Building on the international connections of “the most networked man in the world,” the new Center for Global Communication Studies is exploring the vast and tangled web of global media.
By Samuel Hughes and Katie Haegele | Illustration by Megan Berkheiser
Sidebar | Communications Scholars Cover the Globe
To understand some of the motivation behind Monroe Price’s urge to shape and improve global communications, consider his own introduction to the world:
He was still in his mother’s womb when Germany annexed Austria, his family’s homeland; a few days later, his father’s uncle—the editor of a Viennese newspaper known for its irreverence toward the officialdom of both nations—jumped to his death upon learning that the Nazis were coming for him. Just a few months after Price became “one of the last Jewish infants born in Vienna as it once had been,” as he puts it in his recent memoir, his father was arrested on Kristallnacht. Ten days and some ugly bruises later his father was released, and soon after that the young family managed to escape to the United States on a visa issued by the American consulate in Vienna.
Though Price came of age in a relatively stable America (his memoir is tentatively titled Refugee: Becoming American in the 1950s), he knew how quickly a government—indeed, the very ideaof government—can change. And as goes a government, so go its news media.
“A lot of my work is about the role of media in undergirding a democratic society, enacting a check on government, and reducing the potential for arbitrary governmental behavior,” Price says in a telephone interview punctuated by quick dashes to the computer to fetch documents that he can email his interviewer. In his 2004 book, Media and Sovereignty: The Global Information Revolution and Its Challenge to State Power, he spells it out in more detail: “New technologies, political upheavals, changed concepts of human rights—all these conspire to make this an important moment for rethinking and reformulating speech freedom and regulation in a global environment.” While the ability of any state to control images is “questioned everywhere,” he adds, “it would be naïve to see the world as a place where information moves without various forms of restriction.”
Today, as director of the new Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS) at the Annenberg School for Communication, Price is orchestrating scholarly examinations of media and their nervous dance with governments—and, in doing so, he is helping to position the school as a leading player in the global-communications arena.
“His work is among the best in the world on issues of how to develop policies that are likely to enhance the usefulness of media, especially in democracies,” says Dr. Michael Delli Carpini C’75 G’75, dean of the Annenberg School, who describes Price as “one of the leading scholars in global communications and new technology.”
Delli Carpini also refers to Price as “the most networked man in the world,” and he is not exaggerating by much. Price has been: founding director of the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research at City University in London (which he considers a kind of precursor to the CGCS), director of the Squadron Program in Law, Media and Society at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law (where he served as dean for nine years), co-director of the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at Oxford University, and co-chair of the Moscow Center for Media Law and Policy Studies. His CV is filled with myriad appointments at other institutions, as visiting professor, lecturer, fellow, special advisor, and the like.
The Annenberg School has been building on those networks to forge relationships with a number of universities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and think tanks around the world, including Communications University of China in Beijing and the Center for Communications and Media Studies at Central European University in Budapest—which Price, of course, chairs.
Closer to home, the CGCS has worked with several Penn schools and centers concerned with international and regional studies, including the Law School (where Price has a joint appointment as a lecturer), the Center for the Advanced Study of India, the Middle East Center, the South Asia Center, the Center for East Asian Studies, the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, and the cinema-studies program.
In a sense, the CGCS evolved from a nascent project and graduate-level course that Price came to lead at Delli Carpini’s invitation three years ago. Taking its title and some of its content from his just-published book, the Media and Sovereignty course surveyed the media climate in different parts of the world—from Mexico to China to the Middle East—in order to examine “media regulation across national boundaries.”
In addition, explains Delli Carpini, “Price already had a number of well-developed programs that we essentially imported and developed further at Annenberg.” Those programs took root under what was then the Project for Global Communication Studies.
This past November, thanks to a $10 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, the Project morphed into the Center. But the key word is still Global.
“It’s increasingly the case, with the Internet and changes in the economy and the politics of the world, that if you want to understand how media is structured and what its impact is, you can’t really look at that within nations anymore,” explains Delli Carpini. “Everything we do in our daily lives in the U.S. has some reverberation internationally. And things that happen internationally have reverberations in the U.S.”
Consider some of the center’s programs and initiatives, many of which can be found on the CGCS website (www.cgcs.asc.upenn.edu), and all of which indicate a broad reach in geography and subject matter:
• “Beyond Media Censorship: Speech and State in the Middle East,” a recent workshop designed to stimulate discussion and research and eventually produce a book about how the state interacts with various forms of popular culture in the region, including songs, sermons, blogs, cartoons, and posters.
