Critical Media Analysis

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Chapter 1

What (is) political economy of the media?

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’,

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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

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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 asso- ciated 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

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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 com- parisons 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

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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

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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 within the CPE tradition. Marx contributed to socialist and revolutionary politics but his major legacy is derived from his elaboration of a materialist philosophy (historical materialism) and critical analysis of capitalism. CPE draws on this complex legacy in analysing capitalist production and social relations. Mansell (2004: 98) summarises ‘[i]f resources are scarce, and if power is unequally distributed in society, then the key issue is how these scarce resources are allocated and controlled, and with what consequences for human action’. Critical political economy insists on connecting the study of media to broader patterns of social existence and in particular to questions of the allocation of resources. As British political economist Nicholas Garnham argues, this means identifying how communication and culture relate to processes of production and reproduction within capitalist society. The political economy of culture needs to be situated within an overall analysis of capitalism with ‘a political economy of mass communication taking its subsidiary place within that wider framework as the analysis of an important, but historically specific mode of the wider process of cultural production and reproduction’ (Garnham 1979: 123). Mosco (2009: 94–95) describes this approach as ‘decentering the media’.

One key influence, then, is Marxism, although political economists have grappled with the limitations and criticism of ‘classical Marxism’ to a greater extent than many dismissive criticisms allow. In particular, the revising of a Marxist tradition within political economy has occurred through the confluence of two other influential currents – democratic theory/politics and cultural theory/politics. Political economy shares many of the democratic aspirations of liberal pluralist accounts of the media in serving citizens, but it challenges the ability of corporate-owned media to adequately do so, and mounts a critique of the capitalist market relations on which liberalism is contingent. Political economy draws upon classical democratic theory’s insistence that democracy is based on an informed, participating citizenry, to assert that such political culture can only be generated by a more diverse, democratised media system. Shaped by Marx’s critique of capitalism, the Western Marxist critique of commodification, reifica- tion and the ‘culture industry’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997 [1944]), and by theories of ‘strong’, participatory democracy, political economy criticises the capitalist market system for its failure to deliver economic fairness, social justice or the basis for a democratic polity (McChesney 1998, 2008; Mosco 2009; Murdock and Golding 2005; Hardy 2010b).

The principle of democratic governance, rule by the many, has been a guiding inspiration for critical scholars and a corrective to the ideas and legacy of centralised state control exercised by Communist states under the influence of the Comintern. Western Marxism embraced tenets of participatory democracy

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in its rejection of Soviet Communism and embarked on a positive reassessment of the institutions and processes of civil society, for instance in Habermas’s influential analysis of the public sphere. Democratic theory has thus served to complement, challenge and exceed the limitations of Marxism in theory and practice. This connects to the third key influence, that of cultural theory/politics. CPE scholars have been influenced by and have contributed to a wide range of radical traditions that examine and contest forms of discrimination and oppression based on gender, race, sexuality, disability, age and geocultural relations. How these connect to class conflict and class relations are ongoing debates, but CPE is shaped by the influence and tensions across Marxism, democratic theory and organisation, and cultural theory and politics.

CPE approaches to media

Critical political economy of media examines how the political and economic organisation (‘political economy’) of media industries affects the production and circulation of meaning, and connects to the distribution of symbolic and material resources that enable people to understand, communicate and act in the world. This has three main implications for studying media. First, it requires careful study of how the communications industries work. Here, political economists focus on ownership, finance and support mechanisms (such as advertising), and on how the policies and actions of governments and other organisations influence and affect media behaviour and content. Another key concern is the organisation of cultural production, addressing questions of labour processes and relations, managerial control and creative autonomy for cultural producers. This opens up to the second main topic, the influences and consequences of different ways of organising the media: commercial, state, public and their complex combinations. Analysts engage in historical and contemporary studies of the changing nature of ‘structural’ influences, such as dependence on advertising finance, the range of political, social and cultural influences on media institutions, and the interactions of all those seeking to influence the media. This connects with the third main area: the relationships between media content and communication systems, and the broader structure of society. To understand any specific media form requires addressing ‘how it is produced and distributed in a given society and how it is situated in relation to the dominant social structure’ (Kellner 2009: 96). In particular, CPE asks a question that distinguishes it from various ‘mainstream’ approaches that either ignore, support or accept prevailing social relations: what contribution do the media make in reinforcing or undermining political and social inequality? (McChesney 2003).

