Page 52 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

What (is) political economy of the media? 31

1966 as the first academic centre for the study of media in the UK, and led by
James Halloran. Murdock and Golding’s (1974) ‘For a Political Economy of
Mass Communications’ was the first of a series of papers that set out the rationale
and research agenda for political economy.
Nicholas Garnham worked as a BBC television producer and film critic,
became involved in the audiovisual trade union and began teaching part-time
before helping to establish the first media studies degree at the Polytechnic of
Central London (renamed the University of Westminster in 1992) (Curran 2004;
Mosco 2009: 77). Garnham’sinfluential essay ‘Contribution to a Political
Economy of Mass Communication’ (1979) outlined the theory and tasks for
political economy analysis. An inchoate ‘Westminster School’ emerged, but most
scholars in this emerging subfield were scattered institutionally and also tended
to integrate cultural and sociological analysis. The sociological focus was strong
throughout, in studies of news and documentary producers in press and television
by Phillip Elliot, Jeremy Tunstall, Paul Hartmann, Philip Schlesinger, Murdock
and Golding. Other key influences, as mentioned, were the intellectuals and
writers shaping British cultural studies, overlapping with Marxist influenced,
radical historians such as Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson, whose study The
Making of the English Working Class emphasised the political and cultural, as well as
economic, generation of class consciousness and the self-organisation of popular
movements. Of these figures, Raymond Williams left the most influential legacy
on media and cultural studies in work that ranged across literary, cultural history
and political economy studies, integrating humanities and social scientific
research. Major works include Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958), The Long
Revolution (1961) and Culture (1981).
A key impetus and theme for British cultural studies was to examine the cultural
practices of working class communities formed in the rich historical interweaving of
economic, political and cultural domination and conflict. Hoggart’s (1957) work
elevated working class experience yet, echoing Adorno, charted the perceived
demise and displacement of working class culture and consciousness by the ‘soft
mass-hedonism’ of an increasingly dominant commercial mass culture. The
complexity and contradiction of popular culture were explored most extensively
by Williams, a Welsh-born scholar and political activist, committed to working
class education, who was professor of drama at Cambridge. Like Hoggart, Williams
regarded commercialised culture as eroding authentic working class culture, but
Williams traced this process back beyond post-war Britain to the commodification
of literary work in the late eighteenth century. Also, in contrast to Hoggart and
Adorno’s pessimism, Williams (1981) highlighted an ongoing struggle to realise a
democratic communication system in place of the authoritarian, paternal or
commercial ones that existed.
In place of Adorno’s contention that media industry innovation was a force
for extending elite control, Williams ‘harboured an optimistic reformism’
(D. Schiller 1996: 109); he was more positive about the potential of new media
for creative expression and, while critical of control, saw state-supported media