ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at what media policy is, how to study it "critically," and how these analyses can enliven the understanding of media and society. Media policy is the formal and informal rules and regulations that shape or influence the production, distribution, and consumption of media. To study media policy critically is to analyze those same processes not on their own terms but as specialized microcosms of culture and society. A technological approach focuses on how media devices work, whereby "the best policy" is seen as emerging organically and neutrally from a rational consideration of the properties of the technologies themselves. Another common traditional approach to policy studies, at least in democratic societies, emphasizes the operations of liberal pluralism, the idea that the "best" policy emerges from the fair and legitimate processes of democratic self-governance. Interpretative policy analysis is a move among social-science policy scholars to introduce qualitative research into policy analyses.
