Victor Pickard Awarded the C. Edwin Baker Award from the International Communication Association

Victor Pickard, Co-Director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center at the Annenberg School for Communication and the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy, is the 2025 recipient of the C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy.

The award is given annually by the Philosophy, Theory, and Critique and Communication Law and Policy Divisions of the International Communication Association (ICA) for scholarly and related work that has made a significant contribution to the development, reach and influence of scholarship on media, markets and democracy. Pickard shares the 2025 award with Pablo J. Boczkowski of Northwestern University.

Pickard, who named his endowed faculty position after Baker in 2021, focuses on the history and political economy of media institutions, media activism and the politics and normative foundations of media policy. His work is particularly concerned with the future of journalism and the role of media in a democratic society. He has authored or edited six books and published over 150 articles, essays and book chapters in leading scholarly journals, magazines and anthologies, and co-authored three major policy reports.

“This award is especially meaningful to me because Ed Baker is one of my intellectual heroes,” Pickard told the audience while accepting the award at the 2025 ICA Conference in Denver. “His meticulous, empirically-driven argumentation for why media markets fail democracy remains unrivaled.”

The Baker Award was established in 2010 through an endowed fund created from the estate of Professor C. Edwin Baker (1947-2009), who was the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.