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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 57

directly or indirectly present in all fields of activity and cannot be delimited to
specific spheres of social action, but it is particularly concentrated in the market
sphere of commodity production and circulation that links economic power to
media consumption. Through the commodity form and the market institutions,
economic power affects culture, arts, the media and the public sphere. 33
(2) Political power originates from the need to govern, coordinate and regulate
human activities, and is institutionalized in the form of state authorities, political
parties, a juridical system and – as the ultimate coercive power – the military’s armed
forces. Its primary resource is the right to legislate and allocate authority to the
holders of certain social positions to make political decisions, and supervise so that
legislation and laws are obeyed (if necessary, with the use of physical violence). This
administrative power determines the structured conditions for media use mainly
through legislation, regulations and subsidies that restrict the influence of economic
power on the media. The public service institutions in most European countries
occupy a considerable space between the market and the state, taking form already in
the early days of The Great Transformation, when the printing press contributed to
the rise of state apparatuses, nation states and new cultural mass markets. 34 State-
based and international politics still determine basic conditions for media use
through censorship, regulations of free speech and subsidies to media that cannot
survive on market conditions.
(3) Finally, symbolic power originates in a basic sense from the need to reduce the
contingency in people’s understanding of themselves, others and the world they live
in, but could in a more specific sense be defined as the government and regulation of
the meaning of symbolic forms and contents. In modern societies, symbolic power is
dispersed through a range of social institutions such as churches, schools, universi-
ties, art academies, museums, theatres and the media. Modern symbolic power tends
to be institutionalized into four main branches. A religious branch is concerned with
the sacral, otherworldly and metaphysical aspects of human life. A scientific branch
uses reason to interpret its profane and inner-worldly aspects. An aesthetic or artistic
branch is concerned with human sensibility, expressiveness and matters of taste.
Finally, a media branch is concerned with the transmission, diffusion and circulation
of symbolic contents and forms. These branches of institutionalized symbolic power
overlap, as they do with economic and political power. 35 Symbolic power is thus in
late-modern societies differentiated into mutually competing spheres whose relative
strengths shift historically. The so-called secularization process has for instance
displaced symbolic power from religious to scientific, art and media institutions.
Since the early twentieth century the media sector is a fast-expanding authority and
centre of gravity of symbolic power.
Symbolic power has been differentiated into distinct subfields of cultural produc-
tion, with varying degrees of autonomy, mechanisms of legitimization and consecra-
tion, and relations to economic and political power. The following model
summarizes the dimensions of media power, combining terms and insights from
Bourdieu and Habermas. 36

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