Page 200 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media convergence, communications regulation 179

which states are always and already involved. The issue then is not state vs.
market – but what kinds of state policy interventions are made and on whose
behalf.
Neoliberalism was promoted not merely for domestic governance but to
challenge protectionism by foreign states that prevented TNC expansions and
efficiencies. Here, CPE scholars highlighted the contradictions between the
neoliberal path espoused for others and the massive state support and subsidies
that had contributed to successful cultural industries, such as the US film industry.
In contrast to free trade rhetoric, in the US, France, Germany, Japan, Korea
and China, ‘each story of successful industrialisation follows the same path: state
subsidy, import taxation, high regulation, welfare protection. Then there was
liberalisation, the results of which remain as yet unclear’ (Miller et al. 2005: 109).
The starting point for a political economy of communication, argues
McChesney (2003: 28) ‘is the recognition that all media systems are the direct
and indirect result of explicit public policies’. Marketisation, the opening up of
space for private enterprise, is not the result of autonomous, ‘natural’ free markets
or the logical outcome of converging technologies, but is constructed by the
decisions (or non-decisions) of public authorities. This does not mean that we
should substitute one simple model of causality for another; the processes of
media change are multicausal and invariably multidirectional. It means that to
understand the organisation of communication resources requires understanding
the efforts to shape and contest public policy, across supranational, national and
sub-national levels. Over the last twenty-five years, the dominant tendency has
been the worldwide pursuit of marketisation (chapter three), a term used to
describe a shift in governing values that privileges and promotes freedom of
action for private businesses and market mechanisms over state regulation and
public provision.

Media ownership

Nation-states have adopted anti-monopoly controls to prevent undue con-
centration in media markets, rules on cross-media ownership (usually across
print, radio and television) and rules governing what persons or bodies may own
media. From the 1980s national media ownership rules have been relaxed across
all advanced economies and most developing countries. By the 1990s it was clear
that convergence processes challenged various existing regulatory arrangements
and divisions, which would have to be renegotiated. Corporate interests, while
by no means unified, formed powerful lobbies advocating relaxation of ownership
rules. Governments advanced a variety of arguments led by the claim that digital
abundance is overcoming scarcity, so that market mechanisms will ensure
diversity of supply without the need for structural intervention (Hardy 2008:
145–52; Doyle 2002a).
Liberalisation has been powerfully advocated but there are also tensions and
fault lines. Policy-makers have promoted liberalisation on behalf of increased