This book provides guidelines, tools, and real world examples to help assess and reform the enabling environment for media development that serves public interest goals. It builds on a growing awareness of the role of media and voice in the promotion of transparent and accountable governance, in the empowerment of people to better exercise their rights and hold leaders to account; and in support of equitable development including improved livelihoods, health, and access to education. The book provides development practitioners with an overview of the key policy and regulatory issues involved in supporting freedom of information and expression and enabling independent public service media. Country examples illustrate how these norms have been institutionalized in various contexts.

Based on interviews conducted in four countries - India, Australia, the UK and the USA - it reveals a wide range of opinions on topics which lie close to the heart of their democracies."--BOOK JACKET.

Against a backdrop of great change in technology and the economics of broadcasting and new media, this timely survey of contemporary attitudes to accountability and the public interest in broadcasting is based on over fifty interviews conducted in four democracies: India, Australia, the UK and the US.

This book shows how disinformation spread by partisan organizations and media platforms undermines institutional legitimacy on which authoritative information depends.

Regulation of the media has traditionally been premised upon claims of 'the public interest', yet the term itself remains contested and generally ill defined. In the context of technological development and convergence, as well as corporate conglomeration, traditional 'public service' values in British broadcasting are challenged by market values. With such ongoing trends continuing apace, regulators must increasingly justify their interventions.The communication industries' commercialisation and privatisation pose a fundamental threat to democratic values. Media Regulation, Public Interest and the Law argues that regulators will only successfully protect such values if claims associated with 'citizenship' are recognised as the rationale and objective for the regulatory endeavour. While such themes are central to the book, this second edition has been substantially revised and updated, to take account of matters such as European Directives, the UK's Communications Act 2003, the process of reviewing the BBC's Charter, and relevant aspects of the reform of general competition law.Key Features*Identifies and examines the rationales underlying media regulation and the current challenges to them.*Considers fully the actual and potential utility of legal mechanisms and principles in the design and activities of regulatory institutions.*Fully updated to take account of the European Union's 2002 New Regulatory Framework and the UK's Communications Act 2003.*Accessible to a wide readership in media studies, journalism, broadcasting and law.Praise for the First Edition"e;A detailed and critical assessment of the problems and confusions of recent media regulation in the UK including digital television franchising and the Broadcasting Complaints Commission... it is well organised, and should be a useful resource for more advanced students and academics...for updating the public regulation case with vigour and clarity this book is to be welcomed."e;THES

What are the media's responsibilities? To whom are they accountable? Are they increasingly growing out of control? In the 21st century, our mass media are becoming more powerful and more difficult to hold to account, and attempts at control to prevent harm or make media more responsible are often viewed as infringements of market and media freedom. In this study, Denis McQuail identifies problematic trends and issues and outlines the principles underlying media regulation and accountability.

In this interdisciplinary study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, Thomas Streeter reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. Analyzing the processes by which commercial media are organized, Streeter asks how it is possible to take the practice of broadcasting—the reproduction of disembodied sounds and pictures for dissemination to vast unseen audiences—and constitute it as something that can be bought, owned, and sold. With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles—ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets—have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles.