Page 68 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Paradigms of media power 47

Cromwell 2006: 178). They argue that three major biases are built into ‘neutral’
professional journalism:

1 Reliance on official sources.
2 News hooks [and news values]. A dramatic event, official announcement,
publication of a report is required to justify covering a story, favouring
establishment interests and news management.
3 Carrot and stick pressures from advertisers, business associations and leading
political parties have ‘the effect of herding corporate journalists away from
some issues and towards others’.
(Edwards and Cromwell 2006: 12)

However, there are numerous problems with this analysis. Radical functionalist
accounts can demonstrate persuasively the selectivity in some media reporting,
and the alignment between certain reporting and dominant power interests. But
such accounts do not provide an adequate basis for totalising claims. The search
for a systemic ‘control’ mechanism can only be sustained by an effort to fold the
full range of mediated communications into a uniformity. To do so shifts from
an evidence-based analysis to assertions of control, while conceding and down-
playing dissent and disruptions. Schudson’s (1995: 4) critique of the propaganda
model is relevant here, finding it ‘misleading and mischievous … in its conclusion
that every apparent sign of debate or controversy is merely a cover for a deeper
uniformity of views’.
Alternative expression within mainstream media is further diminished by
casting it as a mechanism to sustain liberal myths: disagreement and dissent is
tolerated, even promoted, to prove and perpetuate the ‘myth’ of media freedom.
But a final variant of this approach is that it is overly reductive and dismissive in
its account of ‘mainstream’ media and over-invests in the progressive capabilities
of ‘non-corporate’, alternative media online. A totalistic critique of the ‘corporate’
mainstream can then only espouse ‘alternative’ media as a solution, in particular
the power of Internet-enabled ‘non-corporate journalism’ (Edwards and Cromwell
2006: 202). A key problem with such analysis from a CPE perspective is that it
conflates all major media as ‘corporate’ so that differences in ownership and
financing are rendered insignificant. For Herman and Chomsky these factors do
matter, but they follow common patterns in the overwhelmingly commercial US
media system. Transferred to other media systems such as the UK, with a mix of
strong public and private media, the adoption of this critique of ‘corporate media’
compounds a denial of salient differences across different institutional arrangements
and their influence on content. Edwards and Cromwell explain the presence of a
more liberal media in Britain, compared to the US, by reference to parliamentary
opposition to state–corporate power, but this fails to acknowledge how public
service structures from the BBC to Channel Four, or the trust-based management
of The Guardian and the Observer, came about, or indeed the role played by anti-market
factions within the Right in the development of media institutions and regulation.