Page 79 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

58 Mapping approaches and themes

Problems in the media: marketisation
CPE is associated most of all with a critique of marketisation. For Murdock and
Golding (1999: 118; Murdock 2003), marketisation means ‘all those policy
interventions designed to increase the freedom of action of private corporations
and to institute corporate goals and organizational procedures as the yardsticks
against which the performance of all forms of cultural enterprise are judged’.
Among the main processes of ‘marketisation’ have been privatisation, ‘the sale of
public communication assets to private investors’. In Europe, this occurred
across the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors, for example in the
controversial privatisation of the French public channel TF1 in 1986 (Kuhn
1995: 185–98). Another feature has been liberalisation, the introduction or extension
of competition in media markets by ‘opening up previously monopoly or
restricted markets to new entrants’ (Murdock and Wasko 2007: 2). This occurred
across Europe in broadcasting (Humphreys 1996; Hardy 2008). A third process
is known as deregulation but is better described as liberalising re-regulation. This
refers to shifts in regulatory regimes towards relaxation of rules and greater
reliance on industry self-regulation, resulting in a shift from the defence of
‘public interest’ objectives to the promotion of corporate interests (Murdock
2003: 20). A fourth process is corporatisation, pressurising public organisations to
emulate profit-oriented businesses by seeking new sources of income and max-
imising their market value. The pursuit of marketisation worldwide over recent
decades has ‘involved a concerted institutional and ideological attack on the
established organization of public culture’ (Murdock and Wasko 2007: 2).
The critique of marketisation highlights the deficiencies of media markets to
provide the range of information and cultural resources to serve citizens and
users. This highlights problems arising from corporate ownership of the media;
concentration of ownership, the range of content produced and the values pro-
moted by capitalistic market provision of media services (Thomas and Nain 2004).
There are many dimensions of the critique but key tenets are that the provision
of media under market conditions does not and cannot realise the full potential
of media to serve democracy, citizens and the common good.
There are classical arguments in defence of market provision of media, but
also contemporary perspectives that refute the diagnosis as well as the proposed
treatments that CPE advocates. In summary these argue that problems of control,
scarcity of supply, limitations in the quality and diversity of information and
cultural expression, and lack of access, have been or are being overcome. Conse-
quently, ‘critical’ political economy is no longer accurate, appropriate or salient. A
critique of corporate concentration made sense in the latter half of the twentieth
century, it is argued, but contemporary media and communications are more
diverse, independent, open and critical than ever before. We’ll examine these
claims through the rest of the book. The aim of this chapter is to take a brief
tour through the main perspectives and debates, in order to identify underlying
issues, perspectives and problems.