Where Has Media Policy Gone? Defining The Field In The Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In recent years, the number of laws and regulations dealing with information and information technologies has exploded. As a result, the boundaries of the field of media policy are increasingly difficult to discern. Problems raised by technologies, media practices, the nature of policy-making processes and the unique characteristics of media as a policy issue area confound the effort. A variety of approaches to defining the field exist in the literature, but, to be useful, a definition of the field of media policy must be valid, comprehensive, theoretically based, methodologically operationalizable and translatable into the terms of legacy law. This essay suggests that, broadly viewed, media policy is co-extant with the field of information policy, defined as all law and regulation dealing with an information production chain that includes information creation, processing, flows and use. More narrowly, media policy as a distinct subfield of information policy deals with those technologies, processes and content by which the public itself is mediated.