Page 125 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

104 Critical investigations in political economy

threatens to amplify the values and interests of media owners, restrict the public
role of journalists and limit the range of voices and opinions necessary for an
informed citizenry and effective democracy. Yet cultural pluralism has been a
growing concern. The diversity of ideas and imagery matter as well as diversity of
information (Murdock 1992b; Andersen 2000). Such an expanded understanding of
media pluralism informs European policy-making. The Council of Europe (CoE)
understands media plurality as the scope for a wide range of social, political and
cultural values, opinions, information and interests to find expression through
the media. Media pluralism encompasses ‘the diversity of media supply, use and
distribution, in relation to 1) ownership and control, 2) media types and genres, 3)
political viewpoints, 4) cultural expressions and 5) local and regional interests’
(K.U. Leuven et al. 2009: 5). Understood in this way, plurality concerns include:

content variety and cultural diversity
media access (social, cultural and economic access for individuals and groups
in society, especially marginalised groups)
independence of creators, programmers and journalists
owner influence affecting media content and performance in entertainment,
fiction and factual programmes as well as ‘news’
plurality of sources of funding for media.

Citizenship has been a central discourse of liberal and radical reformers in the
UK, the United States and elsewhere in response to trends of consolidation,
commercialism and liberalising reregulation (McChesney 1999; Feintuck and
Varney 2006). Yet the tendency to focus on news and information has left the case
for tackling problems of ownership and control in entertainment and cultural
expression weaker. This has been especially problematic where governments
have relaxed media ownership rules to allow greater concentration and con-
solidation across media businesses, while retaining limited protection for news. It
has been understandable why the protection of plurality in news and information
has been the uppermost demand for media campaigners, yet a much wider case
for tackling media power and strengthening cultural pluralism is required
(Hardy 2010a: 267–87).

Commercialism

An overlapping set of critical arguments concerns media commercialism, the
profit-maximising production and circulation of symbolic content. Here again
there are concerns about content diversity arising from corporate behaviour and
the core tendency of commercial market systems to favour profitable consumer
markets and underserve less profitable consumer markets. Advertising finance
tends to favour commercially friendly media content, large aggregate audiences
or affluent niche audiences, and disfavour less popular content and the pref-
erences of those constituting poorer groups, or interests, in society (Gandy 2004;