For Murdock and Golding (2005: 61) political economy approaches are dis- tinguished in four main ways. They are holistic, seeing the economy as interrelated with political, social and cultural life, rather than as a separate domain. They are historical, paying close attention to long-term changes in the role of state, corpora- tions and media in society. They are ‘centrally concerned with the balance

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between private enterprise and public intervention’, between the private and public provision of services. Finally, ‘and perhaps most importantly of all’, they go beyond ‘technical issues of efficiency’ (in terms of market transactions between producers and consumers) ‘to engage with basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good’.

Culture and industry

CPE takes up the notion of the industrialisation of culture, and culture as industry, from the Frankfurt School theorists, notably Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Media, argues the Western CPE tradition, are ‘first and foremost industrial and commercial organisations which produce and distribute commodities’ (Murdock and Golding 1974: 205–6). The study of media production has intrinsic value in understanding how and under what conditions media are ‘made’. However, CPE rests on a larger claim, that understanding ‘production’ is necessary in order to fully understand media ‘content’ and ‘audiences’. To repeat a central proposition: different ways of organising and financing communications have implications for the range and nature of media content. For Golding and Murdock (1977): ‘It is only by situating cultural products within the nexus [interlinking] of material interests which circumscribe their creation and distribution that their range and content can be fully explained’. According to a later formulation (Murdock and Golding 2005: 60) CPE ‘sets out to show how different ways of financing and organising cultural production have traceable consequences for the range of discourses, representa- tions and communicative resources in the public domain and for the organization of audience access and use’ (my emphasis). This formulation bears traces of a debate on the relative importance of economic factors for a full understanding of the (ideological) meaning of texts. As a much earlier essay puts it, to understand the production of meaning requires not only analysis of how ideology is inscribed in texts and readings, but ‘grasping the general economic dynamics of media production and the determinations they exert’ (Golding and Murdock 1979: 210). We will address these issues of ‘determination’ further below.

Core themes

So what has been the focus of work coming from this CPE tradition? According to Murdock and Golding (2005: 64) ‘five historical processes are particularly central to a critical political economy of culture: the growth of the media; the extension of corporate reach; commodification; the universalization of citizenship; and the changing role of state and government intervention’. These important themes also serve to emphasise CPE’s efforts to examine how the media connect to broader social arrangements. I want to begin though with a more media-centric overview of themes.

A conventional mapping divides media analysis into three areas: production, content and audience. Numerous problems and limitations with this model have

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been highlighted. It is more suited to a transmission model of ‘mass commu- nication’, of one-to-many communication, and locates production and audiences at opposite poles. This framework has been found particularly ill-suited to grapple with more recent shifts in relations between production and consump- tion, signalled by terms such as ‘produser’ and ‘prosumer’, with user-generated content, demassification and convergence between ‘vertical’ mass media and ‘horizontal’ mediated communications. Nevertheless the model is useful in mapping what remain core foci in media analysis, as well as helping to identify points of ‘divisions’ in the field.

Production

CPE is most associated with the study of ‘production’ and in a caricatured, but prevalent, version is limited to an account of media ownership and finance. A related, and more nuanced, criticism is that CPE has tended to offer a limited account of media texts (content) and has tended to ignore important aspects of audiences and consumption – how audiences and users read and make meaning from texts. These are important criticisms that we will address, but the equation of CPE scholarship with ‘production’ is inaccurate and must be rejected. What does characterise CPE analysis is an insistence on addressing the organisation of production. Against analyses that narrowly focus on textual construction (‘textualist’) or on the consumption of media meanings, CPE calls for analysts to engage with the manner in which media communications are produced and, more broadly, with the conditions that influence production practices. Amongst the key topics examined are media ownership, finance, governance and regulation, the organisation of media work, influences on media, including owners, managers, advertisers, sources and users.

