Page 66 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Paradigms of media power 45

and elite power that the PM advances. Schudson (1995: 5) concedes that US media
limit diversity of opinion in ways that ‘foreshorten the representation of views on
the left’ yet argues that these tendencies ‘stop far short of uniformity’. Herman’s
(1999: 268) own reappraisal of the model concedes the latter point while reaffirming
the salience of the model to explain and predict, ‘mechanisms by which the
powerful are able to dominate the flow of messages and limit the space of contesting
parties’. Herman and Chomsky write in Manufacturing Consent (1988: 302) ‘As we
have stressed throughout this book, the U.S. media do not function in the manner
of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit – indeed
encourage – spirited debate, criticism and dissent, as long as these remain faith-
fully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite
consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness’.
Yet the key charge from other radical scholars is that Herman and Chomsky’s
account is too deterministic. Functionalism confers a status of necessity on social
phenomenon and in this radical functionalist account the media serve to reproduce
social power hierarchies in systematic ways. Summarising a multifaceted critique
Eldridge (1993: 25) writes:

it is a highly deterministic version of how the media operate, linked to a
functionalist conception of ideology.
[ … ]

Moreover … the ways the messages are received are assumed. Yet it is one
thing to recognize that there are inequalities of power, whether economic,
political and cultural, but quite another to clarify how far the media modify
or reinforce those inequalities. We continually need to ask questions about
control through the whole process of production, content and reception.
This is a conceptual, theoretical and empirical challenge.

For Murdock and Golding (2005: 62) the PM illustrates an instrumentalist
approach, one that focuses on the deliberate and purposeful exercising of power,
to affirm that private media are ‘instruments of class domination’. This, they
argue is ‘partly right’, however:

by focusing solely on these kinds of strategic interventions they overlook the
contradictions in the system. Owners, advertisers and key political personnel
cannot always do as they would wish. They operate within structures that con-
strain as well as facilitate, imposing limits as well as offering opportunities.
Analysing the nature and sources of these limits is a key task for a critical
political economy of culture.
(2005: 63)

Herman and Chomsky describe their approach as an ‘institutional analysis’ of a
system that is decentralised and non-conspiratorial. For Herman (1999: 263), ‘the