Neoliberalism, Media and the Political

S. Phelan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137308351
• eBook ISBN: 9781137308368
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Neoliberalism, Media and the Political examines the condition of media and journalism in neoliberal cultures. Emphasizing neoliberalism's status as a political ideology that is simultaneously hostile to politics, the book presents a critical theoretical argument supported by empirical illustrations from New Zealand, Ireland, the UK and the US.

1

Articulating Neoliberalism in Critical Media and Communication Studies

Looked at broadly, we can identify two distinct discourses about neoliberalism in communication and media studies and elsewhere. The first deploys the term to enact a familiar critical narrative where neoliberalism signifies a social order dominated by the logic of the market. This narrative has been given different articulations¹ in communication and media research. Neoliberalism has functioned as a descriptive and explanatory category in analyses of topics such as infotainment (Thussu, 2007), media ownership (Herman & McChesney, 1997), multiculturalism (Lentin & Titley, 2011), reality television (Ouellette & Hay, 2008), political marketing (Savigny, 2008), political consultants (Sussman & Galizio, 2003), intellectual property rights (Hesmondhalgh, 2008) and the cultural politics of voice (Couldry, 2010). Others have examined the communicative dynamics of “free market” regimes without explicitly deploying the term “neoliberalism” (Aune, 2001). More generally, the role of media and communication practices in the ideological constitution of neoliberalism is taken for granted in the wider literature (see Birch & Mykhnenko, 2010; Harvey, 2005; Jessop, 2010).

Yet, the authority of neoliberalism as a critical signifier has been interrogated by a second discourse. This critique has sometimes been made by those distancing themselves from critical research traditions, in some cases defending their work against the charge of ideological complicity with neoliberalism. However, frustration with the open-ended scope of the term has also been articulated by those who retain a clear commitment to interrogating what might otherwise be named as neoliberal norms. For example, Grossberg argues that a fixation on neoliberalism and neoliberalization can impede critical analysis. As he observes in an interview with Cho (2008):

Too often, the context is just described in terms of the dialectic between the global and the local or in terms of the neoliberalization of just about everything, a particularly unhelpful phrase, whether it is understood economically or governmentally. These are too glib and too easy. We need to find better ways of talking about regional, transnational, or even global contexts. Perhaps we should be looking at all of them but surely we have to figure out how to map the interconnections, the articulations (p. 107).

This chapter has three key objectives. First, I examine our first discourse above, organized around a broad distinction between critical political economy, cultural studies and governmentality perspectives. Second, I discuss how different authors have questioned the value of the concept of neoliberalism. Third, I end the chapter by clarifying my own take on the concept. I affirm the importance of the critique of neoliberalism. However, I recognize that scepticism about how the term is used is in one respect justified. As in other fields, neoliberalism is too often invoked as a “summary label”, a “metaphor for the ideological air we all (must) breathe” (Peck, 2010, p. xii). At the same time, I argue that it would be a mistake to discard the concept; rather, we need to interrogate its formulaic iteration, yet try to operationalize it in a more critically illuminating way. I conclude by briefly outlining a rationale for recuperating the concept, in anticipation of the theoretical discussion of Chapters 2 and 3.

The political economy of neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is commonly defined as an economic ideology and philosophy. Within the field of critical media and communication studies, the concept is most obviously associated with the political economy literature. Mosco’s (2009) broad definition of the political economy of communication captures the critical orientation of a field strongly influenced by Marxist theory: “the study of the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication resources” (p. 2). For critical political economists, the concept of neoliberalism signifies a regime of capitalism that broke from the Keynesian model that shaped Western political economy after World War II (see, for example, Birch & Mykhnenko, 2010; Fenton, 2006; Harvey, 2005; Hope, 2012; Wasko, Murdock & Sousa, 2011). The shift radically altered the relationship between state, capital and labour. The production base of the Keynesian economy was supplanted by a global regime of financial capital and service industries, shifting manufacturing to countries where labour was cheapest. The notion of the welfare state as a protective mechanism for workers was systematically challenged, the very idea of welfare stigmatized. Flexible regimes of production became the norm, eroding the worker protections gained through the post-war “pact” between capital and labour. And the traditionally demarcated roles of management and ownership were fused through stock incentivization policies, facilitating the emergence of an elite neoliberal class focused on maximizing share prices.

