Price, Monroe
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Publication Toward an Understanding of Media Policy and Media Systems in Iraq: A Foreword and Two Reports(2007-05-01) Price, Monroe; Griffin, Douglas; Al-Marashi, IbrahimIn the avalanche of analyses about what went wrong in Iraq, one area should be of particular interest to communications scholars: the development of a media system in Iraq. The emerging media system incorporates many significant strands: the conflict-related and post-conflict actions concerning media policy, the considerable growth of faction-related and entrepreneurial broadcasters after the conflict, the efforts by interests in the region (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and others) to affect the media environment, interventions by the United States and other Western countries, and their complex and often inept media-related reconstruction initiatives, the effort of non-government organizations (NGOs) to repeat or adopt practices from other conflict zones. There's a tendency in the communications studies literature to be concerned with particular U.S.-centric frames of discussion: access by Western journalists to information, depiction of the United States on Al-Jazeera and other satellite broadcasters, the combination of media and Islam as a mode of altering general public attitudes. I focus here — as an introduction to the two accompanying papers — on the emerging structure of media or media influences domestically in Iraq to understand the influence of the successor to Saddam's state television, the relationship between external state-sponsored influences, and pluralism within, and what consequence "media policy" or subsidy and private or party patronage has had on media institutions there. Finally, it will become increasingly important to understand the relationship between these media institutions and the actuality of continuing conflict and search for political solutions within Iraq. This "Occasional Paper" includes two reports. The first is a paper written by Ibrahim Al-Marashi, one of the few scholars systematically tracking media developments within Iraq. Dr. Al-Marashi was a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and has, for the last year, been an Open Society Institute (OSI) Policy Scholar at the Center for Policy Studies at Central European University in Budapest. He has recently joined the faculty at Koç University in Istanbul. The second was commissioned by the Republic of Iraq Communications and Media Commission (CMC), the agency established first under the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) then maintained by the Iraqi governing authorities, and presented at a conference at UNESCO in January 2007. The report is the result of a contract between the CMC and the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research in London.Publication New Role of the State(2002-01-01) Price, MonroePublication Free Expression and Digital Dreams: The Open and Closed Terrain of Speech(1995-09-01) Price, MonroeEach new communications technology (theater, print, telegraph, telephone, radio) presents the possibility of altering the infrastructure of discourse. As it is absorbed, implemented, and developed, each technology plays out and reshapes ideas of community. Societies, as Karl Deutsch wrote, reveal themselves and can be differentiated through the distinctive webs of social intercourse that are the consequence of particular domestications, adaptations, or responses to innovations in modes of communicating. Because the current and massive redesign in the communications infrastructure - digital dreams of an electronic highway - will yield basic changes in social structure, governments are destined to try to affect the pace and direction of transformation. We are at an early stage, but government responses already seem chaotic, fitful, and undertheorized, more the product of the interaction among pressure groups than of some coherent notion of the role of free speech in society.Publication Moving the Needle, Filling the Streets(2014-01-01) Price, MonroePublication The Enabling Environment for Free and Independent Media(2006-01-01) Price, MonroeThis volume seeks to show why media matters. But understanding why media matters depends on the mode of operation of the press and the particular context in which the media exist. Shaping an effective democratic society requires many steps. The formation of media law and media institutions is one of the most important. Laws are frequently looked at in isolation and as interchangeable parts that are separately advanced for the creation of effective and democracy-promoting media. They are also often analyzed and discussed with attention paid merely to their wording. However, each society has a cluster of activities, interactions of laws and the setting in which they exist, that make those laws more or less effective. Different states, at different stages of development, require different strategies for thinking about the role of media and, as a result, for thinking about the design and structure of the environment in which they operate. Media can only matter – we would argue – in an environment (an "enabling environment") that allows for a vigorous, demanding and informative press. It is significant, then, to identify components of the complex legal process that enables media to advance democratic goals.Publication Tax Exemption of Native Lands Under Section 21(d) of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act(1976) Price, Monroe; Purtich, Richard R; Gerber, D.Publication Resuscitating a Collaboration With Melville Nimmer: Moral Rights and Beyond(1998) Price, MonroeThere are ways in which law is a set of illusions, and legal scholarship is about things which are said to happen, rather than really occur; where law is the expression of hope and passion rather than the