Page 75 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

54 Mapping approaches and themes

when, as today, there is increased disquiet about the crisis for commercial news
media and the loss of reach and resources for news journalism in the US and other
media systems. Schudson’s own work is illustrative. Having been a trenchant critic
of radical scholarship by Chomsky, Herman and Bagdikian, Schudson shares
their concerns about the damage to journalism from corporate disinvestment,
stating ‘Wall Street, whose collective devotion to an informed citizenry is nil,
seems determined to eviscerate newspapers’ (cited in McChesney 2007: 97).

Radical pluralism

The interweaving of critical political economy, sociology and critical cultural
theory has produced synthesising accounts that are more open, contingent and
less deterministic, while sharing a focus on the nature and effects of power
imbalances in communication resources. These ‘radical pluralist’ accounts
acknowledge the potentiality for creativity, agency and uncertainty within the
production process, as well as its structuring limitations. In turn, structures are
conceived as ‘dynamic formations that are constantly reproduced and altered
through practical action’, so that ‘analyzing the way that meaning is made and
remade through the concrete activities of producers and consumers is equally
essential’ (Murdock and Golding 2005: 63). Curran (2002) reviews the various
liberal and radical traditions in media sociology and puts forward a revising
model identifying key forces that serve to sustain relations of power and coun-
tervailing forces. This is an effort to overcome the limitations of both liberal
reflection theories and radical functionalism. A central weakness of liberal func-
tionalism is its failure to adequately acknowledge the ‘influences, pressures and
constraints that encourage the media to gravitate towards the central orbit of
power’ (Curran 2002: 148). CPE retains an emphasis on the ‘ascendancy’ of
influences, and of the structuring significance of capital and class. For example, a
study of the Obama healthcare policy debate found that proposals for publicly
funded insurance, strongly opposed by private insurance firms, were margin-
alised across US corporate media coverage, despite majority public support
(FAIR 2009). Yet radical functionalists assert that the main influences on the
media are system enhancing and supportive of the status quo. For Hallin (1994:
13) the propaganda model is ‘perfectly unidirectional; no forces working in other
directions are taken into account in any serious way’. Professional journalism is
regarded as ‘false consciousness’ at the expense of understanding how this ideology
provides resources, including the ability to assert professional values against
pressure from managers, owners and advertisers. Instead, Curran, Golding and
Murdock and others highlight the more varied configuration of media in liberal
democracies (such as public service media), and the presence of ‘countervailing
influences that pull against the magnetic field of power’ (Curran 2002: 148).
Elaborating a theoretical model of influences on media organisations Curran
(2002: 148–55) identifies eleven factors that tend to encourage media to support
dominant power interests: