Page 84 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media cultures, media economics, media problems 63

distinguish between people’s private and individual role as consumers and their
public and collective role as citizens (Baker 2002). Competitive market pressures
may not consistently promote diversity and fairness in media content. Media
conglomeration diminishes competition (McChesney 1999, 2013). Rising capitali-
sation restricts entry to the market, creating a zone of influence where ‘dominant
economic forces have a privileged position’ (Curran 1996: 94). Access to capital
functions as a ‘powerful exclusionary mechanism’ (Manning 2001: 102). This
leads to market censorship. Increased capitalisation ‘has introduced an invisible
system of ideological control by preventing groups with limited financial resources
from competing in the market, and it has restricted consumer power by narrowing
the range of choice’ (Curran 2001: 218).
The idealised notion of market democracy ignores the structuring influence of
advertising in commercial broadcasting and press, which Curran (1996)
describes as a ‘licensing’ power (chapter six). The skewing of media finance,
notably advertising, to favour certain kinds of audiences and disfavour others,
results in certain ideas being privileged while others may be rendered invisible by
lack of user exposure. Consumer demand is only partially effective in oligopolistic,
commercially driven systems, financed by advertising. The concept of ‘consumer
sovereignty’ ignores the variety and complexity of influences which shape media
content, notably in large, bureaucratised, advertising-dependent, media organisa-
tions. This tradition, then, challenges the belief that ‘the free market produces a
media system which responds to and expresses the views of the people’, arguing
that ‘market dominance by oligopolies has reduced media diversity, audience
choice and public control’ (Curran 1996: 92, 95). The increasing power of private
economic interests over the political process undermines democracy and further
removes the market and economic agents from democratic control. However, the
radical democratic approach also challenges the limitations of statist alternatives to
market provision and acknowledges the value of markets in meeting market-
expressed preferences, as well as benefits arising from market competition and
innovation. For instance, Lee (2000: 131) describes a broadening of political
discourse in the post-dictatorship period in Taiwan, where media market com-
petition contributed to ‘the fostering of diverse media accounts that complement
and check one another’, marking an ‘emancipatory alternative to aristocratic,
oligarchic or authoritarian dictatorship’.

The market as media regulator
The concept of the market as regulator is deployed by contending sides but in
very different ways. In pro-market rhetoric, it means allowing normal market
processes to occur without regulatory interference. For CPE critics, this masks a
selective call for only certain kinds of regulation, or indeed state-sanctioned
benefits, to be diminished. As many scholars have noted, the rhetoric of ‘deregula-
tion’ is misleading since marketisation has involved a reorientation of regulatory
tools, not merely a diminution of regulation (Humphreys 1996; Leys 2001). In