The Marxist geographer David Harvey has formulated the best-known political economy analysis of neoliberalism, one regularly cited by media and communication researchers (see, for example, Freedman, 2008; Pickard, 2007). Neoliberalism had already been firmly established as a critical concept when his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism was published in 2005. Yet, Harvey reinvigorated a Marxist analysis of neoliberalism, emphasizing the central importance of class dynamics. His shorthand description of neoliberalism as a theory of political economy gave definitional clarity to a term Pickard (2007) suggests is often “ill-defined and broadly misunderstood” (p. 118):

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free market, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices (Harvey, 2005, p. 2).

Harvey’s definition highlights how free-market regimes need the state’s institutional support and protection, challenging one-dimensional perceptions of neoliberalism as a libertarian philosophy hostile to the state. Yet, the notion of a singular neoliberal “theory” is also an analytical convenience. The “liberal resurgence” (Beaud & Dostaler, 1997, p. 112) of the 1970s and 1980s drew on different theories of liberal political economy, including monetarism, supply-side economics, neoclassical, Chicago School, Austrian School, and rational choice/public choice theory (Beaud & Dostaler, 1997; Cockett, 1995). These theories were sometimes the site of intra-familial philosophical and methodological tensions (Mirowski, 2013). Yet, Gray (1986) suggests their “differences [were] in the end disagreements about transitional strategy rather than about the liberal goal” (p. 79). They coalesced to form a unified political economic vision grounded in a “reaffirmation of the virtues of the market and competition” (Beaud & Dostaler, 1997, p. 118) and strong rhetorical opposition to the idea of state intervention in the economy. The unity between different liberal theories was partly enabled by their identification of a shared antagonist in Keynesianism (see Chapter 2) and their common diagnosis of the capitalist and state crises of the 1970s. Neoliberals saw two features of the Keynesian paradigm as particularly untenable: the direct intervention of the state in the management of consumer demand and the development of a strong welfare state as a bulwark against the vagaries of capitalism (Lacher, 1999, p. 243).

Harvey (2005) describes neoliberalism as the ideology of global capitalism: the legitimizing front for “a project to achieve the restoration of class power” (p. 16) on a transnational scale. This project sometimes assumes a clear authoritarian and imperialist hue (see also Brown, 2003). Yet, it is packaged in ways that can secure popular consent, strategically exploiting the inherent human appeal of the language of freedom and individual rights. The rhetoric of free markets and free trade acts as the ideological cover for the establishment of a transnational regime of capitalist accumulation liberated from the comparative restraints on capital mobility during the Keynesian era. This global ideology is subject to national, regional and party-political variations, and articulated in contradictory ways that belie the notion of a singular neoliberalism. Yet, in Harvey’s (2005) assessment, what is consistent across different formations is the valorization of two principles: the need to create “a good business and investment climate” attractive to global capital and the safeguarding of the financial system, especially in times of political crisis (p. 70). Conflict between these political priorities and upholding the official neoliberal doctrine should be anticipated, he suggests. However, in the last resort, doctrinal purity will be sacrificed to uphold a particular configuration of class-based power.

