Abstract
Christopher Ali’s Media Localism: The Policies of Place offers an almost forensic account of how the local is put to use by policy-makers and policy-shapers to serve the financial interests of large, often global, media corporations rather than the needs of communities. He examines policy contexts in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom and takes a critical political economy perspective to offer a narrative that charts the retreat from the public-service orientation of local media as a public good. The picture is of course complicated by the advent of the digital, where communities are as likely to connect globally on shared concerns, as much as they are interested in issues within their local area. But on the whole, the book shows how policy-makers continually bow to the influence of media corporations whose profit margins are sustained by a regulatory framework that allows for a thinning out of local news provision, thus, making it more difficult for citizens to hold local power to account.
Ali begins, as one might expect, with problematising the notion of the local. As much as it is a place-bound concept, it is also weighed down with symbolism and is inevitably contradictory in nature. Ali notes how the local has become an empty signifier ‘as a result of monopoly capitalism’ (p. 49) and, therefore, sets out to ‘clarify the tangled mess that is the current discourse of localism in media regulation and policy’ (p. 5). The theoretical key to unlock a more productive policy discourse, Ali argues, is to utilise a framework of critical regionalism (drawing on ideas from critical architecture), which has the potential to de-mythologise the local and recognise culture, identity and language, as much as it might be attentive to the spatial.
In the substantive part of the book, he devotes four chapters to a critical discourse analysis of policy documents which includes associated material, such as governmental committee reports, white papers, policy consultation responses and so on. He also draws on a number of interviews with commentators and policy-actors, although these act to fill gaps in the narrative as much as anything. His focus is on local television, although the ways in which regulatory regimes variously allow, or do not allow, for cross-media ownership means that local television policy-making is also discussed in the context of newspaper and radio operations. Community media (often subsidised or volunteer-led) is also seen as playing a role in media ecologies comprising mixed sustainability models. Emerging forms, such as hyperlocal news, are cited as ways in which, ‘local television has been displaced by the emergence of the digital’ (p. 183).
It is the detail in Ali’s analysis that is impressive. There is much value in it as just a history of media policy-making at the beginning of the 21st century, as Ali looks at key moments in regulatory processes in each of the territories he covers. By way of example, in the sections that cover the UK system, he gives an impressive account of Ofcom’s plethora of reports on local media and public-service broadcasting and from them offers us a clear sense of the disconnect between the regulator’s advice (local television needs rethinking in public-service terms for the digital age) and the government’s subsequent actions (let the market run local TV stations how they want). That story is often repeated in Canada and the United States; in each case, regulators come across as slightly toothless in the face of media companies looking to be freed from regulatory constraints or requirements in the face of the market failure of local news.
Ali leads us to a final part of the book where he attempts to offer a way in which to untangle the discursive mess that the local finds itself in. Rather than see local news as a public good that has become a market failure, he argues instead that the notion of merit good (p. 190) is a more useful way to articulate the case for local media in policy discussions. Merit goods are those things that are good for us but which we tend not to realise that we need: ‘socially desirable, possessing of positive externalities, and contains values not presently recognized by the consumer’ (p. 194). Ali is thus arguing for media reform and for the debate about such reform to step back from the neoliberal discourse that has left us with a depleted local media landscape. Starting with the notion that local media is a merit good, he contends, means that the debate will start to shift to recognise that our communication rights are not there to be bought and sold at the behest of the market.