ABSTRACT
Media have always presented a special challenge to policymakers. As commercial enterprises, they raise the usual economic policy concerns regarding the efficiency with which they respond to consumer demands. At the same time, the media are conduits for the debate and exchange of viewpoints on public issues that are vital to the functioning of a democratic society. They are also intimately bound up in the creation of cultural products and the dissemination of cultural values. Ideally, all of these concerns would be addressed in the design of media policy, but there are unavoidable trade-offs among goals and how that might best be accomplished is by no means obvious.
