Page 36 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

What (is) political economy of the media? 15

thought is far from unified, and some economists, including ones working on
media and communications, critique the neoclassical assumptions of rational
actors calculating utility maximisation, or the conditions for perfect and imperfect
competition, drawing on economic history, psychology and psychoanalytic
theory (Sackrey et al. 2010; Miller 2008).
Media economics is a subfield of economics that analyses the media, commu-
nications and cultural industries using economic concepts. This work takes different
forms with varying levels of ‘integration’ into media and cultural analysis. The
influence of specialist economic analysis on communications research media has
been rather limited historically. It has informed legal policy studies, ‘political
economic’ analysis, and to a lesser extent ‘cultural economy’ work, but has generally
remained a largely separate, specialist domain. This is changing, however.
Recognition of the importance of economics in understanding dynamic changes
in media markets has informed mainstream communications research and
teaching. The significance of financing, business operations and markets to
understanding the challenges and transformations of media services, underscores
this. There is an expanding body of literature on media economics, examining
media markets, convergence, digitalisation, transnationalisation and labour
(Doyle 2002b; Hoskins et al. 2004; Alexander et al. 2004; Hesmondhalgh 2013).
Critical political economists draw on this media economics literature but
highlight certain limitations arising from either the ‘uncritical’ application of
economic concepts, or claims made for free-market mechanisms. What is at issue
is less the tools and techniques of economic analysis, or even its insights, than the
conceptual and value framework. The CPE tradition is sceptical concerning
claims made for markets; it challenges the neglect of asymmetry in regard to the
power of actors in markets, and it challenges the contraction of ‘value’ to the
measure of market-based exchanges.

Liberal pluralist communication studies

In the post-war period Western scholarship was dominated by what Pietilä
(2005: 105–26) calls ‘classical behavioural mass communication research’.
According to the behaviourist paradigm, researchers should examine only those
behaviours that can be directly observed and measured, with the goal of deriving
propositions that could be tested, thus applying methods from the physical
sciences to the social sciences. This privileged empirical research and techniques
while leaving unquestioned the social organisation of media provision and
tended to neglect ethical and critical perspectives. Most influential in the United
States, this positivist tradition prompted critical reaction elsewhere (see Nordenstreng
1968; Christians et al. 2009: 184). Early researchers in the CPE tradition did not
reject empirical investigation, in fact they insisted on gathering material evidence,
but did reject empiricism, ‘the reduction of all intellectual activity to the production
of falsifiable statements about observed behaviour’ (Mosco 2009: 79). Instead
scholars argued for a critical approach that acknowledged the relationship