A game of two halves

Freedman, D. (2008). The Politics of Media Policy. Cambridge: Polity.

ISBN 9780745628424; pbk. 264 pp. $US 25.95.

Reviewed by Terry Flew, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland

University of Technology.

Des Freedman’s The Politics of Media Policy is a valuable contribution to what

remains a surprisingly sparse international literature on comparative media policies.

His focus is on media policies in the United States and Britain over the period from

the late 1990s to the late 2000s. This period is largely coextensive with the ‘New

Labour’ administration of Tony Blair in Britain and George W. Bush’s Republican

administration in the U.S., although there is some referring back to the

Thatcher/Major era in Britain and the Clinton era in the U.S. The book is structured in

two parts, with the first providing a valuable guide to how to interpret media policies

and the dominant intellectual frames for analysis of overarching policy themes, and

the second part focusing more on policy specifics in areas such as media ownership,

media content, public broadcasting, digital broadcasting and international trade.

The first half of the book works very well, and provides a significant conceptual

advance in how to approach media policy. Freedman positions his approach as

innovative in three key respects. First, he proposes that media policy-making needs to

be seen as political, as it engages political leaders in questions surrounding the access

to both economic resources and the capacity to speak and be heard in the public

domain, it is shaped by questions of who gets to participate in such decision-making,

and it is rhetorically framed around operational decisions about what issues are

deemed to be significant, as the critics of pluralism have observed since the 1960s.

Second, Freedman seeks to understand the different layers of media policy,

differentiating between policy, governance and regulation, and drawing attention to

the complexities and specificities of media policy. In doing so, he seeks to

differentiate this approach from the policy science literature on the one hand, which

would bundle media policy in alongside all other areas of policy (economic,

environmental, welfare etc.), and on the other hand, he wants to avoid the impression

that it is simply the outcome of elite consensus between powerful media moguls and

political leaders, which the field is often reduced to in popular and academic criticism.

Finally, Freedman uses pluralism and neo-liberalism as organising frameworks that

allow media policy to be seen as having continuities both over time and across policy

domains. In doing so, he is seeking to position media policy analysis as something

other than simply a thick description of events that are not connected by any wider set

of intellectual and political influences, or simply differentiating media policies on the

basis of the political administration that pursued them (Conservative/Labour in

Britain, Republican/Democrat in the U.S.), or on the basis of the particularities of the

nation-state in which they were undertaken.

I would argue that the first half of The Politics of Media Policy is more successful in

achieving its goals than the second. Freedman’s broader claim is that the period from

the 1980s marked a meta-discursive shift from pluralism to neo-liberalism as the

dominant frame for media policy. For Freedman, as for other critical theorists he

cites, neo-liberalism can be understood in terms of the move away from Keynesian

economics with the policies of deregulation and global free trade, a political project

that sought to shift the role of the state away from regulation and redistribution

towards the active promotion of markets and competitive individualism, and an

ideological project that questioned all thinking about society as an organic whole

(‘There’s no such a thing as society’, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher), and focused

instead upon competition, entrepreneurship, individual responsibility and rational

economic calculation of personal gain. Having established neo-liberalism as the

political, economic and ideological leitmotif of our times, Freedman then seeks to

understand the neo-conservatism of the Bush administration and the ‘Third Way’

politics of the Blair government as variants on a global neo-liberal theme of

deregulation, privatization and marketization, where ‘neo-liberal pressures are a key

feature of today’s media environment that shape everything from the role of the state

to the character of the content produced’ (p. 47).

My reading of The Politics of Media Policy is that this approach generates

diminishing returns to Freedman over the course of this book. It works most

effectively in the chapter on media ownership, where the quite overt agenda of the

U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair Michael Powell to relax ownership

laws in ways that allow for further concentration in the hands of big players is

effectively aligned to Labour’s changes to media ownership laws in Britain through

the 2003 Communications Act that proved to be quite favourable to the interests of

Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB. It works less well in the chapter on media content policies,

primarily because of the reluctance to consider the politics of ‘decency’ as something

that cuts across the line between pluralism and neo-liberalism, particularly in the U.S.

where it is a rallying point for religious interests and moral conservatives in their

ongoing battle against libertarianism and social liberalism, and reflects an ideological

fault line that is not reducible to political-economic agendas.

Freedman’s attempt to identify underlying similarities between Britain and the U.S.

around neo-liberalism despite ostensible differences does not work at all in the

chapter on public broadcasting. Identifying ambivalence on the part of the Blair

government towards the BBC, and periodic skirmishes around the BBC’s treatment of

news issues such as the war in Iraq, does not equate to the overt politicization of the

Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the U.S. under Bush, and the continued

generosity of British government funding for the BBC in the 21st century – even if it

is less than some of its advocates (and, most likely, Freedman himself) would wish –

does not parallel the concerted push to de-fund the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)

in the U.S. that has been a recurring strategy of Republican administrations and

Congressional figures since the time of Ronald Reagan. Freedman does not deal with

the question of why the base political support for the BBC in Britain remains, and

why it is so miniscule in the U.S., which would go to the heart of questions as to why

– neo-liberalism notwithstanding – the media ecologies of the two countries, and the

assumptions about media policy and what it should or should not support – remain

profoundly different.

