Critical Political Economy of the Media

An Introduction

Jonathan Hardy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415544832
• eBook ISBN: 9781136486487
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media Studies

How the media are organised and funded is central to understanding their role in society. Critical Political Economy of the Media provides a clear, comprehensive and insightful introduction to the political economic analysis of contemporary media.

Jonathan Hardy undertakes a critical survey of political economy scholarship encompassing worldwide literature, issues and debates, and relationships with other academic approaches. He assesses different ways of making sense of media convergence and digitalisation, media power and influence, and transformations across communication markets. Many of the problems of the media that prompted critical political economy research remain salient, he argues, but the approach must continue to adapt to new conditions and challenges. Hardy advances the case for a revitalised critical media studies for the 21st century.

Topics covered include:

• media ownership and financing
• news and entertainment
• convergence and the Internet
• media globalisation
• advertising and media
• alternative media
• media policy and regulation

Introducing key concepts and research, this book explains how political economy can assist students, researchers and citizens to investigate and address vital questions about the media today.

Part I Mapping approaches and themes

1 What (is) political economy of the media?

DOI: 10.4324/9780203136225-2

Introduction

If there have been times when the political and economic aspects of communication could be neglected by scholars then it is surely not ours. Media industries and practices are being rapidly transformed worldwide. The promises of digitalisation to distribute communication power widely through society and the manner in which such promises are hampered are vitally important issues. Our dependence on communication resources, vividly realised across the keystrokes and connections of daily life, is accompanied by increasing interest and concern in how these resources are organised and controlled. Recognition of the importance of the political and economic organisation (‘political economy’) of media has never been greater. ¹

There is no definitive beginning but if we take the late 1960s as the start date, critical political economy of communications represents half a century of scholarship. Many of the questions asked by radical scholars in the twentieth century remain salient – questions about control over the media, the impact of commercialisation, public and private media ownership, inequalities and power relations affecting communications. Yet the contexts in which these are asked and answered are characterised by rapid and far-reaching changes. This book has two main aims: first, to introduce and explore key features of the political economy of media and, second, to contribute to debates about the salience, value and direction of critical media studies in the twenty-first century.

The political economy of communications describes all forms of enquiry into the political and economic dimensions of communication. This book discusses and promotes such enquiry. Yet a more delimited approach, that of critical political economy, is the main focus of this book. Within the study of media and communications, attention to political and economic dimensions has often been relatively marginal, with greater attention devoted to ‘texts’ and ‘audiences’ than either ‘production’ or the wider contexts in which communication takes place. Critical political economy describes a tradition of analysis that is concerned with how communication arrangements relate to goals of social justice and emancipation. ‘Critical’, then, divides this tradition off from various alternative, often ‘mainstream’, approaches. I take the critical political economy approach to encompass studies that consider political and economic aspects of communications and which are critical in regard to their concerns with the manner in which power relations are sustained and challenged. The vitality of critical political economy studies of communication is demonstrated across recent collections of international scholarship (Wasko et al. 2011; Winseck and Jin 2012) and work on regions such as Latin America (Bolaño et al. 2012). There are several contributing factors that can help to explain this revitalisation, but an overriding factor is that the organisation of communication services has returned to prominence. The promise of limitlessness (in digital communications, content creation, creative labour, global cultural flows) encounters the constraining influences of money and power (the economic and political) in a manner that is unavoidable for serious analysis. The tensions here are not only with visions of limitlessness generated by those advancing the wonders of digital capitalism but also for counter-hegemonic visions of global solidarity and cultural exchange. This chapter introduces media political economy analysis and situates this in relation to alternative approaches.

Political economy

Political economy originally referred to a tradition of economic thinking that addressed the production, distribution and consumption of resources used to sustain human existence. For Adam Smith, the eighteenth century Scottish enlightenment thinker, political economy was the study of ‘wealth’, and was concerned with ‘how mankind arranges to allocate scarce resources with a view to satisfying certain needs and not others’ (Smith 1776: 161). For Smith this was also the study of political decision-making, a ‘branch of the science of a statesman or legislator’ concerned with the activities of government to aid economic growth. The so-called classical political economists, such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, were primarily interested in capitalism as a system for the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of wealth. In the nineteenth century Marx (1818–83) and Engels added class analysis, underpinning their radical critique of capitalism.

