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 codirects the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center. Before teaching at Penn, he taught at New York University and the University of Virginia and has held visiting appointments at Cornell, Goldsmiths, and the London School of Economics. Previously, he worked on media policy in Washington, DC, as a senior research fellow at New America and as a policy fellow for Rep. Diane Watson. Pickard chairs the Board of Directors for the media reform organization Free Press and codirects the annual Consortium on Media Policy Studies (COMPASS) program in Washington, DC. His research on the politics of media policy, the history and future of journalism, and the role of public media in a democratic society has been published in dozens of scholarly journals and anthologies, and he often writes op-eds and essays for popular venues such as The Guardian, the Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Harvard Business Review, Jacobin, The Nation, and The Atlantic. He has been interviewed widely for media organizations such as NPR, Pacifica, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, C-SPAN, 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.