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.

Addresses a critical analysis of major media policies in the European Union and Council of Europe at the period of profound changes affecting both media environments and use, as well as the logic of media policy-making and reconfiguration of traditional regulatory models. The analytical problem-related approach seems to better reflect a media policy process as an interrelated part of European integration, formation of European citizenship, and exercise of communication rights within the European communicative space. The question of normative expectations is to be compared in this case with media policy rationales, mechanisms of implementation (transposing rules from EU to national levels), and outcomes.

Traditionally, the Netherlands has enjoyed status as a test market for new media. But in the past decade, such innovations have been severely hampered by questions about the future of public broadcasting. This issue has led to abundant political grandstanding, but little in the way of definitive policymaking. In February 2005, the Scientific Council for Government Policy published a report with practical policy suggestions. Media Policy for the Digital Age summarizes the Council’s recommendations, giving readers outside the Netherlands insight into the issues at stake and possible solutions, as well as a concise analysis that tackles the challenges of making robust media policy for the twenty-first century.

The Politics of Media Policy provides a critical perspective on the dynamics of media policy in the US and UK and offers a comprehensive guide to some of the major points of debate in the media today. While many policymakers boast of the openness and pluralism of their media systems, this book exposes the commitment to market principles that saturates the media policy environment and distorts the development and application of democratic media policies. Based on interviews with dozens of politicians, regulators, special advisers, lobbyists and campaigners, The Politics of Media Policy considers how governments, civil servants and media corporations have shaped the drawing up of rules concerning a range of issues including: Media ownership Media content Public broadcasting Digital television Copyright Trade agreements affecting the media industries. The book identifies both the institutions and the arguments that dominate the development of these crucial media policies. It will be of interest to public policy and media professionals, researchers, activists and students indeed all those determined to understand and respond to the impact of neo-liberalism on the contemporary world.