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An edited version of this review of Des Freedman's The Politics of Media Policy appeared in Australian Journalism Review, Vol. 30 No. 2, December 2008, pp. 127-129.
Citation preview
A game of two halves
Freedman, D. (2008). The Politics of Media Policy. Cambridge: Polity.
ISBN 9780745628424; pbk. 264 pp. $US 25.95.
Reviewed by Terry Flew, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland
University of Technology.
Des Freedman’s The Politics of Media Policy is a valuable contribution to what
remains a surprisingly sparse international literature on comparative media policies.
His focus is on media policies in the United States and Britain over the period from
the late 1990s to the late 2000s. This period is largely coextensive with the ‘New
Labour’ administration of Tony Blair in Britain and George W. Bush’s Republican
administration in the U.S., although there is some referring back to the
Thatcher/Major era in Britain and the Clinton era in the U.S. The book is structured in
two parts, with the first providing a valuable guide to how to interpret media policies
and the dominant intellectual frames for analysis of overarching policy themes, and
the second part focusing more on policy specifics in areas such as media ownership,
media content, public broadcasting, digital broadcasting and international trade.
The first half of the book works very well, and provides a significant conceptual
advance in how to approach media policy. Freedman positions his approach as
innovative in three key respects. First, he proposes that media policy-making needs to
be seen as political, as it engages political leaders in questions surrounding the access
to both economic resources and the capacity to speak and be heard in the public
domain, it is shaped by questions of who gets to participate in such decision-making,
and it is rhetorically framed around operational decisions about what issues are
deemed to be significant, as the critics of pluralism have observed since the 1960s.
Second, Freedman seeks to understand the different layers of media policy,
differentiating between policy, governance and regulation, and drawing attention to
the complexities and specificities of media policy. In doing so, he seeks to
differentiate this approach from the policy science literature on the one hand, which
would bundle media policy in alongside all other areas of policy (economic,
environmental, welfare etc.), and on the other hand, he wants to avoid the impression
that it is simply the outcome of elite consensus between powerful media moguls and
political leaders, which the field is often reduced to in popular and academic criticism.
Finally, Freedman uses pluralism and neo-liberalism as organising frameworks that
allow media policy to be seen as having continuities both over time and across policy
domains. In doing so, he is seeking to position media policy analysis as something
other than simply a thick description of events that are not connected by any wider set
of intellectual and political influences, or simply differentiating media policies on the
basis of the political administration that pursued them (Conservative/Labour in
Britain, Republican/Democrat in the U.S.), or on the basis of the particularities of the
nation-state in which they were undertaken.
I would argue that the first half of The Politics of Media Policy is more successful in
achieving its goals than the second. Freedman’s broader claim is that the period from
the 1980s marked a meta-discursive shift from pluralism to neo-liberalism as the
dominant frame for media policy. For Freedman, as for other critical theorists he
cites, neo-liberalism can be understood in terms of the move away from Keynesian
economics with the policies of deregulation and global free trade, a political project
that sought to shift the role of the state away from regulation and redistribution
towards the active promotion of markets and competitive individualism, and an
ideological project that questioned all thinking about society as an organic whole
(‘There’s no such a thing as society’, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher), and focused
instead upon competition, entrepreneurship, individual responsibility and rational
economic calculation of personal gain. Having established neo-liberalism as the
political, economic and ideological leitmotif of our times, Freedman then seeks to
understand the neo-conservatism of the Bush administration and the ‘Third Way’
politics of the Blair government as variants on a global neo-liberal theme of
deregulation, privatization and marketization, where ‘neo-liberal pressures are a key
feature of today’s media environment that shape everything from the role of the state
to the character of the content produced’ (p. 47).
My reading of The Politics of Media Policy is that this approach generates
diminishing returns to Freedman over the course of this book. It works most
effectively in the chapter on media ownership, where the quite overt agenda of the
U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair Michael Powell to relax ownership
laws in ways that allow for further concentration in the hands of big players is
effectively aligned to Labour’s changes to media ownership laws in Britain through
the 2003 Communications Act that proved to be quite favourable to the interests of
Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB. It works less well in the chapter on media content policies,
primarily because of the reluctance to consider the politics of ‘decency’ as something
that cuts across the line between pluralism and neo-liberalism, particularly in the U.S.
where it is a rallying point for religious interests and moral conservatives in their
ongoing battle against libertarianism and social liberalism, and reflects an ideological
fault line that is not reducible to political-economic agendas.
Freedman’s attempt to identify underlying similarities between Britain and the U.S.
around neo-liberalism despite ostensible differences does not work at all in the
chapter on public broadcasting. Identifying ambivalence on the part of the Blair
government towards the BBC, and periodic skirmishes around the BBC’s treatment of
news issues such as the war in Iraq, does not equate to the overt politicization of the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the U.S. under Bush, and the continued
generosity of British government funding for the BBC in the 21st century – even if it
is less than some of its advocates (and, most likely, Freedman himself) would wish –
does not parallel the concerted push to de-fund the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
in the U.S. that has been a recurring strategy of Republican administrations and
Congressional figures since the time of Ronald Reagan. Freedman does not deal with
the question of why the base political support for the BBC in Britain remains, and
why it is so miniscule in the U.S., which would go to the heart of questions as to why
– neo-liberalism notwithstanding – the media ecologies of the two countries, and the
assumptions about media policy and what it should or should not support – remain
profoundly different.