A general definition of political economy is the ‘study of the social relations, particularly power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution and consumption of resources, including communication resources’ (Mosco 2009: 24). Mosco traces four ideas central to political economy: engagement with social change and history, understanding the social whole, moral philosophy and praxis (Mosco 2009: 26–36). One link between what we will examine as critical political economy and what is known as classical political economy is that the economic sphere is not separated off from related social and political phenomena. The allocation of resources is recognised to involve political, not merely economic, decisions whose moral consequences permeate social life. Political economists sought to explain the emergence of capitalism but also to assess its implications for human life across societies. This ‘holistic’ approach contrasts with subsequent efforts by ‘neoclassical’ writers to establish economics as a mathematics-based science, by bracketing out history, politics and ethics. Yet the classical political economists in nineteenth century Britain were associated with cold calculus themselves, from Nassau Senior’s opposition to welfare relief during the great Irish famine, Thomas Malthus’s arguments for population control and John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian moral philosophy. Their limitations and pro-capitalist class bias are repudiated in Marx’s Capital, presented as a ‘critique of political economy’.

Neoclassical economics

Initially broad in scope, classical political economy influenced the scientific study of economics developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that focused on the efficient satisfaction of wants in markets, known as neoclassical economics. Its founders included Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Francis Edgeworth and Leon Walras. Thus mainstream economics evolved largely as a discipline professing value neutrality, while taking existing social relations as a given, and in general supporting core principles of market-based systems, namely that consumer and citizen welfare is best achieved through efficient market mechanisms. Classical political economy had expounded the labour theory of value, which located wealth creation in the surplus value extracted from workers (Smith, Ricardo, Marx). Neoclassical economics propounded a new theory of value derived from consumer preferences exercised in markets. This bypassed the attention to social class divisions and injustice in the distribution of wealth and income, which Marx had made central to his account of the exploitative social relations of capitalism. Taking consumer preferences to be preformed and beyond dispute helped to justify the narrowing of economic analysis to a mathematical-deductive system studying supply and demand in markets.

While neoclassical economics became the orthodox approach in capitalist systems, elements of more classical political economy persisted, alongside Marxian and social welfarist approaches. Some neoclassical tenets are repudiated in behavioural economics, whose analysis of irrationality in markets dethrones rational economic ‘man’. There are also more socially oriented economists such as the development economist Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009 for her distinguished work on economic governance and common ownership, which informs analysis of the digital ‘commons’.

Positive political economy

Today ‘political economy’ can refer to a range of contending approaches. One such approach, antithetical to Marxism, is that of the so-called Chicago School, also known as constitutional or ‘positive’ political economy, or as public choice theory (Mosco 2009: 28). This neoliberal approach is associated with Ronald Coase, Gary Becker, Richard Posner and George Stigler. Their work applies and extends neoclassical economic tenets to focus on calculating ‘welfare’ maximising advantage and by applying this to all forms of social behaviour. It does so, critics argue, by pursuing a narrow and conservative model of welfare based on promoting the activities of acquisitive individuals exercising freedom over their supposedly naturally acquired property rights. The purported aim is to provide ‘positive’ or value-neutral analysis, yet the base assumptions are anything but.

Critical political economy

Critical political economy refers to approaches that place emphasis on the unequal distribution of power and are critical of arrangements whereby such inequalities are sustained and reproduced. This critical tradition is influenced by, although by no means limited to, Marxism, as we will examine. Marxian political economy provides a historical analysis of capitalism including the forces and relations of production, the production of surplus value, commodification, social class divisions and struggles.

