Page 90 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media cultures, media economics, media problems 69

Habermas’s original account of the public sphere has been highly influential
in Euro-American scholarship and is also subject to extensive critiques ranging
from historical accuracy and the neglect of plebeian spheres to the privileging of
rational discourse and the positing of a centred, rational subject as the agent of
communicative exchange (Calhoun 1992; Keane 1998: 157–89). The Habermassian
public sphere privileges the exchange of information and opinion and neglects
the entertainment activities of media on the untenable grounds that these are not
part of rational exchange and not concerned with public issues (Curran 2002:
237–39; McGuigan 1996, 1998). Political theorists, communication, and feminist
scholars have challenged and deconstructed information/entertainment and public/
domestic divisions, addressing, for instance, how politics is engaged through
entertainment (Calhoun 1992; Curran 2010a; Street 2011).
While CPE has shared these deficiencies it also provides resources to overcome
them. There are three principal features. First, a critique of market liberalism, as
described above. Second, an expanded conception of cultural citizenship and of
communication rights for all. Murdock (1992b) argues that, in addition to access
to the full range of information, citizens must have scope to engage with the
greatest range of contemporary experience, both personal and collective; to
excavate the historical roots of present conditions; to have access to the broadest
range of viewpoints, expressed in the widest range of possible voices and forms.
Here, the informational, political speech role of media is privileged, but this
argument connects a much broader range of media provision and mediated
communication to underlying values of citizenship. The third feature is a
pluralistic model of media organisation. This multidimensional assessment of
state and market informs radical democratic models of how the media should be
organised that draw on another key argument, namely that there are different
tasks required of media in a democratic system that can best be served by having
a combination of media sectors differentially organised and financed, generating
different communication spaces and styles. Curran (2002: 240–47) provides the
best exposition of such a normative model, proposing a core public service sector
encircled by private, social market, professional and civil media sectors. For
Baker (2002), this compound model is best able to serve a ‘complex democratic
perspective’, one that combines and goes beyond elite, republican (participatory)
and liberal-pluralist democratic theories. It seeks to ensure that the media system
is not controlled by either the state or the market, while incorporating both state
regulation and private media. There are dynamic disequilibria in the system: the
various sectors not only provide different purposes but also ways of influencing
the performance of other sectors to strengthen media independence, enhance
diversity and generate quality. Such normative models were constructed to
address problems in Anglo-American media systems, and their authors would
reject universalising them as a blueprint against the grain of diverse existing
media systems. 3
Critical political economy of media is concerned with how communication
resources are cultivated, organised, allocated and used. Questions of communications