Page 161 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

140 Critical investigations in political economy

advertising with its imputed success. The result is an overly smooth account
whereby audiences ‘complete’ the marketing effort. Smythe’s mass media paradigm
presumes a close connection between messages sent and received by mass audi-
ences. Later analysts stress the risks and uncertainties of advertising effectiveness,
ranging from placement to the persuasiveness of messages, through to reaching
target prospects.
The audience commodity concept has been critiqued but also modified
and developed. For Jhally (1990: 72, 73) the time purchased by advertisers is
‘communications-defined time’; ‘Media sell potential audience-power watching
time, but the only thing they can guarantee is the watching activity of the audience’.
Jhally acknowledges the argument that characterising watching as ‘labour’ is
problematic since watching television does not have the characteristics of com-
pulsion, and exploitation, found in wage labour. However, Jhally contends that
watching activity is indeed compelled and thus an alienated activity. However,
others object that watching TV has no wage equivalent, not least as audiences
cannot convert the ‘salary’ received (Fuchs 2012). These debates have recently
been revived and updated in considerations on the ‘free’ labour of Internet users,
discussed further below.
Another body of research starts from the observation that what is purchased is
usually estimated audience time, combined with target audience valuation. The
audience commodity is less the actual aggregations of people who consume
ad-financed media, rather it is the audience constructed through ratings. This
has informed research on the system of ratings and audience measurement and
has also been a focus for feminist political economists examining the relationship
between capitalism, gender and class. For Eileen Meehan (1993: 386), the
‘naturalistic assumption’ of the audience in Smythe’s work ‘deflected attention
from research into the effects of market pressures on corporate definitions of the
commodity audience and commercial measures of audience preferences’. This
analysis informed a broader critique of the equation of media supply with
consumer demand (Meehan 2005). Denaturalising the audience commodity
encouraged attention to the manner in which audience blocks are constructed
and valued within ratings systems. Meehan’s work examined ratings as a
commodity (1993, 2005) in a highly monopolistic industry dominated by firms
such as A.C. Nielsen in the US. Meehan, together with Inger Stole and Ellen
Riordan, examined the construction of the female viewer in US radio and tele-
vision in the twentieth century, work also developed by more culturalist scholars
such as Ang (1991). Meehan (2002: 216) describes how the most highly prized
commodity audience in post-war US network television was upscale white men,
aged 18–34; channels that lost this ratings contest chased ‘niche’ audiences
(women, children, African Americans or Hispanic Americans). Into the 1980s,
women remained marginalised as a niche audience despite their influence over
domestic consumption and their growing economic equality with men, an outcome
reflecting ‘the sexism of patriarchy as surely as overvaluing upscale audiences
reflects the classism of capitalism’ (Meehan 2002: 220).