The House of Lords Communications Committee set up an inquiry on BBC funding earlier this year. This is a summary of the MRC submission which you can read in full here. The future broadcasting landscape is likely to see a continuation of the trends of the past decade, which together pose major challenges for the media and communications ecology as a whole. However, … [Read more...]
Manifesto for a People’s Media
The 2020s are set to be a decade of huge challenges, and much of the UK's media is unable to support the transformations we need. We urgently need media which is owned by us, accountable to us, where we all get to play a part in creating it: we need to build a media commons. What this could mean is explored in our Manifesto for a People's Media, published as part of the MRC's … [Read more...]
Facebook v Australia: Murdoch wins
by Benedetta Brevini The day after Facebook, the Digital Lord, banned Australian news from its platform, the world is still watching. Of course, it’s watching. After two decades of absence of regulation, the Digital Lords of the Western world such as Google and Facebook are finally under pressure. The fight did not start in Australia and it is already global: from the United … [Read more...]
Media Democracy Festival 2022 #MDF22
#MDF22 The Media Democracy Festival is back! We’re thrilled to announce that 2022’s week-long celebration of progressive media voices will go ahead with a number of international online events from Monday 21st - 25th March, followed by an in-person event on Saturday 26th March at Birkbeck, University of London. Scroll to see both schedules 👇👇👇 Register for your FREE ticket … [Read more...]
A Secret Australia: Why Julian Assange’s own country ignored him and WikiLeaks’ exposés
by Benedetta Brevini As a journalist, scholar and media reformer, I have been following the activities of WikiLeaks for over a decade, assessing the disrupting force of new radical platforms for disclosure. WikiLeaks is a crucial example of a digital platform that exposes the contradictions of the internet as a tool for openness and secrecy, freedom and surveillance, free … [Read more...]
MRC submission to ‘Future of Public Service Broadcasting’ inquiry
Immediately after the outbreak of the pandemic, the Culture Select Committee launched an inquiry into the funding, regulation and remit of public service broadcasting. Given recent attacks on the BBC in particular by senior members of the government, including the prime minister, MRC believes it is vital both to defend the principle of public media but also to emphasise, once … [Read more...]
Public interest solutions to data abuses
by Angela Phillips and Eleonora Mazzoli This is the first of our posts for 2020 in which Prof Angela Phillips and Eleonora Mazzoli reflect on some potential solutions - including constraints on micro targeting and the development of a public service search engine - to abuses of individual users' data. It was originally published on the Media@LSE blog and is reproduced with … [Read more...]