Page 33 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

12 Mapping approaches and themes

by some political economists as too textualist, disconnecting the interpretation of
texts from an appreciation of the conditions in which they were formed. A second
criticism is of over-simplistic readings of dominant ideologies within texts. Third,
has been criticism of the supposed effects and influence of ideology on audiences.
A fourth area of dispute concerns epistemology. Ideology critique involves challen-
ging the construction of reality in discourse, and truth claims. Poststructuralism,
which vies as a leading paradigm in media and cultural studies, regards ‘reality’
as a product of language. As Lee (2003: 154) writes of one influential grouping,
the Yale school deconstructionists such as Paul de Man and Stanley Fish, there are
‘no facts, only interpretations; no truths, only expedient fictions’. Can appeals to
reality be sustained without falling back into naïve realism? CPE adopts a critical
realist epistemology. Critical realism is a philosophy of science that distinguishes
between real structures, actual processes or events and empirical evidence (traces
of events) (Jessop 2008: 45). It recognises ‘the reality of both concepts and social
practices’ (Mosco 2009: 128) and engages in efforts to use empirical evidence to
help assess which concepts and theories are more or less valuable. It rejects
epistemologies based on ideas alone (ideographic) or ‘facts’ alone (positivism) and
seeks to engage and balance theoretical and empirical considerations, conceiving
reality as ‘made up of both what we see and how we explain what we see’
(Mosco 1996: 2). For the Marxist scholar Christian Fuchs (2011: 265):

Empirical ideology critique tests whether certain claims about reality can be
questioned by looking for counter-evidence that supports the assumptions
that the claims are mythological and contradict evidence about the state of
reality. It introduces a different level of reality to claims about reality and
thereby tries to increase epistemological complexity. It is based on the
assumption that reality is complex and contradictory and that one-dimensional
representations of reality lack complexity and should therefore be questioned.

CPE scholars challenge the perceived image of their subfield as confirming, over
and over, that ownership of the means of media production by capital manifests
itself as, and explains, control over meaning. For Garnham (1979: 136) ‘Because
capital controls the means of cultural production … it does not follow that these
cultural commodities will necessarily support, whether in their explicit content or in
their mode of cultural appropriation, the dominant ideology’.Critical scholarship
needs to examine both iterations of ideology and yet remain alert to signs of
conflict, contestation and contradiction in the production and consumption of
meanings (Mosco 2009: 96).

Audience
A common view associating CPE with the study of ‘production’, to the relative
neglect of media consumption and audiences, needs revision. There has been
very strong and extended engagement with audiences within CPE scholarship.