Page 219 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

198 Interventions and change

markets where communications are produced, bought, sold and exchanged. It is
produced within and across levels of ownership and management of communica-
tion services; media–external relationships; access and reception; user activities;
social and cultural practices.
The aspects of media power outlined above – discursive, access and resources –
are central concerns for CPE analysis but also relatively uncontested across
media and cultural studies. Mainstream scholarship does not share the same
evaluation of problems but there are few challenges to the theoretical validity of
these concepts. By contrast, considerable criticism is directed at CPE’s under-
standing of reception and meaning-making. Pursuing the nature of communication
power as ‘framing of the mind’, Castells (2009: 155, 416) argues ‘Power is primarily
exercised in the construction of meaning in the human mind through processes
of communication enacted in global/local multimedia networks …’. If media
power is rightly regarded not as inhering in production or texts but as a process
involving the construction of meanings and their influence, then we need an
account of psycho-cognitive reception and psycho-social action. CPE does not
investigate these in any adequate manner. In so far as critical scholars do infer
media effects and influence (which they do) they are open to this critique, but a
CPE approach that acknowledges explanatory limits carefully can insist on the
value of its analysis of media power. Instead two other key challenges, intro-
duced already in chapter two, are considered further here. These are that CPE
offers a theoretically impoverished domination model, and one that does not
adequately address shifts in communication power in twenty-first century media.

Critical political economy and media problems:
beyond mass media
We have examined political economy as any approach concerned with the
political and economic organisation of media, while focusing on a critical tradition
that aims to identify and address problems in the media. This tradition is diverse
in orientation and examines the full variety of political and media systems but,
while never uniform, its critical normative perspective clusters around concerns
about democratic life in its broadest sense, efforts to distribute power more
equitably in the world and to make communications democratic and sustainable.
Taking off in the 1960s, the tradition dealt largely with problems of mass media.
This included production and engagement with alternative media (considered
below) but CPE analysis focused on problems in dominant mass communications,
in particular:

ownership and (capitalist) control of media
the framing of media issues and discourses (and links between media organisation,
media access and media discourses)
a presumption of influence in the information, ideas and imagery conveyed
by mass media.