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PART  ONE 

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE 

Media Reform
An Overview
DES FR EED m AN , Goldsmiths, University of London
j ONATHAN A . OBAR, York University, Canada




Media reform is a great and formidable challenge. Across international con- texts, reformers are inspired by what the late C. Edwin Baker (2007, 7) referred to as the democratic distribution principle for communicative power: “a claim that democracy implies as wide as practical a dispersal of power within public discourse.” The challenge is made manifest in battles over the future of investi- gative journalism, media ownership, spectrum management, speech rights, broadband access, network neutrality, the surveillance apparatus, digital liter- acy, and many others waged in pursuit of the normative ideals at the heart of Baker’s vision. At the same time, those committed to media reform confront formidable challenges: entrenched commercial interests and media conglomer- ates; sometimes powerful, sometimes disorganized, and sometimes neoliberal governments; a general public often disenfranchised, digitally illiterate and not focused on issues of media reform; and always, the uphill battle of organiza- tion, mobilization, and inﬂuence that is the work of any activist.
In light of these signiﬁcant challenges, the central question addressed by this volume is: what strategies might be utilized to overcome these obstacles in the pursuit of media reform?
Sharing a list of strategies, however, will not ensure their eﬀectiveness. We need to close the gap between a strategy’s supposed potential and the realiza- tion of its eﬀective implementation. Recent high-proﬁle examples of social media activism demonstrate the presence of this gap. For instance, the uses of Twitter during the Arab Spring, Facebook by the Occupy movement, YouTube

3
 
by the KONY 2012 campaign, and the blogosphere by the SOPA/PIPA upris- ing—all generated excitement about social media’s potential to strengthen digital activism eﬀorts. What remains, however, is a widespread lack of under- standing of how best to design and implement an eﬀective social media strat- egy, and how to ensure the most productive return on investment. A recent survey of sixty-three activist organizations operating in Canada clearly articu- lated this concern (Obar 2014). A number of the groups noted that they are relatively new to social media, and that the process of integrating the technolo- gies and accompanying strategies into established methods and routines poses a variety of considerable challenges. A member of one group said: “There appears to be little information or instruction available on how to use social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook.   We have goals and a strategy for
the use of social media, and understand the technical side, but the actual operational side   is largely guesswork” (ibid., 225). Activist organizations
also said that social media’s constant updates amplify these challenges. As noted by a representative from a second group: “Right now I am experiencing issues drawing members from the face book [sic] group to the new page. Also if the technology changes (like the new face book [sic] timeline and you are not keen on the changes) it is diﬃcult” (ibid.). Indeed, the process of integrating a new social media strategy into established routines poses considerable challenges. According to a representative from a third organization: “As with any new development, it has taken care and attention to work out the kinks in our sys- tem. A fair amount of time that could have been spent doing other things is now directed at social media use, and it is diﬃcult to measure that impact. Inevitably, this medium will continue to change and necessitate further analy- sis and labour hours” (ibid.).
The lack of information and training available to activists, the constant changes in the landscape and the tools, and the best combination of strategies for moving forward, while especially relevant to the social media question, are challenges to overcome when considering any number of media reform strate- gies. Indeed, although the successful integration of digital media into the work of media reform activists is one of the more prominent organizational challenges currently faced by groups worldwide, the same diﬃculty of bridging the gap between excitement and eﬀectiveness is common to a wide variety of potential media reform strategies (both oﬄine and online). The chapters included in this volume aim to contribute to the closing of these gaps through the presentation and analysis of successful strategies that have helped to advance media reform eﬀorts in a variety of countries and contexts throughout the world.

A DEFINITION OF MEDIA REFORM 
As public communication systems continue to face underfunding and political interference while corporate media giants increasingly cement their rule; as state
 
elites concurrently construct more sophisticated means of surveilling their populations through digital technologies originally anticipated to help liberate them; and as burgeoning media systems struggle against established power structures for independence of voice, there is an urgent need to reﬂect on and to share eﬀective strategies for media reform. Despite the rhetoric about the threat to established power posed by social media innovation, in many coun- tries throughout the world, communication choices are dominated by the likes of Google, Facebook, 21st Century Fox, CCTV, Brian Roberts, Carlos Slim rather than the voices of individual consumers; our media environments con- tinue to be shaped by the interactions of political and corporate elites rather than the collaborative spirit of user communities.
Media reform movements are, therefore, a response to expressions of concen- trated media power and develop in the context of ongoing struggles over the distribution of communicative resources. We have seen vibrant campaigns for net neutrality, press freedom, aﬀordable broadband, community radio, publicly funded broadcasting, ownership transparency, and media diversity. We have also seen determined battles against cyber-surveillance, unethical and inaccurate journalism, ownership deregulation, Internet censorship, and state intimida- tion. These struggles for communication rights are part of a wider challenge to social and economic inequalities and an essential component of a vision for a just and democratic society.
Given the diverse array of challenges facing media reformers worldwide, media reform can sound a little tentative, a bit polite, and, most importantly, rather ambiguous. After all, contemporary neoliberal projects to restructure, for exam- ple, health, education, and welfare in order to introduce market disciplines into these areas, are usually described as “essential reforms.” Furthermore, democratic attempts to “reform” industries and institutions that are so intertwined with established commercial and political interests is often seen as, at best, severely limited and, at worst, utterly futile—partly because of the ability of the media to marginalize and undermine campaigns that call for their very reform.
Yet media reform remains both an eﬀective mobilizing paradigm and a stra- tegic course of action. It is this latter approach—an emphasis on strategies for media reform—on which this collection focuses: a set of international prescrip- tions that allow individuals and organizations to work together and “to engage with and transform the dominant machinery of representation, in both the media and political ﬁelds” (Hackett and Carroll 2006, 16). Media reform can- not be reduced to a single mode of operation, to a narrow set of predetermined objectives, or to a limited number of channels and spaces. It is rather a ﬁeld in which multiple actors use a range of techniques and capacities to restructure communication systems in the interests not of privileged elites (whether state or market) but of ordinary users, viewers, readers, and listeners so that they might participate better in and make informed choices about the world in which they live.
 
Media reform is, therefore, likely to be very messy. It contains, in the words of Joe Karaganis (2009, 4), two orientations: “one originating in a consumer- rights-based model of policy advocacy; the other emerging from predominantly civil-rights-informed concerns with accountability, representation, and voice in the media.” From our own perspective, these two “geographies of activism” (ibid.)—one more formally connected to oﬃcial processes of lobbying and campaigning, the other to concepts of media justice and social movements— are copresent, although very often in a tense relationship, in the way in which we understand media reform. So without wanting to tidy up the ﬁeld of media reform and to reduce it to a neat and predictable area of activity, let us consider three dimensions (or rather demands) of media reform, taken from the chapter by Cross and Skinner in this collection and realized in the annual Media Democracy Day events in Canada. There are, of course, other typologies of media reform that may be equally useful—for example, Hackett and Carroll’s (2006, 52) deﬁnition of democratic media activism as based on internal reform of the media, the creation of new spaces, and the transformation of contextual factors; or Napoli’s (2009, 385) conception of public interest media advocacy based around “framing processes, political opportunities and mobilizing struc- tures”—but we feel that the following categories provide a framework that speaks to the emphasis on strategic action that is at the heart of this book.

