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The analysis of media policy usually, and understandably, focuses on visible instances of policy action : of government intervention, regulatory activity, civil society engagement, and corporate initiatives. Less frequently considered is the process by which certain issues, frames, and proposals are neglected inside decision-making structures. This article reflects on the relationship between “industrial activism” and policy silences in relation to government desire to secure a digital communications infrastructure for the twenty-first century. It argues that policy analysts need to look beyond immediate and visible instances of decision making in the media field and examine the ideological processes of exclusion and marginalization that distort media policy making and undermine the emergence of alternative paradigms and policy outcomes.

The 'parade of the aghast' One of the explanations for the rise in prominence of populist challenges to centrist political forces has focused on the former's effective use of the media: their ability to transmit 'sentiment' over 'fact', to use 'authentic' language, to make full use of social media and to exploit the mainstream media's appetite for sensationalist stories. 'All neo-populist movements', argues Gianpetro Mazzoleni (2003: 6), 'rely heavily on some kind of indirect (and direct) complicity with the mass media, and all are led by politicians who, with few exceptions, are shrewd and capable "newsmakers" themselves.' In Europe and North America, this has worked to the advantage of iconoclastic far right politicians like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage who have all received extensive airtime in which they have combined nativist rhetoric with outbursts against the political establishment (no matter how privileged they themselves may be). A dangerous cocktail of tabloid values, falling levels of trust in the media and unaccountable tech power (facilitating the spread of hyper-partisan and sometimes 'fake' news) is widely seen to be intimately linked to the rise in recent years both of a xenophobic populism and polarised media and political environments (Barnett, 2017; Benkler et al, 2017, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2017). Yet the political earthquakes of Trump and Brexit were greeted with astonishment and confusion by some of the most prestigious names in mainstream journalism who had, to use a popular expression, misread the tea-leaves. Trump's victory, for example, 'was the night that wasn't supposed to happen, that had almost no chance of happening' opined the public editor of the New York Times (Spayd, 2016) while her bosses, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr and editor Dean Baquet (2017), admitted that '[a]fter such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump's sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?' Reporters at Politico were blunt: 'we were more than wrong. We were laughably oblivious. The entre Washington political-media complex missed the mark. Not by inches or feet, but by miles…There will be plenty of time to dissect it all. The joke is on us' (Palmer and Sherman, 2016). The joke wasn't just confined to the US: for Jon Snow, the veteran presenter of Channel Four News, the British media 'failed, not only over the [Brexit] Referendum, but perhaps over reporting Europe at all down the 40 years of the UK's membership. Amid the fresh mown lies (or fake news) of the campaign itself, we didn't have a chance' (Snow 2017). Elite journalism, however, largely recused itself from any direct responsibility for events such as Trump and Brexit and instead embarked on what some journalists described as a period of self-reflection: 'to 'think hard about the half of America the paper too seldom covers' according to the...

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