Page 160 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Marketing communications and media 139

economic aspects that a materialist political economy of communications should
examine (Meehan 1993). Taking commercial, free-to-air television as his focus
Smythe argued that the commodity produced by media is an audience com-
modity. Media content is the ‘free lunch’ used to recruit potential members of
the audience and to maintain their local attention in order to sell them to
advertisers (1977: 5).

The appropriateness of the analogy to the free lunch in the old-time saloon
or cocktail bar is manifest: the free lunch consists of materials which whet
the prospective audience members’ appetites and thus (1) attract and keep them
attending to the programme, newspaper or magazine, and (2) cultivate a mood
conducive to favourable reaction to the explicit and implicit advertisers’
messages.

The media manufacture audiences as a commodity that can be sold to
advertisers for a profit derived from the surplus value created by audience
‘labour’. Smythe applied Marxian labour theory to the ‘work’ of audiences, who
produce themselves as the audience commodity. Audiences also labour for
advertisers ‘to learn to buy particular “brands” of consumer goods, and to spend
their income accordingly’ (1977: 6). Audiences ‘work to market [ … ] things to
themselves’ (Smythe 1981: 4); they ‘self-market’ (Jhally 1990: 67). Mattelart
(1989: 203) praises Smythe for offering ‘one of the first analyses of the organic
link between advertising and the way the media function’. Smythe’s work
inspired and influenced North American political economy analysis and debates
(Jhally 1990; Meehan 1993, 2005), but was criticised by contemporaries on a
variety of grounds.
Murdock (1978) challenged Smythe’s dismissive account of the Western
Marxist tradition (influenced by the latter’s Maoist sympathies) but their
exchange reflected a more enduring division between Smythe’s structural-
functionalism and Murdock’s espousal of a cultural materialist tradition (chapter
1
one). Basing analysis on the ‘function’ of media necessitates an account of
system-supporting ‘success’ that negates the scope for contestation and resistance,
features that Smythe is elsewhere keen to acknowledge and promote. In Dependency
Road (Smythe 1981: 270), he writes:

True, people are subject to relentless pressures from Consciousness Industry;
they are besieged with an avalanche of consumer goods and services; they
are themselves produced as (audience) commodities; they reproduce their
own lives and energies as damaged and in commodity form. But people are
by no means passive or powerless. People do resist the powerful and manifold
pressures of capital as best they can.

Yet this appeal to agency is undermined in the ‘blindspot’ essay by a func-
tionalist explanatory framework which elides the system-supporting ‘function’ of