KNOw THE mEDIA 
The ﬁrst deﬁnition of media reform relates to attempts to critique the content and structures of the mainstream media and therefore to delegitimize them as ideologically committed to supporting the power relations to which they are tied. In many countries, for example, we have broadcast systems dominated by commercial interests, overwhelmingly formulaic in their eﬀorts to minimize risk and desperate to chase ratings at any cost, or public broadcast outlets that are institutionally tied to elite structures and that increasingly mirror the out- puts and genres of commercial rivals or act as a mouthpiece for privileged political interests. We have newsroom cultures that, again, stick very closely to consensual agendas and established political discourse while, at times, as was uncovered following the phone hacking crisis in the United Kingdom, demon- strates “a recklessness in prioritising sensational stories, almost irrespective of the harm that the stories may cause and the rights of those who would be aﬀected . . . all the while heedless of the public interest” (Leveson 2012, 10). Furthermore, we have online environments that all too often are replicating the monopoly structure and commodity basis of the analogue systems to which they are connected (Curran, Fenton, and Freedman 2016).
There are diﬀerent schools and approaches from political economy critics who focus on the unequal distribution of resources and structural constraints that shape the dynamics of media systems—including the levels of ownership
 
concentration, meaning that media are more likely to reﬂect the corporate and ideological interests of their owners—to more culturally focused accounts that talk about the distortions of symbolic power and the exclusion of voices and audiences from creative decision making.
The most inﬂuential account of mainstream media critique remains the propaganda model, developed by Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky in their powerful condemnation of US elite media coverage of foreign aﬀairs in Manu- facturing Consent (1989). Herman and Chomsky argue that the media produce propaganda: sets of ideas that are necessary to secure, in the words of Walter Lippmann, “the manufacture of consent.” Propaganda is used to naturalize the ideas of the most powerful groups in society and to marginalize dissent. Their propaganda model depends on ﬁve “ﬁlters” working on the media that ensure a structural bias in favor of dominant frames: concentrated private ownership, the power of advertising, the domination of elite sources, the use of “ﬂak” (sustained attacks on oppositional voices), and the construction of an enemy, whether Communism during the Cold War or fundamentalist Islam today. Mainstream media perform an ideological role—none more so than the so- called liberal media, which foster the greatest illusions precisely because their liberalism produces a deceptive picture of a pluralistic media system when, in reality, there is none. All media, whether liberal or conservative, are tied to current relations of power and involved in distorting, suppressing, and silenc- ing alternative narratives to capitalist power.
Despite criticisms that it is too focused on the United States and that it does now allow suﬃciently for challenges to media power, the propaganda model has been taken up by an increasing number of academics and activists, from the proliﬁc watchdog site Media Lens in the United Kingdom to academics working on Hollywood (for example, Alford 2010) to the excellent annual attempt to map “the news that didn’t make the news” by Project Censored.
Robert McChesney (2008) describes another particularly valuable form of critical knowledge for media reform activists: that the system is not “natural” but was created to reﬂect particular capitalist interests. Just as it was structured to beneﬁt private interests, one of the main jobs for the media reform move- ment is “to make media policy a political issue” (ibid., 57) so that publics can demand that it should be reconstructed instead to beneﬁt the public interest.

BE THE mEDIA 
The second dimension of media reform acknowledges that we cannot rely on the mainstream media to adequately represent our lives as they are lived, to hold power to account and to reﬂect honestly on the media’s own interconnec- tions with established power; we are forced to make our own media. This relates to the theory and practice of alternative media (Atton 2002; Downing 2000) which draws on participatory accounts of democracy to produce media
 
that better engage and reﬂect the diversity of the population. Alternative media outlets aim to produce content that forgoes the false objectivity of mainstream news and the sensationalist formats that dominate schedules through methods that are more democratic and where institutions are focused not on proﬁt or control but empowerment.
Alternative media is not new and indeed has always provided a historic counterpoint to mainstream media. For example, the Chartist press in the United Kingdom in the 1840s provided early trade union activists with an essential organizing tool given the hostility toward their campaign from the more oﬃcial titles (Harrison 1974). Buoyed by developments in electronic technology in the early 1970s, the German activist and theorist Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1970) wrote of the possibility of public mobilization through emerging media: “For the ﬁrst time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized production process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves” (ibid., 13). Con- trasting the “repressive” and depoliticized uses of traditional media to the “emancipatory” possibilities of what he saw as new, decentralized media like pirate radio and community video, he urged activists to build new channels of communication on the basis that “every receiver is a potential transmitter” (ibid., 16).
In the age of digital media, we are better able to realize Enzensberger’s vision of a horizontal and interactive communications system that allows for the mobilization of audiences as producers and for the possibilities of content that deﬁes an artiﬁcially narrow consensus. Social movement theory has a particular role to play here in considering the communicative competences, perfor- mances, and structures that are necessary to publicize, organize, and galvanize movements for social justice (Atton 2002; Castells 2012; Downing 2000). We have a whole host of platforms, technologies, and practices in place—from hacktivism to citizen journalism, from protest masks to protest music, and from culture jamming to community media—that both challenge the agendas and narratives of mainstream media and that allow ordinary media users to take control of the technologies.

CHANGE THE mEDIA 
Building on a critique of the limitations of the mainstream media and buoyed by eﬀorts to communicate in our own terms, there is a third strand of media reform which is perhaps the most contentious: eﬀorts to democratize actually existing media through initiatives like diversifying ownership, campaigning for new forms of funding for marginalized content, challenging existing copyright regimes, pressing for more ethical forms of journalism, and more recently, opposing forms of surveillance. This requires an engagement with oﬃcial struc- tures—with formal legislative processes, with parliaments and policy makers,
 
with lobbyists and lawyers—in other words, with the very constituents of the system that are responsible for a diminished and degraded media culture. Perhaps not surprisingly then, it is this dimension of media reform—the one that occupies the attention of most of the contributors to this collection— that is most noticeably absent from much social movement theory that con- siders the role of the media.
For example, the introduction to Mediation and Protest Movements (Cam- maerts, Mattoni, and McCurdy 2013) identiﬁes four key themes for activists in relation to the media: questions of visibility, the nature of symbolic power, the possibilities aﬀorded to protest by networked technologies, and the role of audiences and publics. The authors note that capturing the attention of main- stream media is often just as crucial as producing our own images and perform- ing our own communicative practices but there is no attention paid to the fact that we might want or be able to change the practices and priorities of a capital- ist media.
Donatella della Porta (2013), in a very interesting chapter in the same book that explores the relationship between social movements and the media, makes the important point that both media studies and social movement theory “con- sider both political institutions and mass media as given structures” (ibid., 28), but then herself fails to consider what the consequences of this might be in terms of struggles over the shape of the media. She concludes her chapter by arguing that we need to get to grips with “the agency of social movements in the construction of democracy and communications” (ibid., 33); of course this is a very tricky task if, by and large, social movement activists and social move- ment theory have little interest in trying to modify the structures and institu- tions as they are currently organized. Does that mean that we have to reconstruct communications exclusively from the bottom up and that every existing media institution needs to be abolished? Even if that is the case, which many reform activists may believe (though, in private, some may come to miss selected HBO programs), what does this mean in terms of building eﬀective and rele- vant reform movements?
For many social movement activists, this type of media reform—of trying to democratize the media—is seen as potentially counterproductive in that activ- ists are likely either to be incorporated into oﬃcial channels or to tailor their demands to meet the values and demands of vested interests. Thinking in par- ticular of the US media reform group Free Press, Mickey Huﬀ (2011) of Project Censored warns of the dangers of “working through the system” and of attempt- ing merely to ﬁx, rather than to replace, a social system that has been found to be demonstrably unfair and unequal. This lends itself to reformist illusions that the system can indeed be repaired and that media institutions, even if we do ﬁx them, will ever deliver social justice within the existing frame of capitalism. As Huﬀ argues, we need to “be the Media in word and deed . . . not lobby those in power to reform their own current establishment megaphones for their own
 
