Page 62 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Paradigms of media power 41

variety of roles, cheer-leading the established order, alarming the citizenry about
flaws in that order, providing a civic forum for political debate, acting as a bat-
tleground among contesting elites’. Media also convey messages from the people
‘below’ to those in power ‘above’ and thus have a role of ‘moral amplification’ in
systems of representative democracy.

Radical traditions

A starting point for radical critique is to counter the claims that media are
independent and autonomous institutions. Instead, radicals highlight the nature
and extent of linkages between media and other sources of power. Liberal
communication scholars readily concede that the media do not correspond to
normative ideals of neutrality and autonomy. At issue is the degree to which the
media’s subjugation to authority undermines claims made for the way media
systems perform and, in a related debate, the most suitable ways to organise and
provide media services. A defining feature of radical approaches is to connect
media to the production and maintenance of inequalities in the distribution of
social power and resources. However, as we will explore, there are markedly
different directions in which this is developed, leading to important divisions
within the radical tradition, and different connections and alignments with other
approaches. One direction is towards radical functionalism, which has been
described as ‘the mirror opposite of liberal functionalism’ (Curran 2002: 137).

Radical functionalism
If there are underlying common interests in society then the integrative role of
media can be regarded as beneficial and benign. If, however, social benefits and
resources are unequally and unfairly shared out then the assertion of common
interests may be regarded as misleading, if not mystifying. ‘The media’sprojection
of an idealized social cohesion may serve to conceal fundamental differences of
interest’ (Curran 2002: 137). The media serve to integrate individuals into the
structures of society, as liberal functionalism claims; however, since that society is
unequal and conflictual, to carry out the task of integration requires ‘systematic
propaganda’. That is the claim of Herman and Chomsky in what is perhaps the
best known and most influential version of radical functionalism. Their book
Manufacturing Consent: the political economy of the media was first published in 1988
and republished with updated contributions in 2002 and 2008. The book was
not only a radical thesis, supported by detailed empirical work, but a radical
intervention, provocatively and directly challenging cherished self-conceptions
of democratic media in liberal systems, the United States in particular. The
book came out in a period of still high regard for American news journalism,
approximating, if not always realising, a watchdog role. If propaganda was
all too evident in the state control of communist systems, the authors argued
that the media systems of the so-called free world generated propaganda