Media Policy
Start Date : 21st October 2019
For this week’s reading, we had to read Media Policy by Bill Kirkpatrick.
Media policy is the rules and regulations that are set and enforced by ‘the state, media industries and citizens’ over ‘the production, distribution and consumption of media’.
The reading describes three methods of analysis used when analysing media policy. These three methods are the Liberal Pluralist Approach, the Technological Approach, and the less traditional approach Interpretative Policy Analysis. These methods of media policy analysis can be used to analyse how and why states and the media industries decide to enforce regulations on their media, as well as the effects it has on the citizens.
Since completing the reading I have been working on media policy in a separate assignment, more specifically looking at media policy and minority voices in the media. For this task, I decided to research more into China’s censorship over the media to its citizens. In China, the government decides what material they want their citizens to be interacting with, for example, social media apps such as Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram are all blocked in China and instead there are similar social media sites that have been created specifically for Chinese citizens. Doing this research made me realise how big of an effect media policy can have on people’s freedom and their voices, and how it has the power to make a country a minority voice.
References –
Kirkpatrick,B. (2018) ‘Media Policy’ in The Craft of Criticism. Ed.by Kackman, M., Celeste Kearney,M. New York: Routledge, 314- 339
Weiguang, W. (2017) ‘The Rationale of China’s Media Regulation Policy in the process of the Institutional Transformation’. Notre Dame Journal of International and Comparative Law 7(1), 64-113