power elite agendas, as that will not happen, and indeed, has not, for the most part, in the past.”
Yet media reform eﬀorts do not need to take the form simply of a polite request for minor changes to media behavior or structure. Instead, we need to broaden the debate and to deepen the crisis by campaigning for speciﬁc remedies to, for example, online discrimination, media concentration, press scapegoat- ing, and the decline of local news while recognizing that these failures are indeed systemic and not incidental or peripheral to the core operations of the media. We need, in other words, to bring more radical politics to questions of reform. Of course, reform movements are always fraught with tensions and contra- dictions: they combine people who are happy to stick to immediate and win- nable demands with those who want to go much further; they consist of fragile coalitions between people who think that the system as it exists can deliver reforms that will satisfy enough people and those who think that there are struc-
tural inequalities that cannot be ironed out given the priorities of capitalism.
In these circumstances, the best tactic for those who want to see radical and durable change is not to withdraw from reform-minded movements but to demonstrate that reforms can only be won and protected through systemic cri- tique and radical action such as the boycotts, marches, occupations, and direc- tion action that have won the greatest victories in struggles for social justice.
Media reform, as with many other campaigns for social reform and justice, is therefore a way of reaching out to those people who have a healthy and often instinctive critique of the status quo but who maintain some illusions in the status quo. It is a way of working with those who want to see meaningful change but are not yet prepared to junk existing institutions and traditional forms of political campaigning as in parliamentary methods.
According to Robert Hackett and William Carroll (2006, 13), democratic media activism is both defensive and proactive; in other words, it is both reform-oriented in practice but also revolutionary and autonomist in spirit. Media reform for them involves a redeﬁnition of the very idea of democracy to include new rights such as the right to share meaning as well as an increased emphasis on participation and equality through acts of media-making. Indeed, it is harder and harder to insulate media reform from political reform in par- ticular because of the lack of autonomy of the media ﬁeld from the actions of the state and the market despite the fact that the media still retain the power to aﬀect the operations of other social actors.
McChesney (2008) in his work on media reform movements echoes this link between media and political reform as well as the need to connect both the insider and media justice elements of media reform. He argues that the con- temporary US media reform movement was triggered by the antiglobalization struggles that took place from the late 1990s and which raised serious questions about the incorporation of the right to communicate within neoliberal frames and policies. The movement had to “bed in” before taking to the streets but was
 
also inspired by radical critique of mainstream media performance (54). This is why media reform activists need to employ an inside/outside perspective— producing research, engaging in oﬃcial lobbying, attempting to inﬂuence politicians and regulators—as well as applying external pressure and participat- ing in direct action to transform the wider political climate. That is why all three dimensions of media reform outlined in this chapter—to know the media, to be the media, and to change the media—are so crucial if we are to build eﬀective coalitions to transform media institutions and processes.
For media reform activists, this means organizing in two distinct but com- plementary ways. First, we need to engage with the process as it is and not simply as we would like it to be—or rather we use our vision of what the media might look like in order to deal with how they are currently constituted. We have to use all available channels to spread our messages including more formal political channels inside Parliament or Congress. We need to understand, if not actually to speak, the language of our opponents; to grasp the nature of the political cycles and opportunities that exist; to provide facts and data to back up our case and develop objectives that are not just a series of ultimatums.
Second, eﬀective media reform also requires a radical perspective as no meaningful campaign for media reform is likely to be supported by the media itself or, indeed, by hardly any people in positions of power. Of course there are exceptions such as the recent movement against NSA surveillance where some corporate entities have an interest in being part of a coalition, not least in order to win back some credibility. The point is to create the conditions not simply in which we frame modest demands in the hope of them being accepted but to campaign hard for a shift in the public’s attitude to these issues precisely in order to apply pressure on the politicians and regulators who have the formal power to act. Conﬁning the movement to pretty modest proposals is unlikely to stave oﬀ opposition by the media or politicians. Indeed, the primary audi- ence for media reform activists is not necessarily politicians, and certainly not the media, but publics, other activists, ordinary citizens whose needs are not being met and whose rights are being undermined.
What this means is that to secure a fundamental shift in media power, we need to engage in media reform but not from a reformist perspective. We can learn a lot from the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg who distinguished between revisionist strategies for reform, which attempt to administer pallia- tive care to the capitalist system, and more radical strategies that seek to win reforms as a fundamental part of a revolutionary strategy to transform the sta- tus quo. While the former wants “to lessen, to attenuate, the capitalist contra- dictions” in order to stabilize society and produce consensus (Luxemburg 1989 [1899], 51), the latter seeks to struggle for reforms as part of a more widespread challenge to capitalist hegemony. The crucial point for Luxemburg however was that movements for reforms were central to a more profound social strug- gle: “Between social reforms and revolution there exists for the revolutionary
 
an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim” (ibid., 21).
Media reform, like all other forms of social reform, is a contradictory and uneven process in which diﬀerent groups are involved and diﬀerent strategies are involved. There is a world of diﬀerence between a reform campaign which calls on a handful of the “great and the good” to plead its case and one which seeks to mobilize greater numbers of people using all the tactics that are avail- able—a diﬀerence perhaps between “reform from above” and “reform from below.” You do not have to believe exclusively in parliamentary change to ﬁght for reforms though it would be equally short-sighted to refuse to engage with parliamentary processes as part of a reform campaign. Just as there is little point in aiming only at the band-aid, there is also little point in refusing at least to treat the wound. We need to delegitimize and pose alternatives to the power structures that created these problems in the ﬁrst place. Media reform allows us to do this if we build the necessary coalitions and if we pursue the right strategies.

AN O VERVIE W OF THE BOOK 
This edited collection brings together strategies for advancing media reform objectives, prepared by thirty-three activists and scholars from more than twenty-ﬁve countries, including Canada, Mexico, the United States, Argen- tina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Uruguay, Venezu- ela, Iceland, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Myanmar, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, Egypt, Ghana, Israel, and Qatar. Contributors ﬁrst presented their ideas in the summer of 2013 at a preconference of the Interna- tional Communication Association, hosted by Goldsmiths, University of London in the United Kingdom. The goal then, as it is now, was to bring together successful and promising strategies for media reform to be shared across international borders and media reform contexts. There are, of course, gaps—campaigns that are not mentioned, countries that are passed over, strat- egies that are not fully developed, and themes that are not suﬃciently explored (for example, the relationship between media reform and gender and between media reform and LGBT issues). We hope that this volume will serve as a useful resource for scholars and activists alike, looking to better understand the concept of media reform, and how it is being advanced around the world.

pART I :  INTRODUCTION 
The collection is organized into four parts. Part I provides a general introduc- tion followed by an essay by Becky Lentz that presents the ﬁrst strategy for media reform by asking us to consider the role of media policy literacy in the ongoing battle for media policy advocacy. Lentz suggests that media reform
 
movements should be viewed as an “ongoing and cumulative knowledge- building process” where reformers are continuously evaluating and building upon their reform strategies. In so doing, reformers strengthen their eﬀorts as they traverse the long and dangerous terrain of media policy-making. While battles lost should not be seen as failures, battles won should not be seen as stand-alone victories. No matter the outcome, the labor from past campaigns should serve future policy eﬀorts pedagogically by forcing reformers to learn from past mistakes and successes in order to better understand how reforms can be won in the future.
Parts II, III, and IV focus on Internet activism, media reform movements, and media reform in relation to broader democratic eﬀorts, respectively. Each part contains essays from scholars studying media reform within a speciﬁc international context, followed by a collection of commentaries by media reform activists from around the world. Activist voices need to be circulated inside scholarly communities if we are to realize the pedagogical beneﬁts of sharing strategies for media reform. To help readers focus on the strategies shared, the chapters begin with a brief summary of the media reform strategies discussed at length by the authors.

