Victor Pickard

Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center. Prior to Penn, he taught at New York University and the University of Virginia, and has held visiting appointments at Cornell, Goldsmiths, and LSE. Previously, he worked on media policy in Washington, D.C. as a Senior Research Fellow at New America and as a Policy Fellow for Congresswoman Diane Watson. Pickard chairs the Board of Directors for the media reform organization Free Press and co-directs the annual Consortium on Media Policy Studies (COMPASS) program. His research on the history and future of journalism, the politics of media policy, and the role of public media in a democratic society has been published in dozens of scholarly journals and anthologies. He also often writes for popular venues such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Jacobin, and The Nation. He has been interviewed widely by media organizations such as NPR, Pacifica, The Wallstreet Journal, MSNBC, C-SPAN, the PBS News Hour, and The New York Times. Pickard has authored or edited six books, including the award-winning monographs Democracy Without Journalism? and America’s Battle for Media Democracy. Currently he is serving as a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and working on a book about the history of commercial media capture.