This article examines the representation of racial and ethnic minorities in contemporary U.S. broadband policy, an emerging area of communication policy that attempts to address merging media and telecommunications competition, diversity and inclusion issues for the digital age. A summary of three dominant themes in the literature regarding media diversity outlines the primary concerns of digital media policy. An interpretative policy analysis of the National Broadband Plan sheds lights on how regulators address diversity and access issues in the digital transition, particularly for communities of color. The analysis reveals that unlike prior exclusions of certain racial and ethnic groups in communications infrastructure, the unfolding broadband framework is attempting to be explicit about the inclusion of historically marginalized populations. We argue that the emerging media governance framework is both influenced by the problematic history of media diversity as well as a discursive and material shift that emphasizes market orientations.As policymakers, industries, and communities grapple with the evolving digitalization of telecommunications, recognizing who has access, how and why is critical for ensuring that individuals from all backgrounds are represented in the digital era, and that the discriminatory mistakes from the past are not reproduced.
This article critically examines the role of community media movements in articulating state-civil society relations in the establishment of a popular radical democracy in Venezuela. We employ institutional analysis and a frame-alignment approach to understand how community and alternative media (CAM) advocates negotiated issues of identity and autonomy from the state in the creation of the National System of Popular, Alternative, and Community Communication between 2008 and. The analysis revealed that CAM groups reasserted unmet demands for access to the spectrum and autonomy from state agencies, while amplifying the government's ''anti-imperialist conflict frame'' as a rationale for increased popular participation in the media. We discuss the democratic potential of these policies and the populist public sphere in Venezuela.
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