pART II : INTERNET ACTI v IS m FOR m EDIA REFORm 
The Internet is relevant to current battles for media reform in two ways: ﬁrst, as a tool for advancing activist objectives thus enhancing the capabilities of media reform organizations; and second, as a site of struggle over the future of the media. As the media landscape shifts online and as users increasingly access the Internet as a primary source for news and information, media reform eﬀorts are addressing how the Internet aﬀords the normative ideals central to earlier campaigns, as well as newer aspirations that extend from more tradi- tional eﬀorts. As a result, we are seeing media reform battles waged over issues including Internet access, equality of online opportunity, the protection of online privacy and speech, and a host of other civil liberties relevant to the digital citizen.
The scholarly essays in this part address the previously mentioned roles of the Internet in relation to contemporary media reform. Jonathan A. Obar and Leslie Regan Shade discuss how the digitally mediated, networked society referred to as the Fifth Estate presents users with an opportunity to reinvigorate the public watchdog function. Presented in the context of a victory over attempts by the Canadian government to extend its digital surveillance capa- bilities, the authors describe speciﬁc strategies that emphasize how Internet technologies can be harnessed to hold those in power to account. Christian Christensen describes how media reform debates are emerging as a by-product of the work of WikiLeaks—one of an evolving group of “digital defenders”— that highlights both the capacity of the Internet to hold corporate and state
 
power to account, but also how contemporary and future media reform eﬀorts must do more to protect whistleblowers and promote transparency. M. I. Franklin focuses on the development of the Charter of Human Rights and Prin- ciples for the Internet and Ten Internet Rights and Principles, framing the Internet as a battleground for contemporary media reform eﬀorts that exemplify the tensions between rights-based agendas and those championed by a techno- commercial elite.
The activist commentaries include four essays from media reform organiza- tions. Rainey Reitman from the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes about the lessons to be drawn from the battle over the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States, emphasizing ﬁve strategies drawn from the eﬀort: decentralize, speak up quickly and often, be visible, use Internet com- munities as a political force, and cross political lines. Craig Aaron and Timothy Karr from Free Press, the most visible media reform organization in the United States, discuss the role of outside-in grassroots strategies in the crucial battle over network neutrality in the United States. Joshua Breitbart, formerly of the New America Foundation, outlines how the technical and policy expertise of the Open Technology Institute contributed to the US Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. And David Christopher discusses how Canadian media reform group Openmedia.ca ﬁghts for the future of the Internet by placing citizens at the heart of the debate.

pART III : THE pOwER OF THE m EDIA REFOR m mOvEmENT 
Our starting point in this part is that media reform is not simply a noun but a verb—not simply a normative attachment to change but an active engagement with the circumstances in which we ﬁnd ourselves. This means that we need to focus on the agents of change and to consider the most relevant organizational models as well as the most eﬀective strategies in the pursuit of media reform. As with any progressive social movement, the capacity for change is related both to objective conditions (the scale of the problem, the political and eco- nomic contexts, the salience of the issues involved) and to more subjective factors concerning how best to mobilize in support of reform and what kind of campaign structures are necessary to organize opposition. Media reform is not a spontaneous outcome but the result of individuals working together to iden- tify the problem, suggest alternatives and then to put into action the agreed strategies.
The chapters in this part emphasize strategies from diﬀerent international contexts associated with speciﬁc media reform movements. Alejandro Abraham- Hamanoiel writes about AMEDI, the most prominent media reform group in Mexico, and identiﬁes the multiple strategies it uses—from litigation and
 
lobbying to publishing and media monitoring. Benedetta Brevini and Justin Schlosberg focus on the role of the Media Reform Coalition in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the phone hacking scandal, arguing that success- ful movements need to both engage with mainstream media and oﬃcial policy debates and resist the terms on which these debates and agendas are premised. Hsin-yi Sandy Tsai and Shih-Hong Lo write about media reform in Taiwan and describe a number of strategies that groups like the Media Watch Founda- tion and the Campaign for Media Reform have utilized to defend public broadcasting, oppose monopolies, and press for free speech in an emergent liberal media landscape. Kathleen Cross and David Skinner outline the activi- ties of three diﬀerent Canadian campaigns. They emphasize four insights rele- vant to organizing media reform initiatives: the need to understand regional and national contexts, to seek collaborations and coalitions, to pursue links with academic institutions, and to use multiple approaches and modes of engagement.
In the commentary section, the contributions from media reform organiza- tions help to ﬂesh out precisely how the strategies work in practice in the context of the struggle for low-power FM in the United States and in attempts to open up the airwaves and to protect speech rights in West Africa. Hannah Sassaman and Pete Tridish from the Prometheus Radio Project describe strate- gies that yielded one of the biggest media reform victories in recent history in the United States, the battle for low-power FM radio. Sanjay Jolly, also of the Prometheus Radio Project, writes about more recent developments in the con- tinued struggle for low-power FM in the United States. Kwame Karikari describes the work of the Media Foundation for West Africa in building the necessary coalitions to open up the airwaves in the Republic of Guinea and to secure communication rights in the conﬂict-ridden context of Liberia.

pART Iv: m EDIA REFOR m AS DEmOCRATIC REFORm 
The chapters in this part demonstrate the close interrelation and historical contingency of media and democratic reform. The authors draw on case stud- ies from the United States, Israel, South America, Egypt, and South East Asia to illustrate how media reform activism is intimately linked to social move- ments’ demands for democratic and pluralistic forms of representation and broader communication rights.
Among the scholars, Victor Pickard argues that at least three lessons can be drawn from the post–World War II media reform movement, including the importance of inside-outside strategies, the importance of structural reform eﬀorts and the connections between media and other political and social reform battles. Arne Hintz describes how civil society actors can advance reform objectives by engaging in do-it-yourself policy-making through a pro-
 
cess he calls “policy-hacking.” Presenting examples from a variety of interna- tional contexts—including Argentina, Germany and Iceland—Hintz explains how reformers can repackage and upgrade policy utilizing a DIY framework. Manuel Puppis and Matthias Künzler argue that academic input into the poli- cymaking process often coincides with the interests of political and media elites but suggest that scholars should use all opportunities to break out of this impasse and to play a role both in identifying policy alternatives and helping to produce more democratic media systems. Noam Tirosh and Amit Schejter consider the roles of unions, professional associations, alternative media, and civil society organizations in media reform in Israel. The authors emphasize that the strategy that has had the most success in the Israeli context has been the utilization of alternative media in more extreme forms—by breaking the law and communicating via unlicensed media services. Cheryl Martens, Oliver Reina, and Ernesto Vivares consider the important role of social movements and focus on the cases of Argentina and Venezuela to discuss how media reform in South America is challenging neoliberal models of development and com- munication and the redistribution media power. Rasha Abdulla describes the steps necessary to establish a public broadcaster in Egypt, underscoring that media reform is contingent on state processes, which may lag behind public demands. And Lisa Brooten examines media reform eﬀorts in Thailand in rela- tion to those of Myanmar and the Philippines, illustrating the interrelationship between media reform and broader social eﬀorts, including those to end impu- nity in cases of violence and corruption, and the strengthening legal and regu- latory frameworks.
In the commentary section, Peter Townson of the Doha Centre for Media
Freedom describes media literacy initiatives and campaigns to defend media freedom in the Arab world and to equip journalists with the resources necessary to provide eﬀective coverage of the conﬂicts in which they are involved. Mark Camp of Cultural Survival discusses the use of community radio by Indigenous people in Guatemala to secure their rights to freedom of expression and culture and identiﬁes the legislative struggles to secure meaningful media reform. And Marius Dragomir of the Open Society Foundations lists the steps taken to democratize the Mexican media environment, focusing on key strategies includ- ing research, coalition-building, information dissemination, and lobbying.
Media reform is a constituent part of contemporary struggles for democracy and social justice. Sometimes, it is carried out in its own right—for example, to campaign for independent voices and grass roots outlets in contexts where media spaces are largely dominated by vested interest. At other times, it grows organically out of prodemocracy campaigns that are stiﬂed by the lack of com- municative capacity and where demands for media reform arise more sponta- neously in order to carry the struggle forward. In both cases, it is vital that researchers, scholars, activists, and ordinary users come together to reﬂect on
 
and to develop the most eﬀective strategies to safeguard our communication systems for the public good. We hope that this volume makes at least a small contribution to an objective that is likely to prove crucial in establishing democracy and equality in the twenty-ﬁrst century.