Content

If production matters for CPE analysis it can nevertheless be distinguished from approaches that deal solely with the economic aspects of media industries and markets, because CPE calls for attention to the ‘interplay between the symbolic and economic dimensions’ of the production of meaning (Murdock and Golding 2005: 60). Attention to the production of culture is combined with regard for the complex nature and properties of cultural commodities (symbolic value). The goods manufactured by cultural industries ‘play a pivotal role in organizing the images and discourses through which people make sense of the world’ (Murdock and Golding 2005: 60).

A key focus for CPE is to examine how media and communications serve to sustain the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Media are connected to the ways in which power is sustained through meanings. There are tensions, however, in regard to analysis of ideology, of ideas that serve to sustain relations of dominance (Thompson 1990; Eagleton 2007). First, such ideology critique has been regarded

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by some political economists as too textualist, disconnecting the interpretation of texts from an appreciation of the conditions in which they were formed. A second criticism is of over-simplistic readings of dominant ideologies within texts. Third, has been criticism of the supposed effects and influence of ideology on audiences. A fourth area of dispute concerns epistemology. Ideology critique involves challen- ging the construction of reality in discourse, and truth claims. Poststructuralism, which vies as a leading paradigm in media and cultural studies, regards ‘reality’ as a product of language. As Lee (2003: 154) writes of one influential grouping, the Yale school deconstructionists such as Paul de Man and Stanley Fish, there are ‘no facts, only interpretations; no truths, only expedient fictions’. Can appeals to reality be sustained without falling back into naïve realism? CPE adopts a critical realist epistemology. Critical realism is a philosophy of science that distinguishes between real structures, actual processes or events and empirical evidence (traces of events) (Jessop 2008: 45). It recognises ‘the reality of both concepts and social practices’ (Mosco 2009: 128) and engages in efforts to use empirical evidence to help assess which concepts and theories are more or less valuable. It rejects epistemologies based on ideas alone (ideographic) or ‘facts’ alone (positivism) and seeks to engage and balance theoretical and empirical considerations, conceiving reality as ‘made up of both what we see and how we explain what we see’ (Mosco 1996: 2). For the Marxist scholar Christian Fuchs (2011: 265):

Empirical ideology critique tests whether certain claims about reality can be questioned by looking for counter-evidence that supports the assumptions that the claims are mythological and contradict evidence about the state of reality. It introduces a different level of reality to claims about reality and thereby tries to increase epistemological complexity. It is based on the assumption that reality is complex and contradictory and that one-dimensional representations of reality lack complexity and should therefore be questioned.

CPE scholars challenge the perceived image of their subfield as confirming, over and over, that ownership of the means of media production by capital manifests itself as, and explains, control over meaning. For Garnham (1979: 136) ‘Because capital controls the means of cultural production … it does not follow that these cultural commodities will necessarily support, whether in their explicit content or in their mode of cultural appropriation, the dominant ideology’. Critical scholarship needs to examine both iterations of ideology and yet remain alert to signs of conflict, contestation and contradiction in the production and consumption of meanings (Mosco 2009: 96).

Audience

A common view associating CPE with the study of ‘production’, to the relative neglect of media consumption and audiences, needs revision. There has been very strong and extended engagement with audiences within CPE scholarship.

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What characterises this work, however, is an insistence on connecting audience experience to the economics and power dynamics of media provision. There has been historical and contemporary analysis of how audiences are commodified and sold to marketers (Meehan 2005; Wasko and Hagen 2000; chapter six). Another key focus has been on the implications of audience valuation for media finance, examining how advertising serves as a system of subsidy that privileges media serving audiences valued by advertisers, from Oscar Gandy’s work on the consequences for Black and minority media, to Turow’s (2011) work on the implications of profiling and targeting across the Internet. The ways in which wealth, time, gender and other factors structure access to communications is another central theme. Yet, CPE scholars have acknowledged the tradition’s relative neglect of meaning-making processes in the reception, consumption and use of media products, and made various efforts to remedy this by drawing on the insights of cultural studies and other traditions to examine the production and circulation of meaning. As feminist political economist Ellen Riordan (2002: 8) maintains ‘it is not sufficient to look only at how corporations limit and constrain cultural representations; we must also interrogate the consumption of these ideological images by groups of people who are in turn sold to advertisers as a niche market’. One ambitious effort to combine political economic con- textualisation and audience reception analysis was the Global Disney Audiences project (Wasko et al. 2001; Biltereyst and Meers 2011).

