Page 15 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

xiv Foreword

national newspaper press became increasingly vested in the hands of rich, mostly
right-wing businessmen – a trend that was further entrenched by the rise of press
concentration. A reduction of cover prices also made the whole of the main-
stream press dependent on advertising. This inhibited radical journalism because
some advertisers discriminated for political or economic reasons against radical
publications. Partly as a consequence of these structural economic changes, it is
claimed, the press retained close links to the power structure of society. This
counterview now has growing adherents (Curran and Seaton 2010: Williams
2012a, 2012b; Conboy 2004; Hampton 2004; Petley 2009).
This is a necessarily condensed account in that both traditions also interpret
the wider historical context differently (albeit in often vaguely delineated ways).
The point that is being emphasised here is that media political economy has two
wings. The book that you are about to read concentrates, for understandable
reasons, on one of these.

Contemporary media
This same point can be illustrated briefly in relation to contemporary
media analysis. There is a well-established neoliberal political economy tradition
which argues that the free market guarantees the independence, diversity and
accountability of commercial media (Murdoch 1989). In this view, the free
market ensures that the media are independent of government. It produces a
diverse media system since all are free to publish. It also renders the media
representative since media enterprises must respond to their audiences’ concerns
in a competitive market. This perspective has received a boost from the advent
of the Internet, which is viewed by some as enabling citizen journalists and users
to undermine corporate media power (Benkler 2006). More generally, neoliberal
political economy is highly critical of public broadcasting, holding that it can
never be free since it is dependent on state-sponsored privileges (Adam Smith
Institute 1984).
One part of the radical political economy rejoinder is that the free market can
actively subvert media independence. Thus, media moguls colluded with govern-
ments in much of Latin America during the era of the dictatorships because they
had shared agendas, and benefited mutually from co-operation (Waisbord 2000);
and the same pattern can be found in some East Asian countries such as Taiwan
during its quasi-dictatorship (Lee 2000). Media–government collusion can also
occur in democratic countries, as in Britain during the Thatcherite era when
right-wing moguls entered an informal coalition with government in order to
regenerate, as they saw it, a failed society (Curran and Seaton 2010) and in Italy
where a long-serving prime minister was also the country’s leading media mogul
(Ginsborg 2004).
These extreme outcomes are usually the result of two trends – media con-
centration and media partisanship – fusing to subvert media independence
(Curran 2011). But markets can also generate incentives for media companies,