The political economy of communications

Any examination of communications that addresses economic or political aspects may be included in a broad category of political economic analysis. More narrowly, much ‘political economic’ analysis addresses aspects of the way in which communications are organised and provided as services. Emerging in the twentieth century the main focus has been on mass communication, defined as ‘the industrialized production and multiple distribution of messages through technological devices’ (Turow 2010: 17).

The political economy of communication represents a broad field of work drawing on economics, political science, communication and cultural analysis. A more accurate term for the tradition that developed in media and communication studies is critical political economy (or CPE). This ‘critical’ approach is at odds, as we will see, with ‘mainstream’ traditions in communication research as well as in economic, political and social theory.

Critical scholarship

The term ‘critical’ is usefully broad and encompassing, but it also has distinctive historical roots in communication research. It alludes to the academic practices and values of critique in intellectual enquiry – questioning, interrogating and challenging the adequacy of explanations of phenomena. For Mosco (2009: 128) political economy is critical ‘because it sees knowledge as the product of comparisons with other bodies of knowledge and with social values’. As a descriptor for political economy, however, ‘critical’ has a more precise meaning for scholarship that is critical of the deficiencies of capitalism and of rule by elites. The term critical is associated with the Institute of Social Research established at the University of Frankfurt in 1923. The ‘Frankfurt School’, as it became known, investigated culture in ways that revised, and revived, Marxist theory and integrated this ‘Western Marxism’ with other social theories and with Freudian psychoanalysis.

These scholars rejected positivist claims that knowledge could be value-free and argued instead for a critical–normative perspective that was also reflective about how forms of knowledge contributed to sustaining or challenging existing social conditions. This approach was critical in that it assessed knowledge and social practice against normative values such as fairness in the distribution of wealth and resources. Its origins lie in the analysis of capitalist economies and authoritarian political systems, ranging from fascist to parliamentary, in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet the scholarship that evolved is not restricted to Marxist thought or even socialist principles. Its enduring values are rather liberal and democratic ones; ‘[i]t is committed to political enfranchisement, freedom of speech and intellectual inquiry, and social justice’ (McChesney 2004a: 47).

The term ‘critical’ then helps to connect together traditions of critique as well as values of investigating and questioning arrangements. Yet it also has ‘negative’ associations: we do not (always) appreciate criticism; naysayers with relentlessly negative attitudes may be viewed as rigidly prejudging events, or just not great company. Whether ‘critical’ is too constraining and self-limiting an organising term for the approaches discussed here is an important question, but descriptively at least it helps to delineate approaches which I hope to show are anything but rigid or ‘negative’.

Critical political economy rests on a central claim_ different ways of organising and financing communications have implications for the range and nature of media content, and the ways in which this is consumed and used. Recognising that the goods produced by the media industries are at once economic and cultural, this approach calls for attention to the interplay between the symbolic and economic dimensions of the production of meaning. One direction of enquiry, then, is from media production to meaning-making and consumption, but the other is to consider the relationship of media and communication systems to wider forces and processes in society. It is by combining both that CPE seeks to ask ‘big’ questions about media.

CPE analysis is not defined or limited in respect of its object of analysis. CPE considers all kinds of communication processes, although it tends to ignore some, such as psycho-cognitive and affective processes. It is not defined or limited in respect of methods of analysis. A great variety of research methods are used, although documentation analysis, historical research, textual and media content analysis, economic, statistical and market analysis are the most prevalent. What characterises CPE above all are the questions asked and the orientation of scholars. Whose voices and concerns get to be heard? How are people, ideas and values represented in media discourses – and what is it that affects how this occurs? What is the quality of information, ideas and imagery available through media, and to whom is it available? This tradition asks questions about power in communications and the conditions for realising democracy. These connect, in turn, to two major influences: Marxism, and the theories and practices of democratic politics.

Karl Marx’s work and legacy has had a profound influence on ways of understanding power, domination and inequality withi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• PART I Mapping approaches and themes
• PART II Critical investigations in political economy
• PART III Interventions and change
• Bibliography
• Index