• A proposal for a two-year “China Media Initiative,” in partnership with the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), to “foster media reform in China.” The CGCS is also partnering with IREX on a USAID-funded media-development program in Jordan.
• “Repositioning Public Service Broad-casting,” a conference that will examine how a recent charter review of the BBC addressed challenges to the existing practice of public broadcasting.
• “Re: Activism,” a conference on the “fate of activism in the digital age,” held in Budapest in October 2005.
• Two conferences on media-related issues surrounding the upcoming 2008 Olympics in China: “Global Olympiad, Chinese Media,” held last summer at Communications University of China in Beijing; and a follow-up, “Image, Identity, Technology: Towards the Beijing Olympics of 2008,” this past fall on campus. A related book is planned for sometime this year.
• A two-week summer institute on global media policy, in conjunction with the Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy at Oxford, for aspiring students and others considering a career in communications media.
Susan Abbott, the CGCS’s senior research coordinator, met Price in 2005 at the first Annenberg-Oxford Summer Institute, and has been working with him ever since, first at the Stanhope Centre and now at the CGCS.
“There were 30 students from 22 different countries there for two weeks, every day from 8 a.m. to the wee hours of the morning, talking,” she recalls. “By seeing what people are up against you get a very intimate picture of a media environment in another country.”
Such gatherings also help foster the translation of academic insight into real-world practice. “As intellectuals you have to be able to talk about your craft to people who are going to be able to use it for policy,” Abbott says. “Because of Monroe’s law background, as well as his vast experience in forming intellectual networks, CGCS conferences always have people from civil society, NGO reps, intellectuals, policymakers, and people from other disciplines. It’s important for academics to know these people.”
“We want to bring the world to Annenberg,” says Price, “and Annenberg to the world.”
It’s not always easy for outsiders to get their minds around the CGCS, which describes itself as a “partnership for faculty and graduate-student research and outreach on issues of media development, national identities, and globalization.” That may have something to do with the multifarious career and interests of its director.
His first professional love was journalism, and it still tugs at him. “I often think that I’m a journalist manqué,” he says wryly.
Back in 1959, Price—“full of intensity” as a young writer at the Yale Daily News—had a notion that the Cuban Revolution could be his ticket to a journalistic career. Observing that college students in particular were “threatening to stay away in droves” from Cuba, he convinced a Yale alumnus and National Airlines stockholder “that a series of articles by me in the Yale Daily and in Ivy Magazine might do wonders for student ardor to visit Cuba despite the events there.”
That trip put him in a “context of professional journalists who are trying to define or communicate a large story, when there was really doubt, or a concern, about the direction” that story was going, he recalls. “Among other things, I learned the importance of professional journalists inflating a story that affects people’s future in the United States and elsewhere. It was a time where active journalism could have helped to develop public attitudes at critical moments towards Castro and the regime.”
After he pulled off a similar trip to Soviet Russia, he writes, he came away feeling “triumphant” at his success, “yet slightly and happily fraudulent.” (Price is engagingly open in his memoir about the satisfaction he sometimes takes in manipulating institutions for a desired, beneficent end. In his youth he identified with Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, the Confidence Man, and later came to see himself “more in the tradition of the faith healer,” explaining: “I wanted to orchestrate perceptions, use the leverage of cumulated efforts of others to reach some concerted goal.”)
The following year, he wrote a column for the Yale Alumni Magazine about life in New Haven that led to a job with American Heritage Magazine, which represented an “interesting halfway point” between newspaper journalism and graduate school. Yet shortly after he signed on, he switched gears and ended up at Yale Law School. Why?
“I think I just did it to avoid going into the army,” he says. “I actually really wanted to be a journalist, and I was working for American Heritage Magazine, but it looked as if I was going to be drafted, so I went to law school. In some ways I regret it. I would have loved to be a journalist, and a lot of what I did in law school was a result of my interest in the role of journalists in society.”
As a law student, “I still looked at the world through an aspiring journalist’s eye,” he recounts in his memoir. “I read law, statutes, and cases the way a journalist might see ‘facts,’ less as a statement of immutable principles, and more as a set of representations.”
After law school—where he became executive editor of the Yale Law Journal—Price clerked for Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart. By then he had already begun to learn about the Native American experience. He was captivated by the stories of dislocation and dispossession, including the 1830s legal battle surrounding the forced removal of the Cherokee nation from its home in Georgia to Oklahoma, a journey known as the “Cherokee Trail of Tears.” The struggles of the Cherokee and other American Indians to be a viable political presence and to maintain an ethnic identity in the face of oppression struck a chord.