CHAPTER TWO 

Media Policy Literacy
A Foundation for Media Reform
BECKY LENT z, McGill University, Canada




MEDIA REFORM STRATEGY 
To enact an advocacy campaign aimed at changing the shape of media systems requires engaging in myriad forms of communicative work, which in turn demands knowledge of policy-making processes, the regulatory and legal history of the issues at stake, activism and advocacy practices, and the contemporary legal and political environment. My intent here is to re-conceptualize media policy advocacy by foregrounding not only the work that it involves but the multiple forms of knowledge on which it is based, and to argue that media reform is, there- fore, centrally connected to media policy literacy. Media policy literacy can be engendered through a combination of critical media policy pedagogy and opportu- nities for situated learning.

As Philip Napoli (2009) has illustrated in his capacious overview of media reform scholarship, there are meaningful diﬀerences in how scholars have understood the political stakes, moments of opportunity, and mobilizing structures and strategies of media activism eﬀorts. These works have made visible the alternate imaginings of the socio-political functions of media and have exposed the ideological and structural impediments to citizen group inﬂuence in the policy-making process. In so doing, these studies have denat- uralized both media systems and media policies and, through their analysis, have ﬂagged important lessons for future media policy advocacy eﬀorts (McChesney 1993; Fones-Wolf 2006; Pickard 2010a, 2010b). This chapter

19
 
discusses the challenges associated with promoting similar forms of media policy literacy amongst media reformers. A case study about the Consortium on Media Policy Studies (COMPASS) program in the United States provides one example of a situated learning program contributing at least some of the grounded understanding essential to promoting successful media policy lit- eracy eﬀorts.

WHAT IS MEDIA POLICY LITERA CY ?
For Lunt and Livingstone (2011, 118), media literacy refers to the “policies and initiatives that have been designed to bridge the gap between what people know about and what they need to know about media in an increasingly liberalised and globalised environment.” Media policy literacy, in the context of media reform, refers to what people need to know about the governance of media institutions, legal principles undergirding media regulation, and the processes by which media policies and laws are formed, debated, enacted, and changed. An emphasis on media policy literacy seeks to make visible the practices by which media policy advocates and would-be advocates (i.e., members of the general public) acquire the knowledge necessary to devise and participate in media reform and media justice eﬀorts, the work that constitutes media policy advocacy, and the multiple spheres and strategies that comprise the scope of these practices.
While administrative law in the United States requires that administrative agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) solicit public input as they consider new rules, numerous scholars have noted that structural obstacles often impede the opportunity of members of the public to have a comparable impact to that of other stakeholders. These obstacles include not only discrepancies in access to government deliberations but also knowledge- based resources like those associated with media policy literacy (Gangadharan 2009; Gangadharan 2013; Brown and Blevins 2008; Schejter and Obar 2009; Obar and Schejter 2010).
Beyond an understanding of policy-making processes, media policy literacy is strengthened through competency in the workings of media systems at the macro, mid-range, and micro levels. That is, one needs understanding not only of the macro, such as the political economy of media industries and their regulation, but also their institutional practices (including hiring, promotion, and labor policies), and the impact of their work on communities and indi- viduals. An appreciation of all three levels is required, as well as recognition of their interconnectedness. Media policy literacy is also strengthened through developing understandings of a range of issues, for example, contemporaneous interpretations of freedom of expression in speciﬁc legal environments; the limitations of access to media outlets, services and content; the parameters of media diversity; and the impact of electronic media on privacy. Media policy literacy thus refers to a capacity to recognize and act in the public interest on
 
relevant legislative, legal, and regulatory precedents and rulings, as well as the premises and logics upon which these are based, for given policy issues.
The acquisition of these forms of knowledge is necessary but not suﬃcient for acquiring media policy literacy, however (Lentz 2014b). The other crucial component is gained by on-the-ground experience through participation in media reform eﬀorts—experience that contributes to a grounded understand- ing of what is possible to achieve given the actual operations of the policy- making process at a particular moment in time. The strategic moments of opportunity to enact change, the most eﬀective course of action for a given policy concern at a particular historical juncture, the potential (but not prom- ised) long-term beneﬁts of immediate participation in a reform eﬀort, and which organizations or communities one should align with to achieve desired outcomes are all examples of the ways in which intellectual and experiential knowledge co-produce media policy literacy..

CHALLENGES TO AD VANCING MEDIA POLICY LITERA CY 
One challenge to those trying to create such educational experiences is the interdisciplinary breadth and depth of this policy ﬁeld, which encompasses broadcasting, telecommunications, the Internet, and information policy, not to mention a good bit of social science, political science, economics, computer engineering, and legal expertise. The diversity of issues traveling under the umbrella term media policy contributes to an incoherence that challenges peda- gogic eﬀorts. For instance, although students in my media governance courses take many other media-related classes, each year they will remark, several weeks into the term, “This is so important! Why haven’t we heard about any of this before in any of our other classes?”
Braman’s essays about the ﬁeld’s deﬁnitional problem are a case in point, as are the variety of encyclopedic entries and books on the topic (see Napoli 2008). In the US context, for instance, Braman notes that after covering media policy’s links to the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, things get compli- cated quickly, especially after adding technology to the mix (Braman 2004). In twenty-ﬁrst-century media policy scholarship, she argues, our focus is now more on the constitutive role in social and political life of content and distribu- tion infrastructures. I have argued that in the digital media environment, content and conduit are co-constitutive, thus equal attention must be given to issues of infrastructure alongside the political economy of content production, distribution, reception, and exchange (Lentz 2010).
Braman (2004, 161–176) illustrates this classiﬁcatory dilemma by describing how media policy embraces several related problems: technology-based conver- gence problems; practice-based problems; policy-based problems; and issue- based problems. She also points out a multitude of deﬁnitional perspectives
 
used to map this ﬁeld of inquiry, for instance, by topical area, legacy legal cat- egories (e.g., statutory versus regulatory), media industry type, stage of an information production chain (e.g., creation, processing, or storage), or intended societal impact (e.g., protecting children from harmful content). She settles on a broad vision that accepts “a multiplicity of deﬁnitional faces, each of utility at a diﬀerent stage of the policymaking process,” recasting media policy as information policy: “all law and regulation that deals with informa- tion creation, processing, ﬂows and use.”
These and other well-intended deﬁnitional eﬀorts contribute more, not less, to what I call the media policy tower of babble (Lentz 2014a). Confusion and debate over terminology, entry points, and theoretical foci only obscure rather than clarify what one must know to intervene in policy areas like those men- tioned earlier. This is not to suggest by analogy that arriving at an overarching deﬁnition of media policy is hubristic, but the fact remains that the sheer complexity of issues, institutions, aspirational goals, threats, concerns, legal doctrines, and technologies requiring mastery confounds eﬀorts to design an education that equips graduates—and others—with the capacity to produce policy change.
As with media and communications studies more generally, media policy stud- ies are deﬁned less by a canon of core texts than by their objects of study. Perme- able intellectual boundaries demand rigorous interdisciplinary training, and some measure of practical experience. Media policy scholarship matters to democracy, freedom of information and expression, access to knowledge, eco- nomic and community development, cultural identity, and personal privacy—all oﬀer a suitable vantage point for study. Communities of practice are an equally good entry, be they media producers, media audiences, cultural workers, con- sumer activists, communication rights advocates, journalists, open source devel- opers, children’s and women’s right activists, or social justice activists. Or, it can be approached according to key concepts such as neoliberalism, democratic the- ory, public sphere theory, economic development, globalization, international development, or human rights. Finally, courts, legislatures, regulatory agencies, or international bodies are another entry point for study.
Media policy education interrogates history, legal doctrine, and frameworks, institutions, and aspirational goals; but without direct experience, media policy remains relatively abstract, its impact being less visible than, say, pollution or the explicit violation of human rights. Exceptions include infrequent but vitally important spikes in public awareness like the millions of signatures gathered during the media consolidation debate of 2003 (Moyers 2003), the online protests during the SOPA/PIPA debates, or the extensive media cover- age of the NSA/PRISM aﬀair that has made massive government surveillance an open secret.
Events like spectrum auctions have considerable implications for national treasuries, but few laypeople even know such a marketplace exists. Newcomers
 
