Page 217 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

196 Interventions and change

and the other types of power may be regarded as one of the central tasks in
media political economy.
Coercive and symbolic power are frequently combined. When NATO bombers
started to attack Serb forces in 1999, the then President of Yugoslavia, Slobodan
Milosevic, removed the head of Belgrade’s independent radio station B92. Later,
masked police took over Studio B, Serbia’s main opposition-controlled TV station
(as well as two Belgrade radio stations). When Milosevic was deposed in 2000
demonstrators set fire to the state TV station, an act common across modern
and ancient regime change.
In 2008 Vladimir Putin’s anointed successor Medvedev was voted president
with just over 70 per cent of the vote. Medvedev had refused to take part in
debates between candidates and officially did not campaign, but as deputy prime
minister he received what The Times (Halpin 2008) called ‘blanket Soviet-style
coverage on state television as he tours the country inspecting factories, hospitals and
ice rinks’. When Putin was elected president in 2004, international monitors reported
that the elections were flawed because of an ‘overwhelming’ bias towards Putin
in the media (as well as election count irregularities). The media gave ‘an over-
whelming advantage to the incumbent’ and fiercely attacked Putin’s main
opponent (Sergei Glazyev). According to The Guardian newspaper, by 2003 Putin
had ‘emasculated’ NTV, the only national TV station; ‘such is the level of
control that no political chat show can be broadcast live’. The federal govern-
ment maintained strong control over the nationally distributed state and private
channels.
In addition to instrumental, structural and symbolic forms of power, Braman
(2009: 25) adds informational, as ‘power that shapes human behaviour by
manipulating the informational bases of instrumental, structural, and symbolic
power’. Her focus is on strategies of state power, where informational power
alters how other powers are exercised. An example is states using private sector
entities as regulatory agencies, for instance requiring ISPs to help states monitor
Internet use, or as the revelations of whistle-blower Edward Snowden exposed
in 2013, weakening commercial encryption systems subject to state approval.
The informational state involves network relationships with other states and with
non-state actors of whom TNCs are pre-eminent. Nation-states vie to provide
favourable conditions for corporate activities and these relationships encompass
and connect the global political economy with states’ information policies and
activities, including their generally supportive (if also complexly policed and
negotiated) relations with media providers. Castells (2009: 50) too emphasises
communicative action as the key to power, such that while fundamental sources
of power have not changed ‘the terrain where power relationships operate has
changed’.
The definitional or discursive power of the media is identified by Street (2011)
as one of three main forms of media power, the others being access and resource
power. Discursive power operates through the way the media privilege particular
discourses and construct particular forms of reality. This has been developed in