Page 17 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

xvi Foreword

Quite simply, the charge of simplification extends in both directions. Let me
attempt to illustrate this argument by taking a closer look at two books, written
respectively by leading figures in the political economy and cultural studies
traditions. Their books simplify in different ways. But they also illuminate in
different ways.
Let us first consider Breaking Up America, a book by Joseph Turow (1997), a
media political economist at Pennsylvania University’s prestigious Annenberg
School of Communication. His central argument is that ‘advertisers have been
breaking up America’ (Turow 1997: IX) because they shifted from mass
marketing towards target marketing from the 1970s onwards. This was partly in
order to exclude poor sales prospects but also to facilitate the relating of adver-
tising messages to the social identity and life style of distinct social groups. The
effect of this reorientation was to redistribute advertising away from mass media
in favour of specialised TV programmes, magazines and websites that tended to
emphasise group differences. In effect, changing advertising strategies encouraged
the development of a ‘hyper-segmented media environment’ contributing to the
‘unrelenting slicing and dicing of America’ at the expense of mass media that
supported the integration of society (Turow 1997: 6, 199).
The central thesis of the book is wrong. Advertisers did not ‘break up America’
because America was already broken. Turow’s narrow industrial focus prevented
him noticing the powerful forces that had already fractionalised American
society. Thus, in the city where Joseph Turow works – Philadelphia – many
African Americans lived, and still live, in districts where there are almost no
white faces. The contrast between wealth and poverty in the city was, and
remains, extreme, leading to an almost total separation between where the rich
and poor reside. Yet, Philadelphia is merely a microcosm of wider divisions in
metropolitan American society.
Indeed, the polarisation of wealth in the US is larger than in any other
OECD country, save for Mexico (OECD 2008). A recent study of ‘affective
polarisation’– that is, strong feelings of antipathy towards the other political
side – found that America was the second most polarised out of ten countries
(Iyengar et al. forthcoming). The US was outstripped only by Colombia, which
has experienced thirty years of civil war. A wide range of influences have con-
tributed to this fracturing of American society, from the legacy of slavery, and its
aftermath of Jim Crow oppression, to successive culture wars between secular
and religious forces. Advertisers are, at best, only one additional, small input to
powerful fissiparous forces that have long been in play. Indeed, advertisers were
probably responding to pre-existing social divisions, not just contributing to
them, when they shifted more towards target marketing.
Turow’s narrow industrial focus caused him to overstate the divisive power of
advertisers. Had he stood outside this narrow frame, and considered wider influ-
ences shaping society, he would have offered a more rounded and proportionate
argument. So the weaknesses of his book exemplify what many critics of media
political economy complain about: its tendency to simplify through its selectivity.