have to connect media policies to lived experience to understand what is at stake. Yet media policy scholars, practitioners, and public interest advocates speak the languages of many diﬀerent disciplines. The overall project enjoys no coherent moniker like climate change or human rights. It is referred to as infor- mation and communications technologies (ICT) policy, communication and information policy (CIP), communication law and policy, or Internet gover- nance; all encompass multiple, intersecting objects of study.
Media policy literacy also requires changing traditional notions of media literacy, which, critics observe, are often limited to “the ability to access, anal- yse, evaluate and communicate messages in a variety of forms” (Lunt and Liv- ingstone 2011, 122). Whilst media literacy agendas are now being expanded by governments to include digital media literacy, the overall focus remains, with a few exceptions, protectionist (Wallis and Buckingham 2013). “Media literacy here seems individualised, prioritising consumers and consumer choice over citizens and citizens’ rights, and prioritising protection over participation” (Lunt and Livingstone 2011, 125).
A robust media policy literacy agenda oﬀers a potential counterweight to such a neoliberal media education agenda. Whereas digital media literacy may distract attention from deregulation, critical media policy literacy would develop capacity to intervene on deregulation or liberalization agendas (see Shade and Shepherd 2013). Yet to do so, critically minded media policy schol- ars and advocates need to cultivate viable working partnerships with public interest policy practitioners and advocates to create, and help to fund, oppor- tunities for students to participate, at least peripherally, in communities of practice engaged in media reform work. According to Lunt and Livingstone (2011, 135), “the critical analysis of media literacy not as an inert skill or the property of an individual but rather as a social, contextualised capability.”
Traditional public sphere theory, that is, the Habermasian normative framework, argues that the best defense against threats to democratic media is an informed public adequately equipped for rational public debate. To be sure, there are many critics of the Habermasian framework, but donor insti- tutions and philanthropists determined to salvage journalism or promote social media’s promise do not appear to be among them based on funding patterns noted in annual reports. An exception is the Media Democracy Fund (MDF) with its support for the Media Literacy Project based in New Mexico, whose mission “through education, programs, and grassroots cam- paigns . . . [is to] transform people into critical media consumers and engaged media justice advocates who deconstruct media, inform media policy, and create media that reﬂect their lived experience.”
Shoring up journalism builds better content enterprises, be they public, private, or some combination of the two; however, it only builds part of the necessary movement infrastructures needed for sustainable media reforms in the public interest. If university faculty hiring and course oﬀerings are another
 
indicator of priorities, there is much respect for all things digital: digital jour- nalism, digital culture, digital humanities, or digital media education. Yet despite its importance to the future of democracy, we see scant attention paid not only to questions of media reform but also to digital media policy or even policy literacy. Being called upon to participate in episodic media policy struggles, sign online petitions, contribute to issue campaigns, re-Tweet argu- ments, watch mesmerizing TED Talks, or take part in protests at opportune ﬂashpoints does not an educated digital citizen make.
We need to cultivate in university students a sense of citizenship (analog and digital) beyond voting or conscientious consumption, and inculcate media policy literacy in the same way we do, for example, “environmental education” as an established topic area in secondary and postsecondary education as well as for the general public. The World Environmental Education Congress is just one example of what is needed in the ﬁeld of media policy studies, enhancing deliberate attention to policy issues in the way that environmental education teaches skills to mitigate environmental problems alongside raising awareness and sensitivity about environmental challenges. Environmental education includes attention to governance issues involving international treaties, agree- ments, and norms. So should media policy literacy educational agendas.
The core argument here is that media policy literacy is a precondition for informed engagement in media reform struggles. While media education’s goal may be to produce more eﬀective or responsible ways of using media and tech- nology, media policy pedagogy engenders the capacity to recognize and mobilize what Bitzer (1992) argues is “the rhetorical situation” or kairos, those propitious moments for decision or action, in this case, in media policy struggles. Media policy apprentices need to be able to navigate the temporal and discursive com- plexity of policy advocacy practice while doing policy advocacy work alongside experts who are already part of a community of practice (Postill 2013; Streeter 2013). It follows then that media policy literacy emerges not just from the class- room or from responding critically to scholarly writing, but directly from experi- ence, something the media policy “tower of babble” with its multiplicity of approaches, entry points, and objects of study cannot facilitate unless it explicitly embraces practices. Media policy education, therefore, must draw on a situated theory of learning that oﬀers forms of “legitimate peripheral participation” in the sense advanced by Lave and Wenger (1991). Substantively, this type of participa- tion has to include attention to institutions, legal doctrines, aspirational goals, the history and practice of social movements, constituencies of interest, and speciﬁc policy issues like communication rights, freedom of expression, and broadband inclusion. In these circumstances, internships, fellowships, exchange, or residency programs may help to bring academic study to life.
Yet despite media policy’s clear political signiﬁcance, there are too many
academic programs featuring critique and too few programs preparing students to become participants in media policy or to represent the public interest in
 
government, corporations, or media policy advocacy organizations. Trends related to media studies in higher education raise the question: why aren’t more public aﬀairs and public policy programs teaching media policy? By the same token, why aren’t more academic programs looking beyond the study of journalism or new media to address policies related to information, com- munication, and technology? Finally, why are there still so few handbooks, encyclopedias, readers, and journals dedicated to media policy studies and media reform itself?
Perhaps part of the answer rests in the rather long shadow cast by journalism studies and media studies programs, which have traditionally emphasized con- tent over infrastructure concerns where content is linked to freedom of expres- sion, namely, freedom of the press. More recently, attention to issues of code, infrastructure, and digital forms of activism, have been on the rise since Lessig published Code (1999).
Even still, the tendency is to feature primarily instrumental concerns—how media and technologies enable social and political change—such as activists’ use of Twitter in Arab Spring uprisings or social movements’ uptake of technol- ogy. Less common is news coverage of media policy as an object of activism itself (Mueller, Pagé, and Kuerbis 2004).
There are also too few civil society organizations, sustainable academic cen- ters, institutes, or think tanks in media policy-making. Why the media policy and media reform ﬁelds remain so under-resourced confounds many working in this area. Donors that include the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Media Democracy Fund have already invested vast amounts of money. So why is there still a mere handful of media policy courses in information schools, media and communication studies programs, and political science departments? Why not degrees or certiﬁcates in media policy and media reform? Why aren’t more public aﬀairs and public policy programs teaching media policy? Why aren’t more programs looking beyond the study of journalism or faddish new media phenomena to address information, com- munication, and technology policy? Why are there still so few handbooks, encyclopedias, readers, and journals dedicated to media reform?
This points to what I have previously called a “blind spot in higher educa- tion” related to media policy studies (Lentz 2014a). Despite this study area’s relevance to the issues and concerns mentioned earlier, the ﬁeld of media policy studies remains on the margins of institutions of higher education. If measured by degrees or certiﬁcates granted in media policy studies, it has no signiﬁcant uptake in undergraduate or graduate curricula that mirrors other public policy areas like environmental protection, public safety, or public health.
Deﬁciencies in attention to media policy pedagogy are particularly notice- able in professional schools of business, international development, law, and public aﬀairs, policy, administration, and service. There are, of course, excep- tions. Those related to law programs in the United States include the Berkman
 
