Page 88 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media cultures, media economics, media problems 67

The problem of offering a satisfactory account of the relationship between the
political and economic sphere is an ongoing challenge. In general, critical political
economists have moved from economism towards an appreciation of the relative
autonomy, and complexity, of the state. In democratic political systems, states
are susceptible to democratic pressures to create socially beneficial outcomes,
even while aligned with serving capital and political and economic elites. Any
state theory must deal not only with international variations but also with
globalisation processes and the reconfiguration of state power (chapter seven).
The contribution of CPE analysis within the internationalising of media studies
(Curran and Park 2000a; Thussu 2009; Hardy 2012a) has included analysing the
various interconnections of state and market power (Sparks 2008; Chakravartty
and Zhao 2008). For Sparks (2000b: 47):

The experience of Central and Eastern Europe highlights the fact that, in
most of the world, there is a close relationship, and often interpenetration,
between capital and politics. The belief that these two terms are polarized
into the states of (desirable) complete separation and (undesirable) complete
fusion is to mistake extreme cases for the norm.

In China, Winfield and Peng (2005) conclude ‘there appears to be a convolution
of the Party line and the bottom line, a Chinese media system moving from
totalitarianism to market authoritarianism’, while Lee et al. (2007: 24) propose
‘party-market corporatism’ as a concept to explain both the interlocking of the
state and capital in China, and ‘the management of the state-media-capital
tripartite relationship’.
Perspectives on the state and media tend to draw on a mixture of theoretical,
historical and empirical analysis, although this is not always explicitly acknowl-
edged, as in Althusser’s account of Ideological State Apparatuses (chapter one).
A highly negative assessment of the state comes from libertarian strains that
conceive the state as an essentially repressive force on individual freedom.
However, this can lead to an analysis in close alignment with neoliberalism by
disfavouring state action yet tacitly justifying corporate rule and the freedom of
powerful economic actors. Another, radical democratic, perspective argues that
democratic institutions and processes can be used to develop policies that serve
wider social and cultural goals. There is then a historical debate between revo-
lutionary strategies to capture and overthrow the state or reformism, establishing
social welfare policies through ‘parliamentary socialism’. Connected to these
more general conceptions of the state, economy and democracy are specific
debates concerning the role of the state in communications.

Media and the public sphere

Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first published in
1962, has had an enormous impact on Western media scholarship, especially