Media scholarship involves choices and decision about which aspects of the circuit of communications, encompassing production and consumption, to focus investigation on. Despite its caricature image as being focused on ‘production’, CPE analysis can claim to have a greater regard for holism (Deacon 2003) than many other approaches, not least those that ignore conditions of production. It is certainly true that the demands of holism are rarely fully realised, but the effort to trace relationships and consequences of the organisation of communications is a principal feature of CPE analyses. Curran (2006) gives an example of such an approach in examining crime coverage in US local television news. In the context of deregulation and marketisation, increased competition in supply and rising pressure to meet corporate owners’ and investors’ expectations for profit, coverage of crime sharply increased in US television in the 1990s, being both cheap and popular. By the mid 1990s reporting violent crime accounted for two-thirds of local TV news output in fifty-six US cities (Klite et al. 1997). Incessant coverage contributed to a growing proportion of Americans judging crime to be the most serious problem facing the nation, despite crime levels actually falling. Research by Iyengar and others showed that ‘Local TV news tended also to focus on decontextualised acts of violent crime by black perpetrators in ways that strengthened racial hostility, and fuelled demands for punitive retribution’ (Curran 2006: 140). Such analysis requires that we address the organisation and culture of journalists, the influence of sources, news agendas, media discourses and media influence. Yet equally, it shows that we must address the political economic context and policy changes to fully grasp why news changed, with

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consequences for the way in which both public issues and socio-ethnic groups were ‘framed’.

How do media relate to power sources in society? Whose interests are repre- sented? Who is represented in media? Who has access to communication resources – and what can they do with them? Political economy argues that to answer such questions we need not only the analysis of texts, or texts and readers, but analysis of the forces and interests shaping media and the conditions of production. How you judge political economy will depend on how you view the focus of investigation – the questions it poses and tries to answer. It will also depend on whether you share perspectives that insist there are ‘problems’ in our media systems, whether you are persuaded that it is important to examine these problems and consider how to try to put them right. Critical political economy of communications is a critical realist approach that investigates problems connected with the

political and economic organisation of communication resources.

Critical political economy and its others

The tradition of critical political economy is commonly defined, in part, by way of its distinction from three main alternatives: neoclassical/mainstream media economics, liberal pluralist communication studies and cultural studies (Mosco 2009: 128; Hesmondhalgh 2013). Two are broadly defined as ‘mainstream’ traditions (media economics and liberal communications) while the third is a rival cluster of radical approaches. Defining CPE from its ‘others’ has value but also limitations; it risks perpetuating a tired, rigid classification and entrenching crude and out-dated divisions of a field that is ceaselessly changing. It is also important to resist imposing a false coherence upon any of these approaches, all of which have great internal diversity, dynamic interconnections and complex affiliations. We will engage with the value and validity of these divisions more fully, but they do have some explanatory value. They help us to trace, recover and reassess the influences, points of difference, as well as the often coded shorthand, through which analysts have worked, disagreed and debated.

Neoclassical/modern media economics

Critical political economy starkly diverges from principles of neoclassical economics that continue to influence ‘mainstream’ economics. Neoclassical economics pre- sumes the desirability of a capitalist market economy. This set of values is most pronounced in neoliberal thought, where economics is harnessed to a political programme whereby the creation of efficient and unfettered markets is the principal goal of public policy. Neoliberalism ‘refers to the set of national and international policies that call for business domination of all social affairs with minimal countervailing force’ (McChesney 2001). Market competition is promoted as the best mechanism not only for economic ‘growth’ but also for social organisation and the distribution of resources. Yet, modern economic

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thought is far from unified, and some economists, including ones working on media and communications, critique the neoclassical assumptions of rational actors calculating utility maximisation, or the conditions for perfect and imperfect competition, drawing on economic history, psychology and psychoanalytic theory (Sackrey et al. 2010; Miller 2008).