“It was hardly a stretch … to see in the group and individual stories of these groups echoes of … those in various parts of the Jewish and refugee world,” he writes in his memoir. He would go on to advocate for the legal rights of different American Indian groups, eventually becoming deputy director of California Indian Legal Services and helping to found the Native American Rights Fund. (Ultimately, in a “kind of enormous legal joke,” his approach “led to the extraordinary right of Indian tribes to engage in gaming, establishing casinos throughout the country.”)
“I saw law—or the application of law—as a kind of theater, a theater that could be tweaked and changed,” he writes. “Somewhere in the mix of causation was this idea that law could be upended, made to frolic, allowed to turn disaster into an unforeseen opportunity. Somewhere, in the contribution I made to the sequence of events, was the acceptance of the absurd as a potential mode of solving problems.”
After serving as a professor at UCLA Law School from 1967 until 1982—roughly coinciding with his advocacy for Native American causes—Price was named dean of the Cardozo School of Law, a position he held until 1991. In his memoir he compares the philosophies of two Viennese Jewish philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper.
“Wittgenstein famously said that the purpose of philosophy is ‘to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle,’” he writes. That phrase “stunned” Price, not just for its “trademark anti-essentialism” but because it presaged the constrictive horror of Vienna in the late 1930s. “Rather than trying to find out what the law ‘is’ or ‘should be,’ I saw law as something closer to what Wittgenstein called a function of altering the grammar of the everyday,” Price notes. For Wittgenstein, “The rules of the language game were not determined by the nature of the world, but by interactions among people. ‘Truth’ is not some sort of external reality, not a set of intrinsically correct statements, but is constructed by the coming together of a complex set of factors.”
Yet he also sympathized with the “positivist” approach of Popper, whose worldview allowed that “lawyers could work with the actual rules and try to improve them to make a specific positive social difference in terms of human freedoms.”
Given what happened to his family and the Jews of Vienna, where “the meaning and protection under existing law was fundamentally altered,” Price concluded: “I find a Viennese solution to the problem I’ve posed for myself: work for Popper-like outcomes but with a Wittgensteinian skepticism in the fundamental nature of law’s dominion. I conduct myself as if law should be taken seriously, but in my bones, I have my doubts.”
Even as he worked in the law, Price was deeply immersed in the media. His books range from Cable Television: A Guide for Citizen Action (1972—really) to Television, Public Sphere and National Identity (1995) to The Academy and the Internet (2004), and his many articles include “The First Amendment and Television Broadcasting by Satellites” (UCLA Law Review, 1976) and “Law, Force and the Russian Media” (Cardozo Arts & Entertainment, 1995).
Over the years he has worked with scholars, governments, and civil-service groups to better understand the complicated matrix of media, law, politics, and economics—and the way those forces have affected regular people throughout the world.
Sometimes those forces converge violently, and Price has been particularly interested in how the media are affected in such times.
“One of the areas that I’ve explored and other people have been exploring is how to define relationships between speech and conflict,” he says. Of particular interest is the “overarching importance of an American model of the First Amendment dedication to speech, which is wholly important and significant. It’s interesting to figure out a context in which the principle is bumped up against limits, such as times of fear and times of conflict. These pose tremendous problems, actual and theoretical, in terms of working out media laws and policies, and the issue of how societies think about media in terms of increasing stability.
“Solving really detailed problems of conflict within a highly divided society is important,” he adds. “This is true in Iraq; it was true in Bosnia; it was true in Kosovo, in many of the post-conflict situations. So we’ve tried to help contribute to a literature that deals with these questions of how to think about the press in areas of intense conflict.”
The narrative of media policy-making [in Iraq] concerns ideas of “freedom of the media” and realization of “rights” in the midst of bitter, tough, angry combat. As a result, the story concerns that most important of issues, the relationship of words on the page and law in practice. The account of media policy in Iraq is about humans and their capabilities in an environment where the mere statement of law does not mean its absorption into reality.
—From “Iraq and the Making of State Media Policy,” by Monroe Price.
This fragmentation along sectarian, ethnic, and ideological lines is not problematic in and of itself; indeed, it could be seen to reflect the pluralism viewed as desirable in most media landscapes. It is clear, however, that Iraq’s politicians and sectarian groups continue to view the media as a tactical tool, one duty-bound to support the government or the parties or groups that sponsor them. Sectarian divisions are potentially worrisome in a society with increased incidence of violence along ethnic and religious lines, and Iraq seems to be heading down this road more swiftly every day.