Harvey (2005) emphasizes the “systematic divergences from the template of neoliberal theory” (p. 70) within the universe of “actually existing neoliberalism” (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). These paradoxes are most obvious in the neoliberal account of the state. On the one hand, the state is the official enemy of the free-market project: the primary impediment to human freedom (see Chapter 7). Yet, on the other hand, it is central to institutionalizing the political and legal framework desired by neoliberals and, as we know, its life-support in times of crisis. Harvey’s attentiveness to the neoliberal state’s capacity to depart from ideological orthodoxy explains his scepticism about proclamations of the “end of neoliberalism” in 2008 and 2009 (Harvey, 2009), the popular assumption at the time being that the unprecedented state intervention in the financial system constituted an unpardonable breach of free-market doctrine. His account essentially predicted the political response to the crisis. The bank bailouts in different countries were but an extreme manifestation of the logic of the neoliberal state, which will do whatever it takes to sustain the operation of the “free market” because its own fate has become so intertwined with upholding the integrity of “the financial system and the solvency of institutions” (Harvey, 2005, p. 71). And this work of ideological repair is partly enabled by an infrastructure of “capitalist media”: their default construction of a narrative that, as Harvey says of the recent crisis, all “too easily forgives and forgets the transgressions of a capitalist class” (Harvey, 2010, p. 291; see also Andersson, 2012) or fixates on the excesses of individual bankers, displacing a systemic understanding of the causes of capitalist crises (Dyer-Witheford & Compton, 2011; Fisher, 2009).

Neoliberalism and the political economy of media

Like Harvey, critical political economy of communication researchers take the capitalist system as their primary object of study. Analyses of the effects of neoliberalism on the organization of media, communication and information systems are situated within the logic and trajectory of the wider capitalist economy. Neoliberalism is conceptualized as a capitalist formation increasingly dependent on communicative processes and information flows (Dean, 2009; Hope, 2012). And the labour theory of value is extended to understanding the work done by audiences in the digital and social media ecology (Cohen, 2008). References to neoliberalism typically cue a normative critique of how media and communication systems in liberal democratic capitalist societies have become increasingly market-driven since the 1970s and 1980s (Garnham, 2011).

As in other fields, the term “neoliberalism” is often invoked cursorily in the political economy of communication literature: more of a useful storytelling device than a formally explicated concept.² The dominant narrative is derived from a long-standing Marxist diagnostic of the relationship between media and capitalism. Scholars examine the role of media institutions in ideologically legitimizing the capitalist system and their structural integration in the capitalist mode of production. Most emphasize how the capitalist character of public communication has been amplified in the neoliberal era. Concepts like “marketization”, “commodification”, “privatization”, “deregulation” and “globalization” are synonymous with critical discussions of the pernicious effects of neoliberalism on media and the public sphere. These concepts have a wider currency in media and communication studies, articulated in research labelled neither Marxist nor political economy. Herman and McChesney (1997) examine how neoliberal policies justified in the name of the “free market” have facilitated the emergence of a media landscape dominated by transnational corporations, constituting a “political and cultural system” that McChesney (1998) elsewhere describes as oppressive of “non-market forces” (p. 9). Miller (2003) underlines “the decline in democracy under neoliberal conditions” (p. 5), embodied in a media system that primarily serves the interests of corporations and media owners. Freedman (2008) describes neoliberalism as a project committed to “inscrib[ing] market dynamics in all areas of media activity” (p. 53), normalizing policies that misconstrue the market as an instrument of democracy. And Dean (2009) argues the very idea of democracy has been debased by a “technological infrastructure of neoliberalism”, a regime of “communicative capitalism” (p. 23) where all public communication is subsumed into the informational circuitry of capitalist networks.

