Page 129 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

118 Chapter Four

Similarly, to draw attention to domestic concentrations of media ownership
and to the role of advertising in “filtering” news and other content, would be
tantamount to questioning the existence or efficacy of American democracy.
Nor should one lose sight of the pecuniary rewards awaiting scholars eschew-
ing criticism of moneyed sponsors. These considerations are components of
what may be termed the political economy of scholarship.

THE PAST

Over the past 100 years, mainline American media scholarship has taken
many twists and turns, but there has been one constant: virtual silence re-
garding disparities in communicatory power. In many respects, we will see,
mainline scholarship has been highly self-contradictory. But with regard to
the concerns of political economy, there has been no contradiction: main-
stream scholarship has steadfastly ignored or denied issues raised by dispari-
ties in the power to communicate. (And here we find an additional, and pos-
sibly the most important, explanation for Grossberg’s lack of zeal for
reconciling with political economy.)

Chicago School
Standard histories of American communication/media studies begin with the
so-called “Chicago School” of John Dewey, Robert Park, and Charles Coo-
4
ley. The designation, “Chicago School,” is something of a misnomer, at least
in reference to these three. Cooley, after all, never strayed from the Univer-
sity of Michigan and Dewey’s “communication” writings date almost entirely
from his post-Chicago years at Harvard. Park, though, at Chicago, was cer-
5
tainly seminal. In any event, whether misnamed or not, for many intellectual
historians these “Chicago” theorists were foundational.
Dewey, Park, and Cooley were optimists and progressives. They specu-
lated on how technological change—particularly emerging media of
communication—could restore community in an urban setting, enlighten cit-
izens, and increase democracy. Dewey, for example, forwarded a doctrine of
instrumentalism, proposing virtually unlimited and inevitable human better-
ment through technological change. Technologies, he opined, are instruments
to solve problems, and as the problems change, so do the instruments.
Dewey, Park, and Cooley inquired broadly from humanist perspectives into
the role of media in American society. They viewed society as an organism,
whose citizens are bound together through networks of transportation