The Great Reckoning: Lessons from 1940's media policy battles

The early broadcast era and our current platform era bear some striking resemblances, but one parallel looms large: In the 1940s, we lost a key battle to build a potentially liberating and wondrous medium—and we are on the cusp of doing so again. Then as now, commercial operators defined the terms by which we could use our core communication and information infrastructures. Democratic oversight, public alternatives, and social responsibilities were kept to a minimum. Democratic societies must now fight to prevent this from happening again. This essay takes a closer look at some of the underlying democratic and economic theories that were taking shape 80 years ago and considers their contemporary implications. The US has tested whether the media that democracy requires can be solely delivered by a lightly regulated commercial media system. Today, the data are in, and we can see clearly where this experiment has led us. It has ended with pervasive right-wing propaganda, with little actual journalism, and with a system that is characterized by dis/misinformation and low-quality information in general. Drawing from earlier historical lessons, one potential path ahead is twofold: First, we must reclaim an affirmative understanding regarding government’s duty to ensure that our media infrastructures serve democracy. Second, we must endeavor to remove public goods like news and information from the market entirely and create public alternatives. Pairing these two arguments—one legal-democratic and one political-economic—can help provide the intellectual foundations for a progressive policy approach toward recovering our news and information systems from monopoly power and commercial capture. If we do not learn from the miscalculations of an earlier generation of reformers, we are condemned to repeat them.

[Victor Pickard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.]