This points to a wider tension in The Politics of Media Policy, which is the recurring
tendency to see a diverse range of media policies in two quite different countries
through the single organising prism of neo-liberalism. At times this can take the form
of a neo-Althusserian ‘symptomatic reading’ of policy documents where they are read
in terms of what they didn’t say rather than what they did say, and how this reveals (at
least to the author) what they really meant, as seen in this analysis of the White Paper
on the future of the BBC:
The report is littered with references to flexibility, dynamism, innovation,
novelty, creativity, diversity, transparency, efficiency and competition. Perhaps
it is not possible to formulate media policy in the twenty-first century without
using those phrases but the regularity of their use leads to the impression that,
without the proposed reforms, the BBC (like all public institutions) is likely to
collapse into the opposite of these highly desirable states: stagnation, rigidity,
bureaucracy, uniformity and so on (p. 153).
I am reminded here of Cunningham’s (1992) observation of how the study of media
policy documents frequently disappoints the academic critic as they tend to be ‘ideas-
thick’ rather than ‘ideas-rich’. For those trained in critical reading practices and
analyzing issues in intellectual depth, policy documents can appear as overly ad hoc
generalized and superficial in their approach to questions such as, in this case, the
future of public service media. It is notable that, even though Freedman undertook
over forty interviews in developing this book with policy-makers, lobbyists, advisers
etc., their voice is largely muted in the final work, except insofar as their statements
support a conclusion reached independently by the author (e.g. on the influence of
Murdoch over Tony Blair (p. 12)), or as evidence of the naïveté of regulators about
the extent to which broader political considerations inform their everyday work (p. 2).
The wider problem with Freedman’s analysis rests with the use of the omnibus term
‘neo-liberalism’. It is the most used term in the book as indicated by the index, and
while Freedman occasionally demurs against ‘the tendency to treat neo-liberalism as
an undifferentiated “bogeyman” of contemporary capitalism’, all roads in The Politics
of Media Policy seem to point towards the implementation of some or other form of
neo-liberal policy. Even in cases where there are obvious differences between the
United States under George W. Bush and Britain under Tony Blair, such as the case
of public broadcasting discussed above, this is explained away in terms of ‘the
emergence of varieties of neo-liberalism … [where] states are experimenting with and
internalizing different aspects of the neo-liberal agenda, contributing to the emergence
of “diversity within convergence”’ (p. 223). Even when policies would appear to be
quite different, they are in fact quite the same, all explicable under the rubric of
variants of neo-liberalism!
As I write this review in October 2008, the U.S. government appears to have acquired
a stake in my personal credit card debt. I won’t go through the detail of this, except to
note that the U.S. Federal Reserve acquired a stake in Citigroup as a condition for
supporting its takeover of the failing Wachovia Bank, which makes U.S. taxpayers de
facto equity holder in Citigroup and, hence, in the credit card I acquired through a
quite different, non-U.S.-based financial institution. The wisdom of hindsight about
how the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis and its fallout on global financial markets
would shake deregulatory, minimal government ideas to their core is perhaps easy,
but warning signs that the world of the 2000s was being less and less shaped by neo-
liberal principles were everywhere, from ‘big government conservatism’ under the
Bush administration to the rise and rise of Chinese state-led capitalism.
The term has long been something of an awkward one to pin down, as it appears to
put thinkers as diverse as Milton Friedman, Robert Novak, Will Hutton and Anthony
Giddens in the same intellectual tent, and British think-tanks such as the Institute for
Public Policy Reform and DEMOS were largely saying the same things as the Adam
Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs. It blurs the significant
distinctions that have historically existed within liberal political philosophy and
thought. In the United States, the term ‘liberal’ has long been an epithet directed by
conservatives against the left, and refers as much to social liberalism and
libertarianism as it does to questions of economic policy. The term has also come to
be used in a highly mechanistic and reductionist way, so that neo-liberalism becomes
the dominant ideology of global capitalism. Like all variant of dominant ideology
theories, such assumptions tend to hold only if you either rule out or reinterpret any
evidence that would point to different conclusions. When applied to the policy
domain, such models direct us towards instrumentalist conceptions of the state where
policy is ultimately seen as the handmaiden of class power, and policy studies in
effect become redundant.
The Politics of Media Policy opens with a highly insightful analysis of how to do
media policy studies in original and significant ways. Unfortunately, by anchoring its
empirical analysis closely to a desire to expose the hidden machinations of neo-liberal
ideology, it loses focus the more that it moves out of the dominant terrain of political
economy in the study of media ownership. Des Freedman has pointed to important
new directions in media policy studies, but has unfortunately only got half way to
developing a new synthesis for understanding the relationship between policy
institutions and broader ideas.
References Cited
Cunningham, S. (1992) Framing Culture: Criticism and Policy in Australia. Sydney:
Allen & Unwin.
Terry Flew is Professor of Media and Communication in the Creative Industries
Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.