Policing the Journalism Crisis: Corporate Libertarianism and the Discursive Capture of American Media Policy

• In Event: How Media Cover Media Policy: Understanding Media Policy Bias and Media Policy Silence

Abstract

The discursive parameters established around key policy debates help prefigure the range of possible outcomes. News media is an important site for this discourse, especially in how it legitimates and amplifies received assumptions about the role of public policy in addressing structural problems like the ongoing journalism crisis. This paper will consider a number of factors that contribute to policy obfuscation, ranging from journalistic norms like privileging episodic over thematic news coverage and indexing reporting to elite opinions, to context-specific problems like those associated with the invisibility of media policy, technological exuberance, corporate libertarianism, and regulatory capture. Taken together, these discursive impediments obscure the policy roots of social problems, mask market failures in providing for society’s communication needs, and narrow the possibilities for alternative models – all leading to policy inaction, systemic drift, and, ultimately, policy failure.

Author

• Victor W. Pickard, U of Pennsylvania