Page 51 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

30 Mapping approaches and themes

by the Great Depression, New Deal politics and corporate expansion in North
America in the 1930s and 1940s. Schiller attended City College in New York,
whose provision of free education to the city’s working class and Jewish students
(excluded from Protestant elite private schools) contributed to a radicalised
educational environment. Schiller worked for the US government on the recon-
struction of Germany after the war, then returned to New York to teach and
complete a doctoral thesis on the political economy of post-war relief efforts.
Securing a visiting position at Illinois, his interest in resource allocation led to
work on the radio spectrum and prompted a deepening analysis and critique of
business power. His first major book Mass Communication and American Empire
(1969) was followed by The Mind Managers (1973), Communication and Cultural
Domination (1976) and a host of books and articles up to his final retrospective
Living in the Number One Country (2000).
Schiller’s work helped to define the political economy of communication
approach in the US, examining communication in the wider context of business
expansion and corporate influence on government. Yet it was his critique of
Western cultural imperialism that helped to make Schiller better known abroad
than in America and a huge influence on critical scholarship worldwide (chapter
seven). Central concerns for both Smythe and Schiller were to examine the growth
and power of transnational communications companies and their linkages with
other businesses and capital, notably advertising, with states and state policy, and
with governing elites. Their work examined corporate media in North America
but was also internationalist and Marxian, placing a critique of capitalism and
interests in class, social justice and cultural imperialism at its centre.
Mosco (2009: 88–89) describes a conference he attended at Illinois in 1979
which brought together a new generation of students of Schiller and Smythe
under the auspices of Thomas Guback, including Janet Wasko, Eileen Meehan,
Oscar Gandy, Manjunath Pendakur and Fred Fejes. The political economy
approach now broadened with the work of a new generation including Herbert
Schiller’s son Dan Schiller, and Robert McChesney, both at Illinois, Gerald
Sussman, Stuart Ewen, Emile McAnany, Robin Anderson, Andrew Calabrese,
John Downing, Oscar Gandy and Robert Hackett, amongst many others. From
the early 1980s political economy of communications began to develop as a
‘collective enterprise’ across North America and Europe.

European research origins
A political economy approach was explicitly propounded by scholars in the
United Kingdom, notably Graham Murdock, Peter Golding, Nicholas Garnham
and James Curran. In contrast to the United States a critical Marxian framework
was embedded in the institutional efforts to establish degree courses in media
studies in the 1970s and advanced and explicated as an alternative to mainstream
liberal approaches (chapter two). Golding and Murdock worked at the Centre
for Mass Communication Research, at the University of Leicester, established in