One of the fiercest criticisms that business journalists have faced over the years, especially during periods of financial crisis, is that of their failure to strike a balance between writing for the business bottom line and the public interest. Research suggests that they have most of the time tipped the balance in favour of boosting the corporate interests of the owners of capital or the means of production and not necessarily the real producers and consumers of goods and services. Yet this is contrary to the social responsibility role of the business journalist, which is to hold power, be it political or corporate, to account in the interest of the general public, which is in most cases populated by poor producers and consumers of goods and services. The business journalist therefore walks on a very tight rope! He faces a kind of dilemma! It may be better to call it crisis! On the one hand, he draws his power and inspiration from liberalism, that is the freedom to hold power to account by informing and educating the public about their human wrongs. Yet, on the other hand, he depends on neoliberal capitalism to be able to perform this watchdog role since, without the capital to employ him and provide the other means of producing the news and comments, he will not exist as a professional business journalist.
This book employs a critical political economy approach to better understand the failure of business journalists to strike a balance between capitalism and the public interest. It calls for a shift in paradigm towards what it calls âpublic business journalismâ, which seeks not only to blur the distinction between reporting for the investor (the capitalist) and the general public (society), but also to tip the balance in favour of the latter if it comes to making a choice, because it constitutes the majority, including the former, and also because this would help address rather than reinforce the imbalances of society. It argues that a shift to the more postmodern public business journalism is crucial to averting future failures of business journalism in holding power to account, and, by extension, future global financial crises. In the chapters in the second part of this book I make the argument that the increasing focus on the business bottom line at the expense of the public interest largely contributed to the failure of business journalism in the reporting of great financial crises of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Political economy of journalism and public business journalism
Political economy emerged as a major critical perspective in communication research in the 1940s and was initially developed from the critical theory of media and communication developed by Theordore Adorno and Max Horkheimer. These scholars and other political economists after them, all members of the Frankfurt School, were very critical of the increasing commercialisation of media and communication, where news or ideas of media and communication ceased to be considered as a cultural value to be shared by all members of the community, and instead were taken to mean something to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. The political economy perspective interrogates the notion, prominent in some theories, that reality can be informed only by ideas or observations, and not by both. It also questions the view that all ideas and observations necessarily constitute reality. Political economists rather generally believe that reality can be constituted by many sources and âcannot be reduced to the essentialism of either economics (e.g. money alone drives the media) or culture (e.g. peopleâs values drive the media)â (Mosco, 2009: 1). They hold the view that reality cannot simply be dismissed as the figment of our imagination based on an idea or ideology of some kind, but is informed by a combination of both this ideology and experience: a combination of theory and practice, to put it simply. Another way to put it is to say that ideas on their own cannot, or do not, constitute realities, while on the other hand observations alone cannot, or do not, also constitute reality. Reality is therefore the result of both ideology and observation: a combination of the normative and the empirical, or of the prescriptive and the descriptive.
The approach is largely trans-disciplinary as it is inspired by the concepts of social change, social process and social relations. Yet the approach puts emphasis on social institutions such as media businesses, which are more or less influenced by the dominant classes of society.
Before proceeding to unpack the concept of political economy of journalism I have considered it important to provide a kind of conceptualisation of the much broader and multidisciplinary concept of political economy. Mosco (2009: 2) provides two main definitions of political economy. The first, which is based on a much narrower sense, sees political economy as âthe study of the social relations, particularly the power relations that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication resourcesâ. Mosco argues that the extent to which this definition calls attention to how the business of communication operates underscores its practical value. It for instance provides us with an idea of how a product of communication moves through a chain of production and distribution processes and structures before finally getting to the consumer. It also illuminates how the choices that consumers make about communication products such as a news item, a movie, a comedy, etc. are fed back into policies and decisions that politicians and businessmen make and take, respectively, in producing new or similar products. This definition invites us to consider how not just the communication product but the very attention of the consumers is put in the market place. It helps us see the approach as facilitating our understanding of how power relations operate, how people use and abuse power to make some people get what they want, albeit sometimes at the expense of some people being blatantly denied what they want. It gives us an idea of how power relations interact, and sometimes clash, in the chain of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services.