Center at Harvard University, the Yale Information Society Project, George- town University’s Institute for Public Representation and American University, which now features Internet governance as does McGill University. Schools of Communication and Information Studies, on the other hand, have oﬀered academic homes to many media policy studies scholars and their students. Still, there are relatively few centers or institutes where the histories of media policy studies and media reform movements are being taught, or where gradu- ating students with an interest in this area of public policy formation and issue advocacy might intern, take up a fellowship, or eventually work.
Rather than privileging the gendered design, uneven deployment, or undemocratic governance of media resources that occurs, many media stud- ies and communications departments instead oﬀer courses and programs of study featuring the uses or abuses of media and technology resources. Com- pelling titles of courses, books, and articles in media studies feature the FUD factor—fear, uncertainty, and doubt—rather than how public interest advocates are working to address these concerns and reform institutions and practices (Hindman 2009; Landau 2010; McChesney 2013). Courses also feature aspects of media and cultural industries, media literacy, and more recently, digital activism. Such resources are essential in pointing out to stu- dents the current and potential harms to freedom of expression accompany- ing media and technology innovations. Yet students also need to be aware of scholarship that chronicles how public interest advocates work to address media misrepresentations, violations of privacy, and other media-related policy concerns (e.g., Bennett 2010; Franklin 2013; Hackett and Carroll 2006; Jorgensen 2006; Klinenberg 2007; McChesney, Newman, and Scott 2005; Mueller, Pagé, and Kuerbis 2004). I would argue that these endeavors need supplements to advance the civic dimension of media reform eﬀorts.
Additionally, given that this work is situated primarily in information and communications schools means that the policy studies sector does not neces- sarily engage with media policy scholars or students. Students trained in such schools tend not to get the broader public policy and legal grounding that a law or public policy school oﬀers, both of which would be helpful to them in media policy work.
In summary, a media future that inspires and cultivates innovation, open- ness, and participation depends on the capacity of people to consider them- selves as more than merely digital consumers. Critically minded media policy scholars have an obligation to team up with open source, media democracy, media justice, and freedom of expression communities of practice to render classrooms as collaborators of theory and practice. Universities can also open their doors to advocates as “professors of practice,” creating “sabbaticals for radicals” that allow scholars and students to learn from practitioners, and for practitioners to enjoy opportunities for reﬂection. University professors teach-
 
ing media policy courses can also create educational consortia to share syllabi, with oral history projects as possible points of praxis that bring together teach- ing, research, and practice. Indeed, there are many opportunities to work through the media policy tower of babble that undermines advancing public engagement in one of the most important area of policy studies of our time.
The following section explores one of several examples where eﬀorts are being made to situate MA and PhD students in experiential learning settings where they can practice policy advocacy alongside seasoned citizen and consumer policy advocates.

MEDIA POLICY P EDA GOGY IN PRA CTICE 
The Consortium on Media Policy Studies (COMPASS) program provides MA and PhD students in communication studies with opportunities to work in the summer months (June through August) in Washington, DC, with governmen- tal agencies, companies, and public interest organizations that match the stu- dents’ topical research interests. Since the program’s inception around 2002 when the ﬁrst students were placed as a pilot eﬀort, close to forty fellows have beneﬁted from the opportunity to spend a period of eight weeks between June and August working alongside experienced policy practitioners and advocates. Partnering organizations so far have included the Alliance for Community Media, the Aspen Institute, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Digital Democracy, Common Cause, Consumers Union, the Federal Communications Commission, Free Press, Internews, the Media and Democ- racy Coalition, the New America Foundation, the oﬃces of Representatives Diane Watson (D-CA) and Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), the US State Department, and the World Bank.
According to a 2009 assessment (Newman 2009), the program evolved out of conversations among senior scholars in the ﬁeld of media and communica- tion studies at a time of renewed interest in the ﬁeld of media policy, due to the groundswell of public engagement in the US media consolidation debate of 2003. This renewed interest was prompted in large part by the 1996 Tele- communications Act, which resulted in the largest overhaul of communica- tions policy legislation in years. Since that time, the media policy advocacy sector has witnessed the emergence of several new advocacy organizations and coalitions made possible by a considerable injection of new funding from institutions that include the Markle Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institute, and family foundations like the Haas Charitable Trust and the Benton Foundation. A key theme among one donor institution in particular, the Ford Foundation, was a renewed role for academic institu- tions in media policy practice (Pooley 2011).
 
At present, the Consortium is led by the two Annenberg Schools of Com- munication (USC and University of Pennsylvania) and by the University of Michigan. According to the program’s website:
The purpose of the consortium is to build bridges between the academic study of the mass media and policymakers. COMPASS seeks to train more graduate students in the areas of media policy, law and regulation; we are dedicated to making the academic study of the mass media and communica- tion systems more relevant to and informing of national and international policy planning and regulatory proposals.
For the purposes of this project, past COMPASS fellows were contacted, reaching out to fellows going as far back as 2002 and as recently as 2013 to supplement interviews conducted by Russell Newman in 2009. Past COM- PASS fellows were asked to either complete an e-mail survey or to participate in a brief Skype interview about their fellowship experience. At the time of writing, thirteen of the thirty-three past fellows have responded to our request for information, for a total of eight completed e-mail questionnaires and seven Skype interviews.
According to Newman (2009) and to accounts by various early fellows, the COMPASS program began rather informally, with communication studies professors using their institutional resources and contacts to connect students to Washington, DC. According to one fellow who continued to work in the advocacy sector after his own fellowship experience, and who later helped to facilitate COMPASS placements, congressional fellowship arrangements were made “on an ad hoc basis with particular members of congress.” According to another fellow, the program’s “lack of formalization is what enabled it to exist in the ﬁrst place” with placements being established “behind the scenes.” How- ever, since 2008, and perhaps due to the fact that the Democrats are now in power, there have been essentially no congressional COMPASS fellowship placements; all placements have been at NGOs based in Washington. Accord- ing to Newman’s report, “there is widespread agreement that some form of administration of the program and formalization of the fellowships in Wash- ington is necessary for it to continue.”
All COMPASS fellows interviewed and surveyed were pursuing graduate degrees at the time of their COMPASS fellowships. While the majority of fel- lows heard about the COMPASS opportunity through their educational insti- tutions—either via mailing lists or being advised of the opportunity by faculty members—a couple of fellows learned about the COMPASS fellowship pro- gram through contacts from past internships in the nongovernmental sector. One fellow expressed that he speciﬁcally chose to pursue his graduate degree because the institution allowed him access to the COMPASS fellowship program. Before beginning their fellowships, respondents’ knowledge about policy-making varied widely, from “very little” to “moderate” to “quite knowl-
 
edgeable” and “very advanced.” Those who were quite advanced in their knowl- edge of policy-making had past fellowships at nongovernmental organizations. According to the COMPASS website, fellows receive support from the core institutions to locate an appropriate placement, a stipend of $5,000, and travel expenses for attending a follow-up retreat. Students’ home graduate institu- tions are expected to provide $2,000 for housing expenses. Of those inter- viewed/surveyed, three fellows said that they received $6,000 to cover the costs of their fellowship experience, which they said was suﬃcient for their needs at the time. Two fellows did not indicate the amount of money they received for participating in the fellowship program, but indicated that the amount was “suﬃcient.” One fellow received $2,000 from the COMPASS program and
$2,500 from the student’s home institution—this fellow said that the amount received was insuﬃcient and “did not even cover my rent.” Lastly, one fellow received no funding as she lived at home and commuted on a daily basis.
Survey responses so far indicate that fellows’ day-to-day work responsibili- ties varied signiﬁcantly, depending on the fellowship placement. Fellows in the NGO sector reported that their daily tasks included attending media policy events at other organizations, conducting research and compiling data, organizing interviews, designing a survey, making contributions to larger projects, reading policies, writing draft reports, attending meetings, working with community groups, and doing educational work. Fellows placed in con- gressional oﬃces were responsible for a wide range of daily tasks, including writing “dear colleague” letters, writing resolutions, drafting statements and speeches, reading and sorting constituent mail, and attending events such as hearings, brieﬁngs, and events held by public interest and lobbying groups. One congressional fellow reported being given “the full responsibilities of a legislative aid,” and was responsible for working on broadcast regulation, say- ing “I was able only to work on that issue, researching that issue, reading all the news that was coming out about that issue, studying the bills that were being drafted about that issue.”
As fellows’ tasks diﬀered, so too do their assessments of the importance of their fellowship work. Some found their work to be essential and important to the organization they were working for while others found their work to be not very essential or had trouble assessing the impact of their work. For the most part, writing and research skills, as well as a prior knowledge of policy-making, were found to be the most essential skills needed for these fellowships—capabilities that fellows often use in doctoral programs. Fellows also noted organizational skills, academic review, survey design, editing, critical reading, “big picture thinking,” and statistical analysis as other essential skills for such a fellowship.
Nearly all fellows indicated an interest in getting to experience and observe how power operates in Washington, DC; they all took advantage of their time there by attending events, talks, brieﬁngs, and hearings in their oﬀ-work hours, all of which contributed to their learning and understanding of how
 
