Page 78 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Chapter 3

Media cultures, media economics
and media problems

Critical political economy explores problems of the media. It investigates problems
arising from the manner in which media services are organised and provided, and
problems concerning content, conduct, consumption, usage and influence. This
chapter offers an overview of critical concerns that have shaped the tradition and
introduces contemporary debates, themes and topics that are examined in more
detail in parts two and three. While broad, it focuses on key issues concerning
the organisation of communication resources and hence on questions of control,
markets and states.

Addressing ‘problems’: some preliminaries
Lazarsfeld (1941) distinguished critical research from administrative research
carried out on behalf of public or private sponsors; ‘[c]ritical theory seeks to
expose underlying problems and faults of media practice and to relate them in a
comprehensive way to social issues, guided by certain values’ (McQuail 2010: 11).
Critical scholarship is evaluative. It brings values to bear on the analysis of
phenomena and the formulation of problems. Such problems may be long-
standing and general, even elemental, but the enunciation of problems is itself
always located, in time and space, in sets of values and presumptions. Critical
political economy has a prescriptive mission (McChesney 1998). This normativity,
however, is associated with problems of its own. First, historical accounts of
problems in the critical tradition are challenged in regard to their salience for
contemporary media. Second, much prescriptive work has addressed problems
in specific media systems and this must be reviewed in efforts to provide more
internationalist and comparative perspectives. Third, problems are not only per-
spectival but also unstable formulations in language. As De Certeau (1974: 189)
cautions, ‘Any talk about cultural problems advances on the grounds of unstable
words; it is impossible to determine the conceptual definition of these terms: their
meanings depend on their functioning in ideologies and disparate systems’. One
does not need to adopt the anti-foundationalism advanced in much postmodern
theory to agree with a critique of positivism, and recognise that understanding
the material world is mediated through language and meaning construction.