About

VP


After living abroad for five years of teaching and traveling, Victor Pickard returned to the U.S. to resume his academic studies. He holds a Masters degree in communications from the University of Washington where he conducted research for the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, and wrote his thesis on the Seattle Independent Media Center, an innovative communications model based on Internet activism, open publishing, and consensus-based decision-making.

Victor received his Ph.D. at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research explores the intersections of media politics, history, democratic theory, and communications policy. He has delivered over 100 conference presentations, invited lectures and media interviews, and published over a dozen journal articles and book chapters on subjects such as Internet policy, the media democracy movement, mainstream news narratives, and media history. His work has won a number of awards and has been published in leading scholarly journals, including the Journal of Communication; Global Media and Communication; Media, Culture & Society; New Media and Society; Journal of Communication Inquiry; International Journal of Communication Law and Policy; and Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Victor spent the summer of 2005 working on media policy in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Telecommunications Policy Fellow for Congresswoman Diane Watson, and spent 2008-2009 working on telecommunications and media policy as a Google Policy Fellow and Research Fellow at the New America Foundation, a leading policy think tank, where he continues to serve as a Senior Research Fellow for their Media Policy and Open Technology Initiatives. He also worked on journalism policy as a Senior Research Fellow for the media reform organization Free Press.

Victor's dissertation, "Media Democracy Deferred: The Postwar Settlement for U.S. Communications 1945-1949," explores the origins of the social contract between U.S. media institutions, the government, and the public that emerged from 1940s media policy debates and initiatives such as the Hutchins Commission, the FCC Blue Book, and the Fairness Doctrine. He is currently working on a book on the history and future of news.