Reboot: An Open Letter to the FCC About a Media Policy for the Digital Age
Columbia Journalism Review, Nov./Dec. 2010
Poynter’s Rick Edmonds recommends the “excellent (albeit long) piece by Steve Coll in CJR about modernizing FCC media policies.”
In his letter to the FCC’s Steven Waldman, Coll writes that “….we badly require new policies and new thinking in Washington because the media policy regime we have inherited is out of date and inadequate for the times in which we live.
….The problem is that the media policies that govern us in 2010 — a patchwork stitched from the ideas of Calvin Coolidge’s Republican Party, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory wave — have been overtaken by technological change.
From the country’s founding, American media and journalism have been continually remade by technological innovation. Political pamphlets made room for industrially printed newspapers, which made room for the telegraph, which made room for radio, which made room for broadcast television, which made room for cable and satellite services, which made room for the World Wide Web, which is making room even as we read this for the Kindle, iPad, and mobile phone applications.
When such technological, industrial, and economic changes dislodge the assumptions underlying public policy, the smart response is to update and adjust policy in order to protect the public interest. And politically plausible reforms that would clearly serve the public are within reach. It is time to reboot the system.”
(Related: Keep the Public In Public Broadcasting, NPR’s “On The Media.” Nov. 5, 2010, Audio)