Three broad themes are prominent in discussions of neoliberalism: media ownership and regulation, media production and media representations. First, studies of media ownership and regulation show how corporate media elites – the media wing of Harvey’s neoliberal “ruling class” – have been facilitated by state regulatory regimes that privilege the interests of transnational capital (Ampuja, 2012; Hope, 2012). Critiques of a “state-capital nexus” are extended to transnational governmental bodies like the European Union and World Trade Organization, which increasingly assume the legal and political authority to determine how media and communications policies are formulated at a national level (Hesmondhalgh, 2008). Pickard (2007) identifies four key dimensions in the neoliberalization of media systems: “the privatization, deregulation, liberalization, and globalization of markets” (p. 121). Bundled together, they make for a familiar narrative of how the character of media systems has changed during the neoliberal era. Media and telecommunication resources previously owned by the state were systematically privatized, and media that nominally remained in public ownership were, to varying degrees, reconstituted as market and commercial enterprises. Legislation imposing restrictions on cross-media ownership and foreign ownership was removed or modified in the name of “deregulation” and “light touch regulation” (Mansell, 2011, p. 22). Competitive mechanisms were established in television and radio markets, liberalizing the terms of entry to what, in many countries, had been monopolistic media controlled by the state. And nominally “national” media systems were progressively globalized, structurally integrated into ownership regimes and distribution systems increasingly transnational in character (Hope, 2012). These policies have been widely critiqued, though it would be simplistic to suggest that everything attributable to the category of neoliberalism has been regarded in a uniformly pessimistic way. Mansell (2011) suggests “policy informed by the neoliberal agenda in the case of telecommunications arguably was helpful in dislodging the power of monopolies – public and private” (p. 21). And, in the case of the European Union, regulatory mechanisms that privileged neoliberal policies also helped safeguard public service objectives when the principle of universal access was threatened by the commercial bargaining power of media corporations (Flynn, 2009). However, like Harvey, political economy of communication researchers emphasize the gap between official neoliberal doctrine and the actuality of neoliberal media regimes. Policies scripted in the name of competition, diversity and pluralism have spawned media systems dominated by corporate interests, producing oligopolistic market structures in some of the countries that most enthusiastically embraced the neoliberal agenda (Hope, 2012; Thompson, 2012).

A second thematic strand of political economy research explores how neoliberalism has altered the institutional conditions governing the production of different kinds of media content. Those with managerial responsibility for the production of media and journalism have internalized the assumption that, whatever else they might do, they must maximize profits and audience ratings. Tensions between journalistic and profit-oriented objectives are nothing new. However, the relative importance of economic concerns has progressively increased in the neoliberal era, nurtured in production regimes that demand more of media workers and devalue other normative concerns (Cushion, 2012; McChesney, 2012). Fenton’s (2011) analysis of the condition of journalism in the UK is indicative (see also Fenton, 2010). The production of a “public interest” news ecology has been undermined by various cost-cutting measures, commodifying journalism “at the expense of ideal democratic objectives” (Fenton, 2011, p. 64); competitive pressures have resulted in a homogenization of media attention where everyone chases the same story; and journalists have been forced to adapt to a commercial environment where they are increasingly reliant on public relations source material, a regime of “news production more akin to creative cannibalization than the craft of journalism” (p. 64). These developments become symptomatic of a neoliberalized news culture. Journalists and others are structurally forced to operate in conditions dominated by “the ruthless logic of an economic system that demands ever-increasing profit margins” (p. 65). And these trends assume a more brutal form in the digital ecology, as quantitative measures of audience attention become key surveillance mechanisms for determining news value and the value of journalistic labour.

Third, researchers have examined the effects of neoliberal production regimes on the nature and quality of media content. Soft-focus media and journal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Disfiguring Neoliberalism
• 1  Articulating Neoliberalism in Critical Media and Communication Studies
• 2  Neoliberal Discourse: Theory, History and Trajectories
• 3  Neoliberal Logics and Field Theory
• 4  Neoliberalism and Media Democracy: A Representative Anecdote from Post-Rogernomics New Zealand
• 5  The Journalistic Habitus and the Realist Style
• 6  Media Cultures, Anti-politics and the “Climategate” Affair
• 7  Neoliberal Imaginaries, Press Freedom and the Politics of Leveson
• 8  Media Rituals and the “Celtic Tiger”: The Neoliberal Nation and its Transnational Circulation
• Conclusion: The Possibility of a Radical Media Politics
• Notes
• References
• Index