The Political Economies of Media

The Transformation of the Global Media Industries

Dwayne Winseck, Dal Yong Jin, Dwayne Winseck, Dal Yong Jin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781849664202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Some advocates and more than a few critics have misconstrued the political economy of media as a unified field of inquiry. The authors from this volume, by contrast, draw from a more diverse stream of the schools of thought signified by this tradition: Neoclassical Economics, Radical Media Political Economy, Schumpeterian Institutional Political Economy, and the Cultural Industries School. The book as a whole is as alert to developments in our main objects of analysis - media institutions, technologies, markets, uses and society - as it is to changes in the world around us, including current trends in communication and media studies. The contributors show that digital media are disrupting entire media industries, but without erasing the past. Throughout, the impact of the unprecedented wave of media consolidation in the late-1990s and the financial crisis of the past few years loom large. The authors also suggest that there is no 'supra logic' of 'total system integration' that spans the network media, while insisting that one media sector is not the same as the next. Social networking activities often beg, pilfer and borrow 'content' from 'traditional media', but it remains the case that Time Warner, Comcast, the BBC and News Corp. are very different creatures than Apple, Baidu, Facebook or Google. In other words, even in the age of convergence and remix culture, different media continue to display their own distinctive political economies, as the volume's title - The Political Economies of Media - signals.

PART ONE

Introductory Essay

The Political Economies of Media and the Transformation of the Global Media Industries

Dwayne Winseck

Carleton University

Setting the scene: baseline considerations

In this introductory chapter, I want to set the scene for this book and to paint a broad portrait of a certain view of communication and media studies, and the role of different political economies of the media in the field. Communication and media studies often labor under the illusion that political economy comes in one flavor, but here I suggest that we can identify at least four perspectives that have considerable currency in the field. They are (1) conservative and liberal neoclassical economics; (2) radical media political economy, with two main versions, the monopoly capital and digital capitalism schools; (3) Schumpeterian institutional political economy and two recent offshoots, the creative industries and network political economy schools; and lastly (4) the cultural industries school. Of course, neither all of this volume’s authors nor communication and media studies as a field can be placed so neatly in these categories, but other approaches can be thought of as derivatives of them (e.g. cultural economy, neo-Marxian political economy, critical cultural political economy, and economic geography).

To begin, we need to clearly specify our “object of analysis.” To that end, I focus on the “network media industries,” a composite of the 10 largest media and internet industries, ranked by total worldwide revenues: television, internet access, newspapers, books, films, magazines, music, radio, internet advertising, and video games. These industries do not exist all on their own but are surrounded by the “social ecology of information” and flanked, on one side, by the telecoms industries and, on the other, by the information, communication, and technology (ICT) sector. I use the concept of the network media industries in a way that follows Yochai Benkler (2006). The construct refers to the core and emergent public communications media that migrate around various distribution networks and media platforms and devices. It is not convergence, per se, but a network of media tied together through strategies, capital investment, ownership, technologies, uses, alliances, rights regimes, and so on. Methodologically and empirically, the concept is an important tool because it establishes what is included and excluded from analysis.

The network media concept also reflects judgments about how far digitally mediated communication has been subsumed by the processes of commercialization and capital accumulation (McChesney 2008; Mosco 2009a; Schiller 1999a). I follow the cultural industries’ claim that understanding the capitalization of the communication and media industries is essential but that the process itself is never complete (Miège 1989). In other words, digital network media are immersed within the market, but they also enable and depend upon forms of expression that are not market driven. These ideas line up well with Benkler’s concept of the “social production of information” and what others call “gift culture,” the “digital commons,” and “mass self-expression” (Andrejevic 2007; Castells 2009)—an amalgamation of which I call the “social ecology of information” (see below). These ideas also fit well with the cultural industries school’s emphasis on how the uncertainty and habits of people’s lives and patterns of media use erect strong barriers to the complete commodification of media and culture.

