Page 47 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

26 Mapping approaches and themes

been subject to extensive critique and efforts to overcome its limitations by more
dynamic models (Jessop 2008: 38–47; chapter eight). The revised account of
determination as pressures, constraints and linkages, opens up questions for cultural
research – how far can certain groups of workers exercise creative autonomy
(journalists; news anchors; filmmakers; music producers, etc.)? How is power and
autonomy organised within firms? How is control changing as a result of
dynamic forces – ownership, regulation, competition and technological changes?
Today CPE scholars invariably reject the notion that the economic provides the
essential causal impetus and that other influences are derivative or non-essential.

Origins and emergence of critical political economy

What came to be known (variously) as the political economy of communication
(or culture, or media) has its foundations in the Frankfurt School work of the
1930s and 1940s. Yet, in so far as it draws on criticisms of culture and media its
roots go back much further. One source was the social criticism from the 1890s
and early 1900s directed at the unchecked growth of large corporate interests in the
United States which included criticism of the business interests shaping US journalism
by writers such as Upton Sinclair (2003 [1920]). In the early twentieth century there
were emergent, left-wing critiques of commercial advertising, mainstream
journalism and the private control of broadcasting, some of which is collected in
McChesney and Scott (2004). The origins of an academic political economy
approach to modern communications lie in efforts to understand the organisation
of mass media in the early twentieth century, the expansion of electronic media,
the growth of large-scale entertainment and the shift from small-scale or family-
owned enterprises to large corporate media and communications businesses. It was
in the 1960s that CPE became a distinctive approach with institutional visibility,
notably when it was introduced to the curriculum at the University of Illinois,
first by Dallas Smythe and then Herbert Schiller (Maxwell 2003; H. Schiller
2000). Media political economy approaches developed in the context of a
broader resurgence of radical politics, and were then explicitly formulated in the
1970s (Wasko 2004: 312–13). As Mosco (2009: 68) identifies, there is ‘no simple way
to examine the wider influences on a field that encompasses the diverse con-
tributions of several generations of researchers scattered around the world’.It
has formed out of disparate intellectual currents concerned with the growth of
national and transnational communication businesses, government involvement
in communications and debates on the appropriate governance of communications
and culture across state, public and private actors.

The Frankfurt School
One of the explicit influences on critical political economy was the work of the
Frankfurt School notably Adorno, Horkheimer and others including Walter
Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. Adorno’s analysis of the emerging entertainment