Page 14 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Foreword xiii

This leaves very little to add in a foreword. However, there are perhaps two
themes that are worth exploring further. One is that much media political
economy is right-wing or at least neoliberal, and this book, centred on leftish
media political economy, needs to be read in relation to this. The second point is
that simplification is not the exclusive monopoly of one tradition – something
that has implications for the future development of media and cultural studies.

Historical media political economy
One way to illustrate the argument that media political economy is a large
mansion with many rooms is to take a look at British media history.
A neoliberal political economy interpretation has long held sway in the history of
the British press. Two things gave rise, in its view, to a free press in Britain. One
was the dismantling of state controls: in particular, the end of press licensing in
1694; the liberalisation of seditious libel and defamation laws in 1792 and 1843;
and the abolition of press taxes in the 1850s. The other agency of liberation was
the capitalist development of the press. Increasing sales and advertising revenue
allegedly rendered newspapers independent of government and party subsidy,
and funded increased news gathering resources that freed papers from reliance
on government public relations. Above all, commercialisation rendered the press
more responsive to the public. ‘The importance of sales to newspaper profits’,
explains a standard textbook, ‘forced papers to echo the political views of their
readers in order to thrive’ (Barker 2000: 4).
The traditionalist view holds that the press had become by the 1850s the
Fourth Estate, that is to say an institution independent of government and
representative of the people (Barker 2000: 225). A revisionist variant holds that
this epiphany took place in the later 1940s only when national newspapers finally
disentangled themselves from close party ties (Koss 1981/1984). But while these
competing interpretations disagree about timing, their story line is the same. They
both argue that the press became free of government and switched allegiance to
the people. And in both cases, they agree about the causes of this shift: state
deregulation and market freedom.
As noted above, this is a political economy interpretation, albeit one informed by an
anti-statist, neoliberal version of this tradition. However, it is challenged by a
radical political economy interpretation that reaches a different conclusion. The
neoliberal and radical approaches overlap in that they both celebrate the dis-
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mantling of repressive state censorship. But they differ profoundly in their
understanding of market processes. One approach views the market as an engine
of freedom; the other as a system of control.
The radical political economy argues that the nature of the press market
changed. Initially, press costs were low, making it possible for people with very
limited means to launch great national newspapers, in a way that facilitated the
rise of popular radical journalism. However, the industrialisation of the press in
the mid nineteenth century dramatically raised costs so that ownership of the