—From “Republic of Iraq Communications and Media Commission [CMC] Policy Recommendations Concerning Broadcasting in Iraq,” January 2007.
Before the invasion of Iraq, Price made some notes and recommendations for its future media landscape, which included some hopeful-sounding headings like “Plan for post-regime stability.” Today, he notes somberly, “Iraq represents a pathology of media intervention, and, as with any pathology, its study helps in dealing with more healthy organisms.”
A fascinating examination of that pathology appears in a paper by Ibrahim Al-Marashi, a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School last year. Titled “The Dynamics of Iraq’s Media: Ethno-Sectarian Violence, Political Islam, Public Advocacy, and Globalization,” it shows the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of the media situation there.
The good can be found in TV programs like The Iraqi Podium(which includes a “live call-in segment where viewers can direct questions about political affairs” to journalists, academics, and other guests) and Materials and Labor, a “reality-TV-type show where the station finances the repair of homes destroyed due to the violence.”
The bad might include the early broadcasts of Al-Zawra, a “satellite entertainment channel that also served as a mouthpiece for the Iraqi politician Mish’an al-Juburi during his parliamentary bid during the December 2005 elections.”
The truly ugly would be Al-Zawra after Mish’an’s expulsion from the Iraqi National Assembly—whereupon it “evolved into a platform for insurgents.” (The channel’s slogans include “Al-Zawra, The Voice of the Excluded and Marginalized.”)
Even after the Iraqi government closed it down, Al-Zawra was “able to circumvent the closure through its use of transnational satellites, and it is unclear where its operations are now centered”; its content has become “increasingly incendiary.”
The CMC’s report, presented to the International Conference on Freedom of Expression and Media Development in Iraq this past January, contains a detailed list of policy recommendations covering virtually every aspect of media laws and operations, including ownership, licensing, regulation, and technology. It also paints a stark picture of how badly things can go wrong: “Just recently, gunmen invaded the office of Al Shabbiya and killed 11 of its staff, including its founder, on the eve of its commencement of programming … Violence is its own form of regulation, and, in a context like Iraq, who constitutes the ‘regulator’ in this sense, and what [is the regulator’s] relationship to official and semi-official figures is murky at best.” And yet, it concludes, “even in the midst of instability, the search for the stable proceeds. Institutions, with mandates, exist.” And the emergence of a professional and independent media is “a prerequisite for the advance toward a stable democracy in Iraq.” Which is one reason that the CGCS partnered with Internews, an international NGO that supports independent media in emerging democracies, to produce a training video to help Iraqi journalists report on their nation’s elections.
While making policy recommendations is a major goal of the CGCS, both Price and Delli Carpini are quick to point out that there is no one model that should be followed in all cases.
“If there’s an underlying normative goal that drives our work, it’s that communications and media are central to the ability of a nation to operate in a democratic fashion,” says Delli Carpini. “We unabashedly say that is something that is important and good. After that, we don’t pretend we have some exclusive understanding of how to create a media environment that will encourage democratic practice and citizenry. The system will always vary in what it looks like from nation to nation.”
A 2005 report, “Media in Crisis States”—produced, with the support of the CGCS, by the Crisis States Programme at the London School of Economics (with the participation of academics, journalists, and policy-makers from Europe, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and North and South America)—shows the complexity of the issues. The report concluded that in some countries that are rebuilding after a war, a completely free and independent media can destabilize the situation and do more harm than good. In these fragile states, the formation of a functioning legal and judicial system, which can apply checks and balances to media, must come first. That conclusion, Price notes, “remains controversial and the findings were not unanimously applauded.”
A chilling example of the damage the wrong kind of media climate can unleash is Rwanda.
“The starting point for every public official in Rwanda is the role of the newspaper Kangura and the radio station RTLM’s role in inciting the 1994 genocide, and the need for regulation of the media to ensure that press outlets could never be used in such a way again,” states a draft of a CGCS paper titled “The State of the Media in Rwanda.” “The balance between freedom of expression and the experience of the recent past is a delicate one. As one Minister said, ‘The media destroyed this country.’”
“Rwanda’s history presents some unique challenges for our projects,” noted Enrique Armijo, a media-law attorney at the Washington firm of Covington and Burling (which is working with the CGCS on Rwanda), in an email to the CGCS’s Susan Abbott. “Every public official began our meeting with a discussion of the media’s role in inciting the genocide, and gave that as a rationale for content regulation. They have come a long way; there are 25 newspapers and 10 private radio stations, some of which express criticism of the government. But there is still some progress to be made, especially for the private media …”
Given that some Rwandan journalists have received anonymous threatening phone calls and been the targets of surveillance, and that one managing editor was beaten into a coma, it’s not surprising that self-censorship is the order of the day there. Armijo is in touch with the U.S. Embassy to see whether top Rwandan officials will speak out against the intimidation of private-media journalists.
