Page 77 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

56 Mapping approaches and themes

senior editors. However, the different institutional organisation of PSB influenced
different types of coverage and was responsive to the emerging sophistication of
public relations (and marketing) strategies adopted by the left. Cultural power
was another key force, as perspectives on anti-racism, feminism and lesbian and
gay equality, which were ritually denounced in the right-wing media, moved to
the mainstream as social attitudes shifted. Curran’s (2002) model reaffirms radical
insights while jettisoning an overly ‘mechanical’ radical functionalism. Yet this
partial synthesis of radical and liberal analysis, for all its analytical value, cannot
mark a point of resolution. Critical debates move on, so that today there is a
revivified liberal pluralist orthodoxy, accompanied by a displacement of the
terms of the liberal–radical debate traced in this chapter. Curran’s model
encompasses a pluralisation of modes of communication but focuses upon, and
asserts, the centrality of mass media. Contemporary liberals are less likely to be
found contesting the evidence of elite influences on major media, although that
remains characteristically downplayed, but rather in finding evidence for new
conditions across digital communications that diminishes such concerns about
media power concentrations altogether.

Conclusion

The liberal–radical division provides a useful way to understand historical
debates and retains some salience, not least with ‘radical’ serving as a positive term
for scholars who challenge traditional liberal claims. In the form outlined at the
beginning of this chapter, liberal and radical represent incompatible accounts.
But we have traced some intermediate positions between the two – indeed a
strong tradition of research dubbed ‘radical pluralist’ seeks to do just that. The
unequal distribution of power in society undermines the liberal case. The sig-
nificance of conflict and the influence of dissent across media weakens the radical
account. Radicals are right to critique the tendency in liberal accounts to focus
on political power influences while neglecting economic and corporate ones. Yet
the fusion of a power elite in some radical functionalist accounts is disabling.
Intra-capitalist competition, divisions and differences of interests and outlook
amongst powerful agents are important factors influencing public communications.
One firm conclusion is the need to investigate media arrangements carefully, critically
and empirically. Radical pluralism advocates more open, exploratory investigations
of the relationship between media and the social, investigating how successfully
different groups mobilise available resources to influence media agendas or to
intervene in public communications. More open, empirical investigations illustrate
the debt to pluralism by radical accounts, which nevertheless continue to argue
that the material and symbolic resources that shape media discources are highly
unequally distributed. Where these more synthesising, radical pluralist perspectives
are most distinct is not in their methods, or even their local findings, but in the
way they conceive and address problems of the media.