Page 56 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

What (is) political economy of the media? 35

a generalist manner at the expense of the values of critical interrogation
espoused. In both cases the framing of unsophisticated vs. sophisticated serves as
code to warn students to follow favoured paths and in my view does not always
encourage efforts to illuminate critical problems, which is the objective of CPE.

International origins and development
CPE developed in other regions both through the analysis of national media
systems and as part of a wider critique of imperialism and dependency, including
its cultural dimensions. Critical scholars in Latin America, one of the chief targets
for US-led development projects, challenged the then dominant modernisation
paradigm which supported models of development that favoured Western economic
and political interests. Various writers shaped what became known as depen-
dency theory (Amin 1976; Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Mosco 2009: 101). This
proposed that transnational businesses, supported by their respective states in
‘core’ countries, exercised power over ‘peripheral’ countries and regions through
their control of productive resources and labour. Dependency theorists were
amongst the first to examine international cultural flows and the ways in which
modernisation programmes in developing countries favoured the interests and
expansion of Western media companies. A body of critical communications
scholarship developed in the 1960s that influenced and anticipated work on
media globalisation in subsequent decades. This work drew on an intellectual
and research agenda shaped by anti-colonial movements and struggle for self-
determination by radical intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon in Algeria and Paulo
Freire in Brazil, who had emphasised the importance of mass communication for
liberation movements.

Summary of CPE development
There are diverse traditions, strands and clusters (institutional and geocultural)
that developed and continue to proliferate. The influence of political economy
within the field of communications scholarship varies across time, subject area
and region. However, a general contour can be outlined. CPE themes were
framed against the backdrop of a resurgent Western Marxism, the rise of dissident
social movements and anti-imperialist sentiments worldwide in the 1960s and
1970s. CPE emerged as an articulated set of claims and research priorities in the
1970s. This was a period of intellectual ascendency for neo-Marxist influence
within the humanities and social sciences where media, communications and
cultural studies were located. Critical political economy was never a uniform
approach. Some strands have focused on ideology and subjectivity, others on the
economy, capitalist production and class relations, labour and class struggle (see
Schiller 1996: 132–84; Mosco 2009; Pietilä 2005: 221–44). The CPE approach
that developed from the 1970s had at its core the recognition of media as
industries which produce and distribute commodities (Murdock and Golding