This points to a wider tension in The Politics of Media Policy, which is the recurring

tendency to see a diverse range of media policies in two quite different countries

through the single organising prism of neo-liberalism. At times this can take the form

of a neo-Althusserian ‘symptomatic reading’ of policy documents where they are read

in terms of what they didn’t say rather than what they did say, and how this reveals (at

least to the author) what they really meant, as seen in this analysis of the White Paper

on the future of the BBC:

The report is littered with references to flexibility, dynamism, innovation,

novelty, creativity, diversity, transparency, efficiency and competition. Perhaps

it is not possible to formulate media policy in the twenty-first century without

using those phrases but the regularity of their use leads to the impression that,

without the proposed reforms, the BBC (like all public institutions) is likely to

collapse into the opposite of these highly desirable states: stagnation, rigidity,

bureaucracy, uniformity and so on (p. 153).

I am reminded here of Cunningham’s (1992) observation of how the study of media

policy documents frequently disappoints the academic critic as they tend to be ‘ideas-

thick’ rather than ‘ideas-rich’. For those trained in critical reading practices and

analyzing issues in intellectual depth, policy documents can appear as overly ad hoc

generalized and superficial in their approach to questions such as, in this case, the

future of public service media. It is notable that, even though Freedman undertook

over forty interviews in developing this book with policy-makers, lobbyists, advisers

etc., their voice is largely muted in the final work, except insofar as their statements

support a conclusion reached independently by the author (e.g. on the influence of

Murdoch over Tony Blair (p. 12)), or as evidence of the naïveté of regulators about

the extent to which broader political considerations inform their everyday work (p. 2).

The wider problem with Freedman’s analysis rests with the use of the omnibus term

‘neo-liberalism’. It is the most used term in the book as indicated by the index, and

while Freedman occasionally demurs against ‘the tendency to treat neo-liberalism as

an undifferentiated “bogeyman” of contemporary capitalism’, all roads in The Politics

of Media Policy seem to point towards the implementation of some or other form of

neo-liberal policy. Even in cases where there are obvious differences between the

United States under George W. Bush and Britain under Tony Blair, such as the case

of public broadcasting discussed above, this is explained away in terms of ‘the

emergence of varieties of neo-liberalism … [where] states are experimenting with and

internalizing different aspects of the neo-liberal agenda, contributing to the emergence

of “diversity within convergence”’ (p. 223). Even when policies would appear to be

quite different, they are in fact quite the same, all explicable under the rubric of

variants of neo-liberalism!

As I write this review in October 2008, the U.S. government appears to have acquired

a stake in my personal credit card debt. I won’t go through the detail of this, except to

note that the U.S. Federal Reserve acquired a stake in Citigroup as a condition for

supporting its takeover of the failing Wachovia Bank, which makes U.S. taxpayers de

facto equity holder in Citigroup and, hence, in the credit card I acquired through a

quite different, non-U.S.-based financial institution. The wisdom of hindsight about

how the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis and its fallout on global financial markets

would shake deregulatory, minimal government ideas to their core is perhaps easy,

but warning signs that the world of the 2000s was being less and less shaped by neo-

liberal principles were everywhere, from ‘big government conservatism’ under the

Bush administration to the rise and rise of Chinese state-led capitalism.

The term has long been something of an awkward one to pin down, as it appears to

put thinkers as diverse as Milton Friedman, Robert Novak, Will Hutton and Anthony

Giddens in the same intellectual tent, and British think-tanks such as the Institute for

Public Policy Reform and DEMOS were largely saying the same things as the Adam

Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs. It blurs the significant

distinctions that have historically existed within liberal political philosophy and

thought. In the United States, the term ‘liberal’ has long been an epithet directed by

conservatives against the left, and refers as much to social liberalism and

libertarianism as it does to questions of economic policy. The term has also come to

be used in a highly mechanistic and reductionist way, so that neo-liberalism becomes

the dominant ideology of global capitalism. Like all variant of dominant ideology

theories, such assumptions tend to hold only if you either rule out or reinterpret any

evidence that would point to different conclusions. When applied to the policy

domain, such models direct us towards instrumentalist conceptions of the state where

policy is ultimately seen as the handmaiden of class power, and policy studies in

effect become redundant.

The Politics of Media Policy opens with a highly insightful analysis of how to do

media policy studies in original and significant ways. Unfortunately, by anchoring its

empirical analysis closely to a desire to expose the hidden machinations of neo-liberal

ideology, it loses focus the more that it moves out of the dominant terrain of political

economy in the study of media ownership. Des Freedman has pointed to important

new directions in media policy studies, but has unfortunately only got half way to

developing a new synthesis for understanding the relationship between policy

institutions and broader ideas.

References Cited

Cunningham, S. (1992) Framing Culture: Criticism and Policy in Australia. Sydney:

Allen & Unwin.

Terry Flew is Professor of Media and Communication in the Creative Industries

Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.