Page 59 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

38 Mapping approaches and themes

in favour of one or other tradition or to consider whether there might be a more
convincing intermediate position’. It was also an effort to foreground a Marxist
tradition ‘that had been marginalized in British academic life for much of the
post-war period’ (Curran 2002: 108). This radical strand also challenged the
more long-standing tradition of liberal pluralist communication studies, then
dominant in the United States.
In the liberal pluralist paradigm power, including media power, is dispersed;
the relationship of power to media content and media discourse is contingent. In
the Marxist account, media plays a key role in the management of society, the
relationship between concentrated power and media discourse is one of determi-
nation. In the 1970s distinctive liberal and neo-Marxist approaches dominated
and structured debates in Western media theory. Through the 1980s and 1990s
such a division of the field became less tenable and less acceptable to all protagonists.
Radical, neo-Marxist perspectives lost ground in the midst of a broader retreat
from leftist ideas, towards more pluralistic accounts of media power and influence.
Liberal perspectives were also strengthened by a variety of different, even
incompatible, intellectual currents that shared opposition to the perceived rigidities,
reductionism and determinism of neo-Marxist approaches. These included
postmodernism, cultural studies approaches, liberal sociology, the ‘process
school’ of semiotics (Fiske 1990) and emerging globalisation theories.
Is there value then in returning to a liberal–radical framework formulated more
than a quarter of a century ago? The liberal–radical ‘schism’ structures a review of
approaches to media (Goldsmiths Media Group 2000), yet it is clearly reductive
to align and assign approaches towards media to two rival camps. As a binary,
liberal–radical is ripe for deconstruction. So, we will try to interrogate rather than
merely endorse the division and review both classical and contemporary arguments
regarding its salience. Yet, the division between liberal and radical approaches
connects to central issues in the political economy of media, concerning the
relationship between media and other sources of power in societies, the nature
and extent of ‘autonomy’ for media workers, the production and circulation of
meanings in societies. How does the ordering of power in society relate to media
providers in regard to their organisation, behaviour, content and output? To what
extent are media organisations independent of powerful interests in society?
Not surprisingly the liberal–radical division has tended to be favoured by critical
scholars, not least in challenging the taken-for-grantedness of mainstream (liberal)
perspectives. Liberal scholars such as McQuail (2010: 11) propose an alternative
division, between right (conservative) and left (progressive and liberal) that would
tend to collapse the radical–liberal division. For perspectives on media power
and in particular media policy a useful set of divisions is between neoliberal,
liberal democratic, libertarian, postmodernism and critical political economic
perspectives. Meyrowitz (2008) identifies three core ‘narratives’ of media influence:
power, pleasure and patterns. We will draw upon these mappings but begin by
reviewing the ‘traditional’ liberal–radical division and then tracing how accounts
were modified in changed conditions.