Media economics is a subfield of economics that analyses the media, commu- nications and cultural industries using economic concepts. This work takes different forms with varying levels of ‘integration’ into media and cultural analysis. The influence of specialist economic analysis on communications research media has been rather limited historically. It has informed legal policy studies, ‘political economic’ analysis, and to a lesser extent ‘cultural economy’ work, but has generally remained a largely separate, specialist domain. This is changing, however. Recognition of the importance of economics in understanding dynamic changes in media markets has informed mainstream communications research and teaching. The significance of financing, business operations and markets to understanding the challenges and transformations of media services, underscores this. There is an expanding body of literature on media economics, examining media markets, convergence, digitalisation, transnationalisation and labour (Doyle 2002b; Hoskins et al. 2004; Alexander et al. 2004; Hesmondhalgh 2013).

Critical political economists draw on this media economics literature but highlight certain limitations arising from either the ‘uncritical’ application of economic concepts, or claims made for free-market mechanisms. What is at issue is less the tools and techniques of economic analysis, or even its insights, than the conceptual and value framework. The CPE tradition is sceptical concerning claims made for markets; it challenges the neglect of asymmetry in regard to the power of actors in markets, and it challenges the contraction of ‘value’ to the measure of market-based exchanges.

Liberal pluralist communication studies

In the post-war period Western scholarship was dominated by what Pietilä (2005: 105–26) calls ‘classical behavioural mass communication research’. According to the behaviourist paradigm, researchers should examine only those behaviours that can be directly observed and measured, with the goal of deriving propositions that could be tested, thus applying methods from the physical sciences to the social sciences. This privileged empirical research and techniques while leaving unquestioned the social organisation of media provision and tended to neglect ethical and critical perspectives. Most influential in the United States, this positivist tradition prompted critical reaction elsewhere (see Nordenstreng 1968; Christians et al. 2009: 184). Early researchers in the CPE tradition did not reject empirical investigation, in fact they insisted on gathering material evidence, but did reject empiricism, ‘the reduction of all intellectual activity to the production of falsifiable statements about observed behaviour’ (Mosco 2009: 79). Instead scholars argued for a critical approach that acknowledged the relationship

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between observed reality, truth claims and power interests, an approach developed in the influential work of the Frankfurt School.

The main division between CPE and liberal pluralism concerns the analysis of power and power relations. Liberal pluralist political thought conceives of interest groups who vie for power in a manner which is open and contingent. Inequality in power and resources between interest groups is acknowledged, but no group dominates. Sustained dominance is rejected because it would undermine the affirmation of the ‘democratic’ political system that liberalism defends, and dis- tinguishes from authoritarian systems. This means that forms of systematic and structured inequality are ‘downplayed in favour of an implicitly optimistic notion of society as a level playing ground where different interest groups fight for their interests’ (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 32). A rich strand of liberal media sociology offers much needed empirical and ethnographic studies of media organisations, media work, as well as participation and engagement by users. However, this work has also been challenged for its relative neglect of economic influences (Golding and Murdock 1979: 200). Differences between liberal pluralist and radical approaches to media are examined more fully in the next chapter.

Cultural studies

Cultural studies emerged as another strand of radical scholarship. Its origins lie in the work of British social historians and literary scholars including Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and later Stuart Hall. Cultural studies explores the dynamics of power and culture across an unbounded terrain, including cultural globalisation and diaspora, analyses of race, gender, sexuality and disability. It has challenged narrow, often elitist, orderings of what constitutes cultural value, to embrace a very wide range of phenomena and to apply insights and approaches to broader sectors including the economy. It has drawn on a wide range of sociocultural theory from work on psychoanalysis, semiotics, language and affect, to cultural theories of social organisations, behaviour and interaction, and cultural policy and politics.

Very much has been written on the ‘long-standing theoretical and methodological affinities and tensions’ (Chakravartty and Zhao 2008: 10) between CPE and cultural studies, and the institutionalised debate that has flared with often bitter heat for nearly three decades. The 1980s and 1990s saw sometimes vitriolic exchanges from traditions that both claimed a radical legacy and mission, and defended themselves against the putative existential threat posed by the other. Divisions between cultural studies and political economy structured the field of media studies in some educational environments, notably the UK; relations between these ‘camps’ became hostile, combative and ‘adversarial’ (Mosco 2009: 80). There are compelling arguments both for and against revisiting this ‘cultural studies vs. political economy’ divide. The principal case against is that many of the heated divisions are of their time, marking out the intellectual and material environment of the 1980s and 1990s, and are arguably of greatest interest

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to historians. The principal case for revisiting is that the division can help new generations of students to map and decode differences formulated in contemporary as well as historical writings.

