Populists in power usually maintain the institutions inherited from the pre-populist past, but use several strategies to render them hollow. These strategies include capture (institutions being staffed with new individuals who lack value commitment to the original rationales for having the institution), duplication (institutions being paralleled by new ones, with ostensibly the same competencies, which overshadow and sideline the original institutions), erosion (legal changes or de facto changes, to the point of rendering the institution purely perfunctory), expansion (when institutions are granted legally unlimited powers), or migration (when they are transferred to another institutional context). The chapter shows in detail how populists in power capture electoral institutions, public media and media boards, NGOs etc). The trajectories of backsliding are such that the changes are often obscure and incremental. The truly toxic effects are caused by the interaction between various changes.

Pickard makes the case for why a new public media system is necessary to confront thesystemic market failure plaguing American journalism. While underscoring normativefoundations, this chapter tries to address the “how did we get here?” and “what is to bedone?” questions currently facing US society. After contextualizing problems withmisinformation and the contemporary journalism crisis, the chapter assesses recent movestoward public investments in news media around the world as well as recent developmentsin the United States. The chapter explores various criteria for what this new public mediashould entail, and concludes with a discussion about the necessary policies for actualizingstructural alternatives to the overly commercialized American media system.

This chapter asks whether news organizations, organizations, in their search for sustainable business models, are acting increasingly as a force for exclusion. Rodney Benson identifies two forms this exclusion takes. In some cases, the exclusion is economic, as happens when subscriptions are too expensive for audience members who might otherwise consume such news. In other cases, the exclusion is cultural, which can be seen in publications freely available to all but in fact only attract the interest of those with proportionally larger volumes of economic and cultural resources than the average member of the public. Benson calls for scholars to see exclusion as socially organized and to aid in the search for solutions to the problem of “civic” inclusion, which he imagines will include media literacy initiatives, newsroom recruitment to ensure better representation of people from diverse background, government policies to support independent media, and a range of other initiatives.