Page 30 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

What (is) political economy of the media? 9

in its rejection of Soviet Communism and embarked on a positive reassessment
of the institutions and processes of civil society, for instance in Habermas’s
influential analysis of the public sphere. Democratic theory has thus served to
complement, challenge and exceed the limitations of Marxism in theory and
practice. This connects to the third key influence, that of cultural theory/politics.
CPE scholars have been influenced by and have contributed to a wide range of
radical traditions that examine and contest forms of discrimination and oppression
based on gender, race, sexuality, disability, age and geocultural relations. How
these connect to class conflict and class relations are ongoing debates, but CPE is
shaped by the influence and tensions across Marxism, democratic theory and
organisation, and cultural theory and politics.

CPE approaches to media

Critical political economy of media examines how the political and economic
organisation (‘political economy’) of media industries affects the production and
circulation of meaning, and connects to the distribution of symbolic and material
resources that enable people to understand, communicate and act in the world.
This has three main implications for studying media. First, it requires careful
study of how the communications industries work. Here, political economists
focus on ownership, finance and support mechanisms (such as advertising), and on
how the policies and actions of governments and other organisations influence
and affect media behaviour and content. Another key concern is the organisation
of cultural production, addressing questions of labour processes and relations,
managerial control and creative autonomy for cultural producers. This opens up
to the second main topic, the influences and consequences of different ways of
organising the media: commercial, state, public and their complex combinations.
Analysts engage in historical and contemporary studies of the changing nature of
‘structural’ influences, such as dependence on advertising finance, the range of
political, social and cultural influences on media institutions, and the interactions
of all those seeking to influence the media. This connects with the third main
area: the relationships between media content and communication systems, and
the broader structure of society. To understand any specific media form requires
addressing ‘how it is produced and distributed in a given society and how it is
situated in relation to the dominant social structure’ (Kellner 2009: 96). In particular,
CPE asks a question that distinguishes it from various ‘mainstream’ approaches
that either ignore, support or accept prevailing social relations: what contribution
do the media make in reinforcing or undermining political and social inequality?
(McChesney 2003).
For Murdock and Golding (2005: 61) political economy approaches are dis-
tinguished in four main ways. They are holistic, seeing the economy as interrelated
with political, social and cultural life, rather than as a separate domain. They are
historical, paying close attention to long-term changes in the role of state, corpora-
tions and media in society. They are ‘centrally concerned with the balance