این متن را بخش به بخش باذکر تمام تیترها و خلاصه ی جامع از محتوا زیر هر تیتر به انگلیسی خلاصه کن Strategies for Media Reform


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 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.