Page 70 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Paradigms of media power 49

for instance under different institutional arrangements? How does media work
differ across varying, and changing, environments? Such neglect is too high a price
to pay for the clarity and impact of such totalising readings of media performance.
Influences within radical functionalism can be identified that help delineate
different strands of critical political economic thinking. First, radical functionalism
has tended to bear greater influence from the work of a ‘later’ Frankfurt School
theorist Herbert Marcuse, notably his focus on psychologistic explanations for
dominance and subordination, emphasising concepts such as false consciousness
and the ‘repressive tolerance’ of dissent (Jay 1996). A left libertarian and often
anarchist orientation articulates a strong suspicion of power centres as tools of
ruling class interests that are inherently repressive. The socialist emphasis on
harnessing such resources for socially progressive purposes tends to be collapsed
into liberalism, and dismissed. Divisions over the state also influence divergent
accounts of media reform and democratisation. Radical functionalism tends to
favour anti-system initiatives including radical media, by viewing mainstream
media as either wholly corporate instruments or irretrievably co-opted to serve
establishment interests. By contrast, other CPE approaches identify a purposeful
struggle to create and sustain public media with attention to democratising policy,
and public service operations, in alliances with media workers (chapter nine).

Revisions and debates

If the 1970s saw a division between liberal and radical/Marxist being used for
pedagogic purposes, scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s brought signs of con-
vergence in media sociology. Part of this was revision within radical scholarship,
part commonality with a more empirical mainstream media sociology. Underlying
tenets informing radical critiques were challenged by research from media
sociology, cultural studies, and by alternative approaches notably drawn from
postmodernist theory. By the end of the 1990s the liberal–radical schism had
given way to a partial synthesis in radical pluralist perspectives. This shift has been
examined in some detail (Goldsmiths Media Group 2000; Curran 2002). We will
briefly explore some key developments to trace how liberal and radical accounts
were revised in three key areas: domination theory and ideology (post Marxism);
media theory (new influences); news processes and sources (liberal and radical).

Domination theory and ideology
We now have many accounts of the shifts in ‘radical’ scholarship away from a
pronounced Marxism to what has been called ‘radical pluralism’. This involved
shifts from a class-conflict model of society towards a more pluralist conception
characterised by struggles – over identities, culture and meaning, as well as material
resources – that were fluid, complex and contingent. Studies of subcultural for-
mations found active resistance within working class subcultures that reworked
aspects of commercial culture, fashioning ‘contrary cultural definitions’ (Clarke