“The challenge for Rwanda is to ensure that the prohibitions on content that are put in place to protect the country from repeating its history do not inhibit the press from performing its essential role in the democratic process,” notes the CGCS paper. “Not all criticism of the government undermines the morale of the country, and not every anti-government opinion is divisionism. In fact, an environment that encourages criticism, debate, and independent viewpoints will only lead to a stronger Rwanda.”
If all these examples seem far away and of questionable relevance for Americans, recent events have made it clear how deeply intertwined our lives are with the outside world.
“If we don’t care about political systems in other countries, what will happen?” Susan Abbott says. “That’s the why of all this. Why do people pursue careers in foreign service? Why do people do the kind of research we’re doing? To find peaceful ways of conflict resolution. This really is the future of education.”
SIDEBAR
Communications Scholars Cover the Globe
Among the Center for Global Communication Studies’ many links to like-minded institutions around the world (see main story above) is Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, where Monroe Price and the CGCS helped create the Center for Media and Communications Studies. A number of CGCS students are doing research there, including journalist and Annenberg Ph.D. candidate Susan Haas. For her research on Radio Free Europe, she is making use of CEU’s unique Open Society Archives (OSA), a trove of information on the Cold War and life in the post-communist era. (The OSA’s 1956 Digital Archive, for example, contains international media coverage of the Hungarian revolution and interviews with Hungarian refugees, as well as declassified briefings and weekly summaries by the CIA.)
“When I got to the archive it was summer and they weren’t open, but because I was with Annenberg I was allowed in,” Haas recalls. “They brought me 37 boxes of files. CGCS opens doors.” In return, two CEU doctoral students came to Philadelphia in 2005 and helped organize the “Re: Activism” conference in Budapest that fall.
Antonio Lambino III, a second-year Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School, is a former Fulbright scholar who once worked as a news anchor in his native Philippines. Lambino later joined the government to work on his country’s development efforts, traveling with international partners to the poorest villages to talk to people and figure out how to improve their lives. After earning his Ph.D., he wants to take what he has learned back home, and use policy to give people some control over their own lives.
The opportunity to study with Price was a major factor in Lambino’s decision to come to Annenberg, and he refers to Price as “an excellent example of a public intellectual—someone who uses their academic training to effect change.” Having attended the Global Media Policy Institute at Oxford, where Susan Abbott, now the CGCS’s senior research coordinator, also met Price, Lambino describes the experience as “intense.”
“To increase global awareness is not as simple as putting people from other countries in the same room,” says Lambino, “but that’s part of it.”
In October 2005, Abbott and Lambino participated in the Global Forum for Media Development conference in Amman, Jordan, which brought hundreds of media professionals together to discuss involvement in developing nations.
“Face to face, [the CGCS] allows people to share interests and experiences and fall in love with a different part of the world,” says Lambino. “On an institutional level, it ensures that these experiences are sustainable, and increases the chance that you’ll make a dent.”
Briar Smith, a second-year Ph.D. candidate at Annenberg, participated in an international workshop on China’s hosting of the Olympics, sponsored by Communications University of China in Beijing and the CGCS. While the games don’t begin until 2008, there’s plenty to talk about already—China has been creating its accompanying media message for years.
“Comparative studies are useful to understand this,” says Smith, who notes that, among earlier Olympics hosts, Barcelona ran a “tight image campaign,” while “Atlanta was poorly run, image-wise” and Athens “didn’t open a communications office until two months before the Olympics.”
China opened its communications office in 2001, and the Olympic mascots chosen by the Chinese government are loaded with symbolic meaning, Smith points out. One is a Tibetan antelope—a very controversial choice, she says, since in the wake of the Chinese invasion, Chinese soldiers depleted the real antelopes that used to live in the Tibetan mountains.
She also learned a lot from Chinese scholars.
“One of the things the center has been good at balancing is to not go into things thinking we have all the answers,” says Annenberg Dean Michael Delli Carpini. “We think we have something to share with scholars and practitioners around the world, but we also always enter that conversation realizing we’re going to learn things as well.”
“The difference with real-world solutions versus academic research is that it’s sped-up,” says Price. “Scholarly work takes longer. But in dealing with reality, you need immediate answers.” —K.H.