Page 18 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

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Yet, his narrow focus brings into sharp relief an important – and widely
ignored – dynamic shaping media systems. His analysis is sustained by careful
examination of trade journals and interviews with eighty-six executives. It shows
the way in which market researchers sought to develop a more fine-grained
market analysis. This encouraged new ways of conceptualising and measuring
audiences: such as the People Meter which examined individual viewing behaviour
within the home instead of relying on the ‘household’ as the unit of measurement.
This fostered in turn advertising targeted towards baby power, grey power, teen
power and other categories based on life style and values, which fuelled the
growth of specialised cable television channels. In other words, Turow’s analysis
documents changes in the ‘hidden’ economic forces – the media’s advertising
support system – that contributed to changes in the structure and content of the
media. It is an original and informative book that has been followed by sub-
sequent studies that develop its central argument in relation to more recent
developments in the media (Turow 2006, 2011).
Let us now turn to another book, Performative Revolution in Egypt, written by
Jeffrey Alexander (2011), a distinguished cultural analyst and a Director of the
Center of Cultural Sociology at Yale University. His central argument is that the
revolution which brought down the Muburak regime in 2011 was the product of
cultural power. He describes the way in which binary moral categories and
energising narratives were deployed to mobilise people on the streets, and to
persuade the army to stay neutral. Ideas, words and images were, in his account,
the bullets that prevailed; digital communications were the artillery that the
regime was unable to spike effectively. The Internet and social media also
enabled the rebels to win wider support in the West, and resulted, he suggests, in
the Pentagon exerting discrete pressure on the Egyptian military to stay out of
the conflict.
Alexander centres his analysis on the month of the uprising, and has little to
say about the wider context of the revolution except in one respect. We learn
about ‘the Arab intellectual revolution of the preceding decades’ (Alexander
2011: 95–97), inspired by Arab engagement with Western ideas, in particular its
concept of civil society, and with liberal values more generally. These especially
appealed to the younger generation, we are told, and found expression in a
plethora of films, TV programmes and novels. This provided the intellectual
antecedents sustaining the ‘performative revolution’ and helps to explain why the
central mobilising themes of the insurgence – freedom and democracy, civil
society and national renewal – had such resonance. It also explains the power of
the rebels’‘political theatre’, as when the occupation of Tahrir Square enacted
what a more civil and egalitarian society might look like.
This is a clever and engaging book that has something interesting to say about
the power of ideas and awakening public consciousness. It is also written with an
authoritative grandeur of tone (almost as if Jeffrey Alexander wore an academic
gown, when he tapped on his keyboard). But despite this, an element of doubt
begins to creep in when it becomes increasingly clear that Alexander does not