Page 34 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

What (is) political economy of the media? 13

What characterises this work, however, is an insistence on connecting audience
experience to the economics and power dynamics of media provision. There has
been historical and contemporary analysis of how audiences are commodified
and sold to marketers (Meehan 2005; Wasko and Hagen 2000; chapter six).
Another key focus has been on the implications of audience valuation for media
finance, examining how advertising serves as a system of subsidy that privileges
media serving audiences valued by advertisers, from Oscar Gandy’s work on the
consequences for Black and minority media, to Turow’s (2011) work on the
implications of profiling and targeting across the Internet. The ways in which
wealth, time, gender and other factors structure access to communications is
another central theme. Yet, CPE scholars have acknowledged the tradition’s
relative neglect of meaning-making processes in the reception, consumption and
use of media products, and made various efforts to remedy this by drawing on
the insights of cultural studies and other traditions to examine the production
and circulation of meaning. As feminist political economist Ellen Riordan (2002: 8)
maintains ‘it is not sufficient to look only at how corporations limit and constrain
cultural representations; we must also interrogate the consumption of these
ideological images by groups of people who are in turn sold to advertisers as a
niche market’. One ambitious effort to combine political economic con-
textualisation and audience reception analysis was the Global Disney Audiences
project (Wasko et al. 2001; Biltereyst and Meers 2011).
Media scholarship involves choices and decision about which aspects of the
circuit of communications, encompassing production and consumption, to focus
investigation on. Despite its caricature image as being focused on ‘production’,
CPE analysis can claim to have a greater regard for holism (Deacon 2003) than
many other approaches, not least those that ignore conditions of production. It is
certainly true that the demands of holism are rarely fully realised, but the effort
to trace relationships and consequences of the organisation of communications is
a principal feature of CPE analyses. Curran (2006) gives an example of such an
approach in examining crime coverage in US local television news. In the context
of deregulation and marketisation, increased competition in supply and rising
pressure to meet corporate owners’ and investors’ expectations for profit, coverage
of crime sharply increased in US television in the 1990s, being both cheap and
popular. By the mid 1990s reporting violent crime accounted for two-thirds of
local TV news output in fifty-six US cities (Klite et al. 1997). Incessant coverage
contributed to a growing proportion of Americans judging crime to be the most
serious problem facing the nation, despite crime levels actually falling. Research
by Iyengar and others showed that ‘Local TV news tended also to focus on
decontextualised acts of violent crime by black perpetrators in ways that
strengthened racial hostility, and fuelled demands for punitive retribution’
(Curran 2006: 140). Such analysis requires that we address the organisation and
culture of journalists, the influence of sources, news agendas, media discourses
and media influence. Yet equally, it shows that we must address the political
economic context and policy changes to fully grasp why news changed, with