On the need to revalue old radical imaginaries to assert epistemic media and communication rights today

In this chapter, the liberal radical and the socialist radical imaginaries are foregrounded as providing important historical justifications for democratic and emancipatory public interventions in the context of media and communication. First, these two radical imaginaries will be unpacked with regard to their views on the role of the state, democracy, and citizen emancipation. Subsequently, the historical impact of these two radical imaginaries on media and communication will be addressed at the level of ownership of media and communication infrastructures, access to infrastructures, information and knowledge, the production and regulation of media content and public interventions relating to information and communication infrastructures. Finally, it will be concluded that in the current conjuncture characterised by inequality, surveillance, mis- and disinformation, and oligopolistic power, there is an urgent need to revalue these old radical imaginaries and combine them with new ones in tune with the digital age in order to provide a more solid basis to posit and justify a set of epistemic rights in the context of media, communication, and democracy today.