Page 76 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Paradigms of media power 55

state censorship
high entry costs (economic barriers to mass media production)
media concentration
corporate ownership
mass market pressures (i.e. commercial incentive to maximise audiences)
consumer inequalities (i.e. provision ‘skewed’ towards serving affluent
consumers)
advertising influence
rise of public relations
news routines and values
unequal resources (unequal access to economic, social and ‘cultural’ capital)
dominant discourses.

However a further list of countervailing influences is identified:

cultural power (intra- and inter-group influences of alternative understandings/
values)
state empowerment (for instance, press subsidy systems and forms of public
broadcasting)
media regulation
source power (capabilities of groups, including ‘resource poor’ groups, to
secure media exposure or access)
consumer power
producer power
staff power.

This ‘reconstituted radical perspective’ (Curran 2002: 165) offers a valuable
toolkit for analysis. It encourages analysis of the conditions that enable media
debate to be more open and contested as well as those that explain elite influence.
The approach informs an analysis of media coverage of the urban left who held
power in local government in London and other UK cities in the 1980s (Curran
et al. 2005). This describes how an adept and comparatively well-resourced left-
wing administration at the Greater London Council (GLC) could contest critical
accounts with alternative frames through media access, advertising and effective
public relations – while individual councils were less organised and able to
challenge stories about the ‘loony left’. Vehement attacks on the GLC from
right-wing national newspapers were not reproduced in reporting by local or
national news on public service broadcasting (PSB), governed by rules on
impartiality and with news agendas that were more focused on council provision.
The authors argue that consideration of core political economic influences
(media ownership and regulation) needs to be supplemented by consideration of
media sources and cultural influences. The right-wing newspaper attack on the
urban left was greatly facilitated by the hierarchical structure of power within
the popular press, with journalistic output shaped by the influence of owners and