Page 31 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

10 Mapping approaches and themes

between private enterprise and public intervention’, between the private and
public provision of services. Finally, ‘and perhaps most importantly of all’, they
go beyond ‘technical issues of efficiency’ (in terms of market transactions
between producers and consumers) ‘to engage with basic moral questions of
justice, equity and the public good’.

Culture and industry
CPE takes up the notion of the industrialisation of culture, and culture as
industry, from the Frankfurt School theorists, notably Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer. Media, argues the Western CPE tradition, are ‘first and foremost
industrial and commercial organisations which produce and distribute commodities’
(Murdock and Golding 1974: 205–6). The study of media production has intrinsic
value in understanding how and under what conditions media are ‘made’.However,
CPE rests on a larger claim, that understanding ‘production’ is necessary in order to
fully understand media ‘content’ and ‘audiences’. To repeat a central proposition:
different ways of organising and financing communications have implications for
the range and nature of media content. For Golding and Murdock (1977): ‘It is
only by situating cultural products within the nexus [interlinking] of material interests
which circumscribe their creation and distribution that their range and content can
be fully explained’. According to a later formulation (Murdock and Golding
2005: 60) CPE ‘sets out to show how different ways of financing and organising
cultural production have traceable consequences for the range of discourses, representa-
tions and communicative resources in the public domain and for the organization of
audience access and use’ (my emphasis). This formulation bears traces of a
debate on the relative importance of economic factors for a full understanding of
the (ideological) meaning of texts. As a much earlier essay puts it, to understand
the production of meaning requires not only analysis of how ideology is inscribed
in texts and readings, but ‘grasping the general economic dynamics of media
production and the determinations they exert’ (Golding and Murdock 1979:
210). We will address these issues of ‘determination’ further below.

Core themes

So what has been the focus of work coming from this CPE tradition? According
to Murdock and Golding (2005: 64) ‘five historical processes are particularly
central to a critical political economy of culture: the growth of the media; the
extension of corporate reach; commodification; the universalization of citizenship;
and the changing role of state and government intervention’. These important
themes also serve to emphasise CPE’sefforts to examine how the media connect
to broader social arrangements. I want to begin though with a more media-centric
overview of themes.
A conventional mapping divides media analysis into three areas: production,
content and audience. Numerous problems and limitations with this model have