Page 13 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

xii Foreword

with the left is especially pronounced in media studies. ‘The political economic
perspective’, writes Michael Schudson (1996: 145), ‘has been adopted and
developed primarily by left-wing critics and analysts of the news media’.
However, although there is uncertainty about whether political economy’s
home base is on the left or the right, there is much greater agreement that this
approach is deeply flawed. It is widely alleged that the political economy
approach is ‘reductionist’, by which is meant that it reduces complex phenomena
to simplifying economic explanation. This is usually contrasted with the complexly
related multidimensionality of the critic’s own rounded perspective (e.g. Tomlinson
1999: 16–17). A stronger version of this criticism is that critical political economy
can offer almost cartoon-like simplicity. Thus, Schudson (1996: 145) writes that ‘a
political economy perspective has sometimes tended toward “conspiracy theory”
or simple-minded notions that a ruling directorate of the capitalist class dictates
to editors and reporters what to run in their newspapers’. This is contrasted with
the multi-perspectival, balanced approach that he advocates.
The implication of these denunciations is that much media political economy
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is really not worth bothering about. This would seem to be the view of the dis-
tinguished editors – including John Hartley and John Fiske – who produced a
compendious, 367-page textbook introducing Key Concepts in Communication and
Cultural Studies (O’Sullivan et al. 1994). In their considered judgement, the existence
of media political economy was not even worth registering.

Intellectual contribution

Adifferent case is presented by three good media political economy anthologies.
They show why a focus on media political economy illuminates the forces shaping
media institutions, and what they produce; and shines a light on the media’s
relationship to power, and the media’s wider role in society. But with becoming
modesty, some of the essays in these collections also acknowledge the limitations
of the traditional political economy approach, and emphasise the complexity of
the interactions and influences that are in play (e.g. Garnham 2011).
Each of these anthologies has distinctive strengths. One pulls together good
past work in two massive volumes (Golding and Murdock 1997); another is good at
situating the media in relation to the wider economic context (Winseck and Jin
2012); and the third gives more attention to drama and cultural production than
the other two (Wasko et al. 2011). These volumes are supplemented by at least a
thousand publications on different aspects of media political economy.
But multi-authored volumes also have limitations, while the sprawling literature
on media political economy is now so extensive that it is difficult to stay on top
of it. The great virtue of this book is that it pulls together the critical media
economy oeuvre in a single compact volume. It orders and evaluates this literature
under different topic headings to establish clearly the terrain of the subject. It is
learned and well written. And its synthesis demonstrates why critical political
economy of the media is important to an understanding of the media.