A much broader definition of political economy, according to Mosco (2009), sees it as the âstudy of control and survival in public lifeâ. The key words in this definition are control and survival; control relates to how a community of people runs and manages its affairs, while survival refers to what people do on a daily basis, for example production, distribution and consumption to keep their society on the move. While control relates to a political process as it involves community power relations, survival relates to an economic process as it involves economic power relations that shape or influence the production and reproduction, as well as the distribution and consumption, of goods and services. The extent to which this definition provides the political economy approach with the power to encompass all human activity and processes underpins its standing as a more ambitious way of understanding this rather ambivalent approach. Mosco (2009) famously credits his mentor and founding father of the political economy of communication, Dallas Smyth, with having provided him with this broad definition in an interview that he had with him when he was researching for the first edition of his ground-breaking bookâ The Political Economy of Communication. Mosco (2009), however, points to a major downside of this definition in that it is difficult to draw the line between the political economy of human activity and the processes of controlling and surviving nature. Yet other political economists (Latour, 2005) have been more concerned about the increasing way in which human activity has threatened the environment. This perspective seems to suggest that, after all, human activity with nature or the environment involves some kind of control and survival.
Political economists are concerned about interactions, or tensions, between power relationsâ be they political or economicâ that lead to the control or survival of human activity. This human activity can involve some kind of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, which for the purposes of this book may mean a piece of news item or commentary that brings to light the use or abuse of political and/or economic power.
In fact a much simpler way of understanding this broad definition is provided by Bachman (2001), who simply sees political economy as a kind of interaction between political processes or power relations (control) and economic process or power relations (survival). This interaction, according to Bachman, takes place on two levels. The first involves the description and analysis of the way government and economics interact in one place at one time. This interpretation suggests that the political economy of a society, country or city can be measured by the levels of interaction between government functionaries, politicians, bankers, business people and the rest of the public in that place, in that specific time. The political economy of, for instance, London is measured by the activities of the British government such as influencing the increase in interest rates by the Bank of England and how that impacts on the buying and selling of stocks on the London Stock Exchange by the end of the day on which the increase was announced. The other involves the âphilosophy of how government and the economy actually do, and should interactâ. It is indeed the second interpretation of political economy that has come to gain more currency in recent years. This is mainly because it involves the interrogation of not only what is observed or seenâ the empirical or descriptiveâ but also what is conceived or thought of as an ideaâ the normative or prescriptive. Mosco (2009) broadens the conceptualisation of the political economy approach by looking at four central qualities that characterise it: history, the social totality, moral philosophy and praxis, all of which we shall be looking at later in this chapter.
Political economy of journalism
Journalism practice is normally considered to be part of the broad field of communication and media studies, which is in turn part of the much broader field of communication. The field of communication encompasses a much wider range of disciplines, which, in addition to communication and media studies, includes sociology, linguistics, information studies, philosophy, architecture and computer science. However, for the purposes of this book I will focus only on communication and media studies, especially on the specialist field of business journalism. Mosco (2009: 8) sees communication as a âsocial exchange of meaning whose outcome is the measure or mark of a social relationshipâ. He makes the argument that, from this perspective, communication should not be seen merely as the process of transmitting information but as âsocial production of meaning that constitutes a relationshipâ (Mosco, 2009: 8). Thus he warns against the tendency to communication essentialism (Burke, 1969a, 1969b; Latour, 1999; McCloskey, 2002), that is, an inclination to reduce reality to the ârhetoric of conversationâ or communication alone without also seeing it as the âlogic of inquiryâ or analysis(Mosco, 2009: 66). From the point of view of this book, I go along with Moscoâs preference for a combination of the âlogic of inquiryâ and rhetoric of conversation as the basis of epistemology, that is critical knowledge and understanding of a communication message. By way of reinforcing this line of thinking, Mosco affirms that this combination of the two approaches specifically:
maintains that understanding is not a process by which one person observes and reports on reality by using language that reveals that reality. Rather, understanding takes place when two or more people exchange observations and ideas, and express them in language that does not reveal reality, but which helps to constitute reality
(2009: 66)
In a way the combination of the rhetoric of conversation and the logic of inquiry resonates with the political economy of communication. Broadly speaking, when you talk about the political economy of communication you are talking about how political and economic power relations are influenced, or vice versa, within the context of agenda setting by our âsystems of mass media, information, and entertainmentâ (Mosco, 2009: 6). Since journalistic praxis generally operates within the structures of these mass communication systems, political economy of journalism can be defined as the way in which journalists are influenced, or vice versa, by the political and economic power relations, within an agenda-setting context, and how that impacts on their social responsibility role to serve as watchdogs, rather than mere lapdogs or cheerleaders, in the interest of the general public. This definition in a way suggests some kind of resonance between the concept of the political economy of journalism and that of public business journalism, especially in the context in which the public business journalist is able to use the political economic perspective to interrogate the political and economic power relations in the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in the public interest.
Business journalism and public business journalism
Business journalism deals with reporting in the media that discusses events, topics and issues related to the economy, business, development and industries, or how people as producers and consumers spend their money to better themselves in both national and global contexts. It includes writin...