Political economies of media take it as axiomatic that the media must be studied in relation to their place within the broader economic and social context. This context is undeniably one where capitalist economies have expanded greatly over the past quarter of a century, albeit at a relatively slow pace in most of the Euro-American “advanced capitalist economies” since the post-1973 “long downturn.” After expanding across the planet, however, the global economy has staggered badly from one crisis after another in recent years, starting with the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, followed by the collapse of the dot-com bubble (late 2000–3), and the global financial crisis that erupted in 2007–8. The impact of these events on all aspects of the network media has been substantial in the Euro-American countries. Elsewhere, however, almost all media, from newspapers to the internet, are growing at a fast clip, as is the case in, for example, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and Turkey (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2010: 7; PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) 2010: 29).

The fact that the global financial crisis (2008) fell so fast on the heels of the collapse of the telecoms–media–technology (TMT), or dot-com bubble, should certainly disabuse us of the notion that improved communications will create “perfect information” and therefore “perfect market,” the mainstream economists holy grail. During the dot-com bubble years (1996–2000), the media, telecoms, and internet industries served as objects of massive financial investment and speculation (Brenner 2002; “The Great Telecom Crash” 2002). Some scholars also argue that the fast paced growth of business media, such as Business Week, CNBC, and The Economist, especially in India and China, have essentially served as the “handmaidens” of Wall Street and “the City” (London) (Shiller 2001; Chakravarty and Schiller 2010). Things are likely more complicated than that, however, as the chapters by Aeron Davis and Marc-André Pigeon in this book explain, but can essentially be boiled down to the idea that elite business-oriented newspapers (e.g. Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist), television channels (CNNfn, CNBC), and specialized news services (e.g. Bloomberg, Dow Jones, Thomson Reuters) help to circulate and crystallize certain key economic “conventions” among financial market traders, central bankers, policymakers, politicians, and journalists. The public is well aware of the financial world and its impact on people’s lives, but most people are neither all that interested in nor the primary subjects of these “convention-making conversations.”

Many observers argue that some segments of the media, journalism and music especially, that were already staggering from the steady rise of the internet and falling advertising revenues have been tipped headlong into the abyss by the global financial crisis of 2007–8. The financial crisis, however, has also spurred many governments to invest substantial sums of stimulus money into next generation networks (NGNs), basically 100 Mbps fiber-to-the-home networks. In Australia, Korea, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and at least a dozen other countries, more than US$71 billion has been pledged to develop universally accessible fiber and/or wireless-based NGNs over the next few years. The most ambitious of these projects, in Australia, will bring 100 Mbps fiber networks to over 90 percent of homes in the next 5 years through a new government-created company, the National Broadband Network Company (NBN Co.). In Sweden and Holland, municipal governments and cooperatives are doing the same thing (Benkler, Faris, Gasser, Miyakawa, and Schultze 2010: 162–4; Middleton and Givens 2010). These are the digital public works projects of the twenty-first century. Some wonder if they mark the renationalization of telecoms after 30 years of privatization and neoliberalism (IDATE 2009: 16).

In reference to the United States, Robert McChesney and John Nichols (2010) argue that the crisis now facing journalism will only be turned around if new forms of journalism and public media, including universal, affordable, and open broadband internet services, are well-financed by these stimulus projects. The range of such initiatives suggests that we live in unconventional times, and in such times the boundaries of what is possible expand. Of the nonconventional media options now on offer, Benkler (2010), Benkler et al. 2010), McChesney and Nichols (2010: 96–7), and Eli Noam (2009: 15–16) identify the following “ideal types”: public service media (e.g. BBC), employee or co-op ownership, effective nonprofit media (Wikipedia), municipal broadband networks, community media, small commercial media (Talking Points Memo, Huffington Post, GlobalPost), and volunteer partisan media (Indymedia). This is truly an impressive display of structural diversity. It is significant and should not be underplayed. But is it revolutionary? As we will see, that depends on whether you ask followers of Joseph Schumpeter or Karl Marx.

Perhaps, however, this is just another wave of “creative destruction” that happens every so often to wipe away the old, and usher in the new, as Joseph Schumpeter (1943/1996: 83) put it in his c...