Page 124 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Concentration and commercialisation 103

Attending to such network processes can help displace analyses that are too
centred on individual companies or agents (including owners), and help to identify
the interdependencies and processes of co-opetition discussed. They can also theorise
power in productive ways as both distributed (unevenly) in networks and as struc-
tured by network characteristics. Yet, sophisticated accounts of the dispersal of
power can offer a dissolution that many CPE scholars will reject. The analysis of
capitalist economic processes and class relations tends to be supplanted, and in
place of structured hierarchies of power a flatter, more open and porous account of
network power is offered. There are undoubted benefits from such network analysis
but the framework can be as limiting as those it seeks to supplant. Arsenault (2012:
102) proposes ANT as an approach that ‘complements rather than replaces more
traditional political economic approaches’, yet the division between these can be
overstated. Arsenault argues that to assess firms’ dominance ‘we must look
beyond traditional measures of the political economic power of media, such as allo-
cational, economic, and attention scarcity … power is equally evidenced in an actor’s
ability to institute network program changes in the media and communications sector
and its ability to influence and leverage connections to parallel networks’ (119). Shorn
of the network terminology it is inaccurate to suggest CPE has pursued the former
at the expense of the latter. There are also problems when networks are ascribed
agency, as in Arsenault’s formulation of networks as ‘the dominant social structure
guiding the operations of contemporary communications businesses’. How are
networks ‘guiding’ forces? If dominant, how do networks relate to economic
processes of capitalism and how should their relationship be understood?
Global media industries involve practices that are highly damaging to the
environment from energy use and waste. This relates to another key problem area,
media representations of the ecological crisis and environmentalism. Maxwell
(2009) proposes an agenda for research on media industrialisation that encom-
passes non-human biodiversity, the latter sharing actor–network theory’sefforts
to move beyond human-centric perspectives in favour of a broader appreciation
of organic life incorporating non-human actants.
We have traced above a number of issues and concerns but the CPE critique
of media concentration can be summarised as follows:

1 The concentration of market power can stifle competition.
2 The private concentration of symbolic power potentially distorts the democratic
process by granting too much capacity for influence to private media owners
(Curran 2002; Baker 2007).
3 The media power at the disposal of media moguls tends to be exerted in a
one-sided way, promoting pro-capitalist interests.
4 Media groups drive policy –‘centralizing and globalizing firms need and seek
political support for their advances’ (Herman and McChesney 1997: 172).

Traditionally the critique of media concentration made by both liberals and
radicals focused on the consequences for democracy. Ownership concentration