Page 86 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media cultures, media economics, media problems 65

of states exercised over and through media. Media worldwide have been har-
nessed to repressive, sectarian and anti-democratic purposes. The classic liberal
concern to protect media from state interference remains both salient and shared
by radical democratic media theory. However, classical liberal theory of the
media has provided a complex and problematic legacy. Liberal theory of the
press holds that the primary democratic role of the media is to oversee the state.
This task requires that the media are ‘free’ from state interference. The theory
supports a free-market economic model particularly powerful in the United
States and encapsulated in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ formulation of the
US Supreme Court (Baker 1989; Stein 2008). The libertarian model of press
freedom was formed through the political struggles against authoritarian rule
(McQuail 1992; Hardy 2008). A key problem was that it came to be applied in
the twentieth century to the quite different conditions of private ownership of
powerful media (Keane 1991).
Liberalism has, from its inception, grappled with the problems of speech and
speech rights (Barendt 2005; Hardy 2008) and from the late nineteenth century
confronted problems of corporate media ownership, monopolisation and
market-driven pressures for sensationalism. Different political systems favoured
different solutions depending on the leading values requiring protection, market
conditions and power interests shaping policy at any one time. The two main
responses came to be recognised as ‘social responsibility’ and ‘social market’.
The ‘social responsibility’ model was best articulated by the Hutchins Commission
on Freedom of the Press in 1947 in the United States (Siebert et al. 1963). This
in turn influenced the 1947–49 Royal Commission on the Press in Britain
(O’Malley 1997; Curran 2000). Both combined a critique of market failure in
the press with promotion of media professionalism, involving ‘the adoption of
certain procedures for verifying facts, drawing on different sources, presenting
rival interpretations’ whereby ‘the pluralism of opinion and information, once
secured through the clash of adversaries in the free market, could be recreated
through the “internal pluralism” of monopolistic media’ (Curran 1996: 99).
This ‘Anglo-American’ concept of social responsibility rejected a purely libertarian
view of the press as unrestricted freedom for publishers. Addressing the growing
criticisms of concentrated ownership and the narrow business control of editorial
agendas in the US press, the Hutchins Commission proposed that the press
should become more like ‘common carriers’ for diverse opinions (drawing on the
model of European public service broadcasting), and should be subject to an
industry code of practice, overseen by a new independent agency. The Com-
mission thus accepted a role for government in supplementing privately owned
media, but its defining boundary was that no economic restrictions should be
placed on private enterprise. The alternative social market model, developed in
several European countries, justified state intervention in markets on behalf of
democratic objectives, in particular pluralism of voice and, later, cultural diversity.
This engaged a more positive assessment of democratic states’ capacity to
advance social benefits (Christians et al. 2009). In addition to public service