Page 80 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media cultures, media economics, media problems 59

Neoliberalism
New liberalism, neoliberalism, marks a reassertion of individualism animated by
a modern notion of consumer sovereignty. It is a political philosophy ‘rooted in a
claim that the market is more rational than the state in the redistribution of
public resources’ (Chakravartty and Zhao 2008: 4). The neoliberal argument
that the media are best organised according to free-market principles rests on
various claims. Central is a belief in the efficacy of market competition to provide
the best and most desirable mechanism for satisfying consumer wants. For Adam
Smith (1776), competition ensures that the best quality goods are produced at
the lowest prices. The search for market share ensures that producers adopt the
most economically efficient means of production and deployment of labour. The
marketplace is conceived as a space in which individuals enter into voluntary
transactions, and where the inherently conflicting interests of producers and
consumers are resolved to the benefit of both parties. In neoclassical economic
theory ‘[u]nder perfect competition economic resources are allocated between
different goods and services in precisely the quantities which consumers wish
(their desires expressed by the price they are prepared to pay on the market)’
(Whish 1989: 4). 1
Real markets only ever approximate to perfect conditions, as even mainstream
economists readily concede, but the principles and desirability of market
mechanisms are strongly upheld by neoliberals, not least in regard to commu-
nications. A free-market environment in communications, they argue, allows for
the greatest circulation of ideas, information and expression. In competitive
markets, media firms must be responsive to what the public wants in order to
remain viable. Accordingly, competition ensures that the media are subject to
popular control. Moreover, markets serve popular tastes and interests, which
may be blocked by restrictions on supply imposed by regulation or state action.
For free marketeers, the media should be ‘free’ from state ‘interference’, the role
for government should be the minimum necessary; media regulation should be
strictly limited and directed towards facilitating the profitable production and
exchange of goods in national and international markets.
Such market liberalism has long been the province of the neoliberal right
(Adam Smith Institute 1984), but support has grown in other quarters influential in
contemporary media debates and in academia. Some versions of left-wing thought
share a deep opposition to the capitalist state and associate media regulation
with social and cultural control and authoritarianism. Left and right libertar-
ianism thus opposes interference with the freedom of economic transactions
carried out between individuals. Support is also found amongst cultural theorists
whose principal target is the distorting interference of cultural elites on media
provision. In market-based media it is the consumer who is sovereign. Media
must give the people, or at least economically viable market segments, what they
want. This is contrasted with regulation by elites or cultural commissars who
‘interfere’ in markets to impose what they think is best. Media regulation is