Page 60 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Paradigms of media power 39

Liberal pluralism
The core tenet of liberal pluralism is that power is distributed and dispersed across
different groups and networks in society who can influence decision-making pro-
cesses and institutions in allocating resources and taking decisions. While different
groups pursue their own sectional interests to varying degrees, the political
system is oriented to serving the needs of society as a whole. In contrast to
domination theories of various kinds, including Marxism, power is pooled and
shared; power is also contingent rather than ordered in a fixed distributional
hierarchy. Liberal pluralism describes a political system that is relatively open to
influences across society and this openness in turn legitimates its core principles
of democratic accountability and fairness.
That is only a starting point. There are varieties of liberalism and these in turn
privilege different ‘jobs’ for media, and different conceptions of how media and
communications should be organised and regulated to serve democratic purposes.
Baker (2002) describes elite, republican, pluralist democracy and his own ‘complex’,
compound perspective. Modern liberal theorists have engaged with the evidence
of conflict in society, and pluralists recognise that different groups and interests
compete for power and influence, but the key characteristic of liberalism is that
dominance is not pre-structured. In representative democracies most sections of
society are represented by organised interest groups and parties who compete in
institutionalised political forums so that political power is contingent and
unpredictable.
In regard to media, the tenets of what Curran (2002: 127) calls ‘liberal reflection
theories’ are that the media reflect rather than shape society. Media convey,
circulate and enable the exchange of information, ideas and opinions across
society. Different groups and interests in society can inform and influence society
through the mediation of public media. Media systems are open to a sufficiently
wide range of voices, ideas and opinions across society to legitimate public
media’s role on behalf of society. This vision has its origins in the hard-fought
liberal claim to freedom of expression. In order to serve society, the media must
have a high degree of autonomy. Within a libertarian perspective such autonomy is
defined against ‘interference’ by states whereas other liberal traditions incorporate
a role for the state as guarantor of communications against private interests. In
general, liberalism promotes media autonomy from the instrumental interests of
states, political groups, media owners and advertisers. In the twentieth century,
liberalism faced imperatives to resolve for each medium the inherent tensions
and contradictions between economic and political freedom, between ‘market
freedom’ for the owners of media and ensuring that media supported democratic
processes (Murdock 1992b; chapter three).

Liberal functionalism

Derived from Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), structural functionalism is associated
with the US sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–79). Functionalism proposes that