embodiment of practical relationships. I have long thought that the area of intellectual property called "moral rights" or droit moral had these qualities of elegant fiction. Moral rights, in this special sense of art and literature, have to do with the personal and continuing involvement of the author or painter in a work of art, even after property owner shifts. Moral rights have to do, in their most dramatic manifestations, with physical changes in works of art - violence, deprecations, even the dissipation in integrity that inevitably comes with the passage of time. Moral rights are or can be violated when an artist's name is associated with a work that is not truly his or hers or when the work is represented as being the creation of another. Closely related are the issues that arise when a work is scarred or defaced, when it is reshaped or even placed in a hostile and unfriendly environment.Publication Satellite Broadcasting as Trade Routes in the Sky(2002-01-01) Price, MonroeThe metaphor of trade routes - used from time to time to think about the distribution of ideas and imagery - ought to nourish our conception of transnational paths of delivery of electronic communications. Our minds are full of Rupert Murdoch and Disney, CNN and the BBC as traders in information, great shippers of data, distributors of sitcoms and news and advertisements. In the common reading of the world of electronic signals, the media is considered "global," and the general impression is of a constant and ever-present net that can deposit information everywhere, disregarding boundaries. Our common and most recent experiences with the Internet seem, at first blush, to confirm and underscore a belief that data careers around the world from server to server, in patterns that seem virtually impervious to purposive planning or political and legal intervention (Volokh, 1995). Sender and receiver are linked in ways that appear indifferent to the route or mode by which they are connected. The obsolescence of boundaries is reinforced. So, too, has been the effect of the seamlessness of telephony in the developed world, obliterating distance and time. In telephony, transmission pathways seem invisible, or at least irrelevant, to the substantive decisions of most users. Although users are almost never conscious of it, all these modes of communication (postal service, telegrams and telephones) required the construction of international systems of regulation. Assurance of adherence to worldwide standards was a condition for their instantaneous nature and compatibility. The predominance of the West in terms of development and control of access to technology dictated the change in structure of international communication, putting pressure on non-Western members to Westernize, in order to comply with the prevailing system's bureaucratic rules.Publication Ownership in Russia(1996) Price, Monroe; Krug, PeterThe broad strokes of Russian media ownership policy are relatively easy to identify: a commitment, expressed in statutory form, to mass media pluralism, marked by both state and private ownership. Beyond that however, the lines become blurred, as policy formulation becomes subject to competing demands. State domination and control gives way, but not without complex relationships to the past. In this chapter, we examine the process of change by attempting to identify the key elements of this hybrid system, focusing on several aspects of transformation, each of which, in some way, is connected to ownership. We shall first place these matters in historical context, and then describe the framework within which key decisions are made: the sources of law and policy.Publication Comparative Analysis of International Co- And Self-Regulation in Communications Markets(2007-09-01) Latzer, Michael; Price, Monroe; Saurwein, Florian; Verhulst, Stefaan; Hollnbuchner, Katharina; Rance, LauraGlobalisation, liberalisation and convergence of communication markets have triggered intensive debates about the options for regulatory reform, including the growing role of alternative modes of regulation (self-regulation, co-regulation). These alternatives or supplements to traditional statutory regulation are marked by the involvement of nongovernmental actors in regulatory processes. Both industry and policy makers consider alternative regulation to have great potential for solving problems in communication markets. Regulators are increasingly required to assess the potential and limitations of alternative regulatory institutions to inform or improve regulatory systems. As part of this, they are examining how existing alternative regulatory schemes work and what improvements can be made to them. Regulatory authorities are seeking to identify best practice in other countries in relation to self- and co-regulation and regulatory innovation. Empirical evaluations are intended to contribute to a better understanding of alternative modes of regulation and increase the knowledge base for decisions on whether various types of co- and self-regulatory solutions might be preferable to full statutory regulation. This report is intended to contribute to the regulator’s assessment- and regulatory choice-efforts. It examines whether and how success and failure of selected self- and co-regulatory schemes can be explained by their respective institutional design, by characteristics of the industries involved and by the established regulatory environment. In other words, the performance of selected self- and co-regulatory schemes is examined comparatively and it is investigated as to whether and how performance differences can be explained by differences in the organisational design of the alternative regulatory institutions (institutional/organisational success factors) and by differences regarding their particular industrial and regulatory environments (enabling contextual factors).