Page 16 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Foreword xv

with extensive economic interests, to ingratiate themselves to power. For example,
News Corporation pulled the critical BBC World Television channel from
the northern signal of its STAR TV satellite service in order to please the
Chinese government, in the hope that it would gain enhanced access to the
Chinese market (Dover 2008). Similarly, Hong Kong press owners’ desire to
expand their diversified business interests in mainland China was a key factor in
the taming of the Hong Kong press (Lai 2007).
Markets can also become politicised by governments, as in the case of the
creation of a market-based TV system in post-communist Eastern Europe where
franchises were allocated mostly to government allies (Sparks 1998), or in many
states in the Middle East where advertisers have been reluctant to incur official
disfavour by supporting media that governments disapprove of (Sakr 2001).
More generally, it is claimed that online concentration has extended major news
organisations’ hegemony across technologies (Curran et al. 2012). Commercial
pressures encourage insular, decontextualised, entertainment-centred journalism
that badly serves democracy (Curran 2010a). By contrast, strong and independent
public service broadcasting regimes support higher levels of knowledge about
public affairs than commercial regimes (Cushion 2012).
In passing, it is perhaps worth noting that an intermediate position argues that
the market has encouraged greater independence from government or party,
while increased professionalism has limited negative market effects. This is, in
essence, how Sally Hughes (2006), Carolina Matos (2008) and Carmen Sammut
(2007) interpret the development of the media in, respectively, Mexico, Brazil
and Malta.
This is not the place to arbitrate between these contending claims but merely to
repeat the point that the political economy tradition does not have a party line. It
actually embraces very different, and sometimes implacably opposed, inter-
pretations. But what these different interpretations have in common – indeed
what makes their authors, in a sense, members of the same squabbling family – is
that they tend to give considerable emphasis to political and economic influences.

Simplification
But is not a narrow focus on political and economic influence enormously limiting?
Does it not confirm what critics complain about – namely its tendency to simplify?
The charge can sometimes be true. But this is no reason for ignoring the valuable
knowledge and insights that media political economy can offer.
The charge of reductionism usually flows one way, to denigrate media political
economy. But exactly the same charge applies with equal force to cultural studies.
Cultural studies tends to concentrate on cultural power, to the exclusion of
political and economic power – and when it writes about the latter it is usually
through the prism of the power of ideas that are assumed to be autonomous. But
again this is not grounds for ignoring the valuable knowledge and insights that
cultural studies can offer.