Page 32 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

What (is) political economy of the media? 11

been highlighted. It is more suited to a transmission model of ‘mass commu-
nication’, of one-to-many communication, and locates production and audiences
at opposite poles. This framework has been found particularly ill-suited to
grapple with more recent shifts in relations between production and consump-
tion, signalled by terms such as ‘produser’ and ‘prosumer’, with user-generated
content, demassification and convergence between ‘vertical’ mass media and
‘horizontal’ mediated communications. Nevertheless the model is useful in
mapping what remain core foci in media analysis, as well as helping to identify
points of ‘divisions’ in the field.

Production
CPE is most associated with the study of ‘production’ and in a caricatured, but
prevalent, version is limited to an account of media ownership and finance.
A related, and more nuanced, criticism is that CPE has tended to offer a limited
account of media texts (content) and has tended to ignore important aspects of
audiences and consumption – how audiences and users read and make meaning
from texts. These are important criticisms that we will address, but the equation
of CPE scholarship with ‘production’ is inaccurate and must be rejected. What
does characterise CPE analysis is an insistence on addressing the organisation of
production. Against analyses that narrowly focus on textual construction (‘textualist’)
or on the consumption of media meanings, CPE calls for analysts to engage with
the manner in which media communications are produced and, more broadly,
with the conditions that influence production practices. Amongst the key topics
examined are media ownership, finance, governance and regulation, the organisation
of media work, influences on media, including owners, managers, advertisers,
sources and users.

Content

If production matters for CPE analysis it can nevertheless be distinguished from
approaches that deal solely with the economic aspects of media industries and
markets, because CPE calls for attention to the ‘interplay between the symbolic
and economic dimensions’ of the production of meaning (Murdock and Golding
2005: 60). Attention to the production of culture is combined with regard for the
complex nature and properties of cultural commodities (symbolic value). The
goods manufactured by cultural industries ‘play a pivotal role in organizing the
images and discourses through which people make sense of the world’ (Murdock
and Golding 2005: 60).
A key focus for CPE is to examine how media and communications serve to
sustain the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Media are connected to the ways
in which power is sustained through meanings. There are tensions, however, in
regard to analysis of ideology, of ideas that serve to sustain relations of dominance
(Thompson 1990; Eagleton 2007). First, such ideology critique has been regarded