The shared intellectual roots of cultural studies and political economy have been described by many scholars (Babe 2009). This excavation has often been allied to an effort at reintegration or a redrawing of the map to realign critical scholars working across cultural studies and CPE traditions (Meehan 1999; Couldry 2000; Fenton 2007; Hesmondhalgh 2007). This is vital work, to which this book seeks to contribute. For Babe (2009: 4):

Cultural studies may be loosely defined as the multidisciplinary study of culture across various social strata, where culture refers to arts, knowledge, beliefs, customs, practices, and norms of social interaction. Studies in political economy of media, in contrast, focus on the economic, financial, and political causes and consequences of culture.

Babe argues that there are common roots in cultural materialism, an approach developed in the work of Raymond Williams. Williams (1983: 210) called for a ‘cultural materialist’ approach that should pursue ‘analysis of all forms of signification [ … ] within the actual means and conditions of their production’.

Williams (1980: 243–44) outlined ‘a theory of culture as a (social and material) productive process and of specific practices, of “arts”, as social uses of material means of production’. This emphasised that cultural forms and activities needed to be comprehended in more encompassing social processes. The legacy was complex, though. As Schiller (1996: 187) discusses, Williams’s cultural materialist theory generated an ‘ambiguous oscillation, for it explicitly assigned to language, communication and consciousness as such “a primacy co-equal with other forms of the material social process, including … ‘labour’ or ‘production’ ” ’, yet reproduced the dualism in the terms used in discussion, tending to separate language (or consciousness) and production (or being). The field of communications, argues Schiller (1996) has struggled to overcome such dualistic thinking, dividing mental and material and cultural and economic in Western thought, a dualism that Peck (2006) argues structured the mid 1990s debates on political economy versus cultural studies between Nicholas Garnham and Lawrence Grossberg.2

The formative intellectual context in which CPE and cultural studies developed has been mapped, albeit in fragmented ways. Schiller (1996: 186) highlights the turn to culture in the 1960s and 1970s, informing political economic analysis of ‘transnational corporate communication’ and British cultural studies’ ‘engagement with the history and present status of the British working class and, soon, with the anti-racist and feminist movements that began once again to burgeon. In both cases “culture” appeared to satisfy, or at least, to raise the prospect of satisfying the need for drastic conceptual revision of entrenched Marxian formulations’. Curran (2004) traces how the influence of Marxism and literary studies led to British cultural studies and along a path through textual analysis, psychoanalytic

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theory and ideology to postmodernism and towards idealist thought and acquiescence. Likewise, McGuigan (1992) charts the shifts from cultural materi- alism to cultural populism and a more celebratory account of consumer/user power in cultural markets. Against the much better known Birmingham School of British Cultural Studies (whose first directors were Richard Hoggart, then Stuart Hall), Curran (2004) describes a Westminster tradition where Nicholas Garnham, Curran and others took a more materialist path focused on policy and regulation, media institutions and work, technology and history. Babe (2009: 84) argues that in their formative years political economy and cultural studies approaches ‘were fully integrated, consistent, and mutually supportive’. CPE shares common roots and integrates well with critical cultural studies (char- acterised by Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism) but the other scion of postmodernist cultural studies is inimical. Critical of the postmodernist (and populist) turn in cultural studies, Babe advocates the reintegration of a cultural materialist, critical cultural studies with political economy. We will return to examine these issues at various points but to do so it is important to identify key differences informing relations between varieties of cultural studies and CPE, some of which remain salient. However, divisions at the level of ontology, episte- mology, methods, political philosophy and outlook belie easy summary, much less synthesis (see Ferguson and Golding 1997; Mosco 2009; Curran 2002; Meehan and Riordan 2002; Cottle 2003a; Babe 2009). Three key areas of division are epistemology, politics and political and social theory, and theories and analysis of culture and communications.

