcasting industries have grown enormously
to become the main media consumed, talked about and used as a cultural
practice, sources of information and labour tools across the planet. Issues
of content, access, diversity in representation and truthfulness echo values
acclaimed almost by all states in the world, as the ratification of UN
declarations on human rights and other equity centred policy initiatives
allows at least a formal statement to be made. Our analysis places particular
emphasis on the role of the EU as an international and supranational
actor in communications policies. In particular, because of its institutional
organization, which offers more spaces open to citizens’ input than other
international organizations, it serves as an example of possibilities with
more democratic policy orientation than the dominant neoliberal stream
of policy direction. Attention is paid to the fundamental commonalities
among nations, such as the quest for public-broadcasting communication
spaces predominantly expressed through public-service broadcasting
and the issues related to the continuous threat of the idea/l and
model of PSB. A set of neoliberalist arguments and perceptions, including