Public Policy and Media Organizations
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Public policy thinking and implementation is both a process of intellectual thought and rationale for governing. This book examines public policy and the influence news media organizations have in the production and implementation of public policy. Part I assesses the impact of political philosophy on public policy thinking and further discusses the meaning of public policy in social democratic systems. It uses the riots that occurred across England in the summer of 2011 as a case-study to focus on how the idea of the ’Big Society’ was regenerated by government and used as a basis for public policy thinking. Finally, it investigates how media organizations form news representations of public policy issues that seek to contextualize and reshape policy manufactured for public consumption. Part II provides a psychological exploration of the processes which explain the connection between the media, the public and policy-makers. Does the ’common good’ really drive public policy-making, or can group processes better explain what policy-makers decide? This second part of the book explores how media workers’ professional identities and practices shape their decisions about how to represent policy news. It also shows how the public identities and corporate interests of media organizations shape their role as referees of public policy-making and how all this culminates in faulty decision-making about how to represent policy news, polarization in public opinion about particular policies, and shifts in policy-makers’ decisions.
David Berry is an academic and writer at Southampton Solent University, UK. David has published five books to date and his most recent, Revisiting the Frankfurt School: Essays on Culture, Media and Theory, was published in 2012. David is Chief Editor of the International Journal of Radical Mass Media Criticism at www.fifth-estate-online.co.uk. Caroline Kamau completed her PhD at the University of Kent, UK, in 2005. After working as a postdoctoral research associate in Kent for a year, Kamau was an adjunct lecturer at Florida State University's London centre. She was then a lecturer in psychology at Southampton Solent University, UK, for 5 years. Kamau is a lecturer in organizational psychology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on group processes.