Epistemology

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and is concerned with the nature, sources and extent of the knowable, and the justifications for beliefs. As discussed above, CPE generally operates in an epistemological framework of critical realism. This realist epistemology is based on the ‘assumption that there is a material world external to our cognitive processes which possesses specific properties ultimately accessible to our understanding’ (Garnham 1990: 3). That reality is only accessible to us through concepts and discourses, but there is a material reality independent of discursive construction. For some culturalist critics such ‘realism’ is conflated with positivism, a crude belief in the capacity to determine ‘objective’ facts from external reality. Cultural studies, influenced by postmodernist thought, tends towards post-positivist, constructionist and subjectivist epistemologies (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 46). Yet, plenty of culturalist scholars share the main tenets of critical realism. Instead, a more general critique made of CPE is that it is empiricist, privileging observable ‘facts’ at the expense of interrogating meaning systems and articulations with rigour, in other words doing precisely what the Frankfurt School decried. The charge itself reflects tensions traceable to the humanities’ influences on cultural studies and the social scientific influences on CPE (Philo and Miller 2001). Some observations; first, it is problematic to conflate empirical

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analysis with naïve realism since this tends to discount the methods and material of empirical analysis which are indispensable tools for investigating media and for any ‘cultural materialism’. Second, debates on realism are ongoing within contemporary critical scholarship, with notable efforts to provide theoretical sophistication (Garnham 2000; Fuchs 2011). Third, there are, as Babe examines, deeper and more irreconcilable divisions between critical realism and postmodernism.

Politics and political and social theory

Cultural studies has been particularly associated with pluralising what constitutes the political. This has been influenced by feminist, LGBT, postcolonialist, and new social movement critiques of the exclusivity, selectivity, narrowness and hierarchisations of what constitutes the ground of politics. At a theoretical level Foucault’s rejection of a conception of power as repressive in favour of one where power is productive, diffused through discursive interactions, has been particularly influential. Identifying with the marginalised and subaltern, cultural studies has aligned with radical social movements but has tended to remain suspicious and disconnected from ‘organised’ labour movement politics, in con- trast to stronger links within CPE with labour and organised working class movements. There are, of course, vital debates about the scope, orientation and organisation of ‘progressive’ political change. Writers in the traditions of cultural studies and political economy have sought to clarify, and sometimes exacerbate, these divisions and so this remains fraught territory to navigate, with a legacy of reductive positioning and caricaturing. For some CPE writers, cultural studies approaches privilege social identity at the expense of addressing the political and economic forces that structure entitlements, inequality and oppression under capitalism (Mosco 2009). Cultural studies writers in turn have challenged CPE as privileging class-based politics and organised labour movements that are regarded as complicit with, or less radical in countering, other forms of oppression, notably those based on gender, sexuality and ethnicity.

One key division has been in regard to the politics of recognition and associated power dynamics. Much of this is traceable to an older debate about Marxian class politics and its privileging of social class over gender, race and other divisions of power. The industrial working class as subject of history was challenged by both the evident failure of this unified subject to overthrow capitalism and the ordering of power which displaced other sources of oppression including those generated by the revolutionary (male) subject. However, it has been an unfor- tunate characteristic of radical ‘left’ movements to engage in often bitter and arcane sectarian divisions amongst themselves. The struggle has had added heat in academia for various reasons. It is much more a ‘war of words’, as shared commitment to praxis (theory-in-practice) and public–political engagement is more difficult to realise. Further, the debate strikes at core values and self-images for avowed radicals. As many now argue, in Euro-America at least, the times

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demand that those seeking to sustain and advance critical work find common cause against neoconservatism (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 47), and the threat to criticality arising from marketisation pressures in higher education.