the Hill works. For some fellows, being able to glean how power operates in the US capitol was the most substantial take-away from their fellowship expe- rience. For example, one fellow had this to say about his congressional oﬃce fellowship:
For me the more interesting part was learning the kind of behind-the-scenes politics; for example, how various congressional oﬃces would strategize, or rather the various congressional staﬀers, how they would coordinate and try to message particular things. We also interfaced with the press fairly often so it was interesting to see that side of things. But there was just so much that you would never hear about, even just seeing things like how most of this language was being put together by twenty-ﬁve-year-old congressional staﬀ- ers, seeing the relationships that these congressional oﬃces had with outside groups and other institutions ranging from public interests, nonproﬁt groups to corporate lobbyists.
I personally was very interested in seeing how corporate lobbyists were taking part in these daily activities, just seeing them in the halls of congress; so just basically seeing how power operates on a daily basis.
While the majority of fellows agree that they did all their learning about policy- making from working alongside and observing congressional staﬀers, one fel- low said that he learned the most by attending meetings, while others said they learned by having conversations and asking questions, or as they went along by completing tasks independently and then seeking feedback from colleagues.
Given that the COMPASS fellowship lasts such a short time, i.e., only dur- ing the summer months, the majority of fellows did not feel they became an authentic member of their community of practice, the term mentioned earlier in this paper by those working from a situated learning perspective following Lave and Wenger. By the end of the program, most said they gained useful knowledge about both policy-making and how the Hill works. Fellows also said that their COMPASS experience gave them new conﬁdence in their aca- demic studies, and gave them opportunities to attend events and meet new people, future contacts, and supportive faculty—all listed as strengths of the COMPASS program.
However, several felt that they had too little contact with other fellows, that they did not make the connections they were hoping to make, and that they had a sense of doing work that was not useful to the organization where they were placed. That said, nearly all fellows described their COMPASS experience as positive.
With their fellowship experience behind them, some past fellows say their work now is not speciﬁcally related to anything they learned during their fel- lowship. However, other fellows report that their fellowship experience played a large role in the work that they are doing now. One fellow said that the fel-
 
lowship was formative: “[It has] really shaped the way that I think about policy and about activism as well and the goals of activism and what they can be and what they should be.” Other fellows said that their work would be much less policy oriented had they not completed a COMPASS fellowship.
A deeper examination of the actual work that fellows perform during their fellowships alongside seasoned experts could also oﬀer insights into how to structure approaches to media policy pedagogy both within and outside higher education. For example, fellows report in interviews and surveys that they participated in many routine activities that at ﬁrst seemed strange but later made sense to them. Such tasks included writing reports, preparing public testimony, developing white papers and policy briefs, and meeting with public oﬃcials and their staﬀ. Fellowship experiences that oﬀer opportunities to par- ticipate in advocacy practice fosters a sense of belonging and legitimacy that is not possible otherwise. While this point may seem obvious to practitioners (including law faculty in clinical legal programs), it may not be clear to those involved with media and communications studies teaching and scholarship that is de-linked from practice contexts and professional training programs. For this reason, an examination of syllabi from COMPASS and similar pro- grams could be a valuable tool for the media reform movement.

CONCL USION 
What is gained by looking at media reform through this lens of media policy literacy? First, the approach broadens how we understand the labors of media policy advocacy communities. Rather than honing in on particular campaigns, and narrating and explicating their successes or failures, examining media reform as imbricated in media policy literacy requires that media reform move- ments view advocacy work as an ongoing and cumulative knowledge-building process, one in which advocates continually learn, interpret, and revise how to intervene in the policy-making process. The campaigns media reformers mount hinge on and are informed by previous experiences with advocacy eﬀorts. Accordingly, media reform should be seen as an active pedagogic process, one in which advocacy groups both acquire the skill sets and resources necessary to intervene in policy-making while, at the same time, adjusting or modifying their expectations of what can be accomplished at particular historical junctures. Second, looking at media reform through this lens of media policy literacy allows us to reimagine, and perhaps to decenter, questions of success or failure in media reform eﬀorts that elide those episodes of media advocacy practice that serve as teaching moments for practitioners themselves. Deliberate atten- tion to reﬂecting on practice serves to advance the work of policy advocacy in the public interest. Media policy advocacy groups may participate in a reform eﬀort with the expectation that their immediate actions may not achieve their
 
stated goals. However, to see these campaigns as failures often is to misunder- stand their purpose or the way they function for advocacy groups themselves. Finally, to highlight the centrality of media policy literacy to media policy advocacy is to recognize the long-term commitment and tenacity of media reform and media justice activists. It is to be wary of notions of advocacy constituted by quick ﬁx actions to address what seem like exigent policy questions. It is to see that media reform eﬀorts are borne not only of impas- sioned beliefs and commitments to a more democratic or participatory media, but of the tremendous amount of work required to gain the many literacies required to make such eﬀorts eﬀective. A commitment to media policy literacy, therefore, is essential for the potential success of media reform campaigns; that is, if by success we mean contributing to building ongoing capacity for sea- soned advocates to nurture newcomers, for scholars to learn from practitioners by chronicling their various policy wins as well as losses, for practitioners to obtain time to reﬂect on these experiences, and for students of media studies to be able to pursue opportunities to engage directly as coparticipants in media
reform eﬀorts.

NOTES 
1.	The case study is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non- commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd); see http://ijoc.org.
2.	See Freedom of Expression, Media and Justice, www.fordfoundation.org/ issues/freedom-of-expression/exploring-issues-of-justice-through-media; “Non- proﬁt Journalism and the Need for Policy Solutions,” www.freepress.net/blog/ 11/12/05/nonproﬁt-journalism-and-need-policy-solutions; and the Knight Foun- dation, Media Innovation, www.knightfoundation.org/what-we-fund/innovating
-media.
3.	See the Media Literacy Project, http://medialiteracyproject.org; Journalismfund.eu, www.journalismfund.eu/; and “Philanthropic Foundations: Growing Funders of the News,” http://communicationleadership.usc.edu/pubs/ PhilanthropicFoundations.pdf.
4.	See World Environmental Education Congress, www.environmental
-education.org/.
5.	In the United States, examples include the Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the Telecommunica- tions and Information Policy Institute (TIPI) in the Moody School of Communi- cation at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Syra- cuse University School of Information Studies, the Institute for Information Policy at Pennsylvania State University, the Quello Center at Michigan State Uni- versity, American University, the University of Virginia, and Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center. Also noteworthy are the Oxford Internet Institute’s grad-
 
uate program in Internet Studies where a policy focus is included as part of the curriculum.
6.	A study of university-based degree- or certiﬁcate-granting programs related to media policy literacy (broadly conceived to include Internet governance, ICT, and other related subspecialties) would be a worthy undertaking for future media reform infrastructure-building work.
7.	Consortion of Media Policy Studies, COMPASS, http://compass consortium.org/.