Cultural theory

A core organising tenet for cultural studies is to challenge the condescension, elitism and cultural hierarchism that justifies denigrating or disregarding ordinary, everyday culture. Here cultural studies identifies elitist perspectives from the political left, as well as right-tending conservatism, with the Frankfurt School’s critical pessimism ritually condemned in textbook accounts. Within cultural studies a reading of contemporary culture emerged that challenged at key points the critical perspectives of CPE. Cultural studies ‘had a fairly positive perspective, counting on the potential resistance of working-class culture in the face of capitalist domination’ (Christians et al. 2009: 185). The critical concerns with mass media power and influence were mitigated and minimised by counter-assertions. Commercial mass media dominance was less consequential because its content was raw material used for refashioning into more autonomous and oppositional cultures and meanings (Jenkins 1992). For Lull (1995: 73) ‘Popular culture … is empowering. The mass media contribute to the process by distributing cultural resources to oppressed individuals and subordinate groups which they use to construct their tactics of resistance against hegemonic strategies of containment’. This perspective became dominant in a more optimistic version of cultural studies variously described as ‘cultural populism’ (McGuigan 1992) and ‘celebratory cultural studies’ (Babe 2009). A key dynamic in cultural studies was to reject the assumed passivity of audiences and emphasise instead the interpretative capabilities of ‘active audiences’, the productive refashioning of cultural texts by subcultures and fans, and more recently interactivity and co-creation online. Cultural studies has foregrounded issues of ‘textuality, subjectivity, identity, discourse and pleasure in relation to culture’ (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 42). The ‘new’ audience researchers emphasised the active construction of meaning and the appropriation of media products to fashion independent, even oppositional, cultures.

The CPE critique is that cultural studies progressively abandoned attention to the structural factors that influence the production of media content (McChesney 2004a: 43). CPE scholars have charged that the relative absence of analysis of capitalism and the structuring influence of class relations restricts the explanatory reach of cultural studies and contributes in some versions to an uncritical account of market provision (‘cultural populism’). In some areas of enquiry what began as an informed criticism of economism and reductiveness in analysis ended up as an evasion of problems of power in all but the most micro of contexts.

The problems of corporate control over communications, emphasised by critical political economists, could be answered by a more consoling account that granted independent creativity and agency to audiences. Political

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economists argued that active audience accounts reproduced liberal ‘uses and gratifications’ research, taking media provision as given (offering an uncritical account of what was made available for audiences) and downplaying the highly unequal power dynamics between producers and consumers (Mattelart 1994: 237).

An influential model developed by scholars at the Open University (UK) conceptualised a ‘circuit of production linking processes of representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation’ (Du Gay: 1997). They argued that all these foci are required to ‘complete’ a study, and that any can serve as entry points for analysis. By contrast, CPE scholars argue for an ordering and sequencing of analysis that recognises the antecedence of production; ‘production is processually and temporally prior to consumption’ (Born 2000: 416). For Murdock (2003: 17) analysing ‘the dynamics that are currently reshaping the professional production of public culture’ is ‘an essential first step to understanding the symbolic textures of everyday life’.

Today the re-examination of production and consumption stimulates fruitful dialogue and integration across CPE and culturalist work, for instance in work on the dynamics of corporate synergy and intertextuality. Corporations seek to exploit their brands and intellectual property across a wide range of media platforms, forms and allied merchandise, which are promoted and cross-promoted through their various media outlets. The strategies of recycling, reversioning and repurposing have been analysed by CPE scholars as strategies to maximise revenues, including using corporate forms of transmedia storytelling, as in the Matrix trilogy and spin-off products, to create ‘narratively necessary purchases’ (Proffitt et al. 2007: 239; Meehan 2005). Within culturalist literature such ‘top down’ critiques of power tend to be reversed in favour of a more celebratory account that takes themes of active audiences and resistant readings into an analysis of fan-generated production. The best work, however, is alert to the contradictory tensions in fandom (Hills 2002) and draws on the strengths of CPE and cultural studies to examine the nature of the constraints and opportunities of inter- textuality. Jenkins (2006) examines the contradictions for media companies in their desire to police intellectual property while encouraging lucrative forms of immersion by fans. Waetjen and Gibson (2007) argue that Time Warner’s Harry Potter films and merchandise created a ‘corporate reading’ that supplanted the contradictory and polysemous discourses on commodification encountered in the J.K. Rowling books. Such studies highlight the value of considering how corpo- rate activity seeks to order ‘(inter) textual space’, encouraging analysis of the contending forces and sites of communicative exchange involving user-generated content alongside corporate promotions and journalistic commentary (Hardy 2010a, 2011). In turn this allows for a critical political economy that is alert to contradictions within cultural production and exchange, and can draw on the insights of cultural theory. Far from diminishing critical accounts this strengthens analysis of power dynamics, including corporate strategies to impose proprietary control over symbolic meanings.

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