Page 132 - Culture Society and the Media

122 CONTROL OF THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRIES
instrumental analysis concentrates on how individual capitalists pursue their
specific interests within particular communications companies. The second main
variant, however, works at a more general level and looks at the way the cultural
industries as a whole operate to advance the collective interests of the capitalist
class, or at least of dominant factions within it. Marx’s best-known statement of
this position occurs in one of his earliest works, The German Ideology, where he
argues that:

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has
control at the same time over the means of mental production…. Insofar as
they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, they
do this in its whole range, hence among other things (they) also regulate
the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are
the ruling ideas of the epoch. (Marx and Engels, 1974a, p. 64–5)

As Marx saw it, then, the owners of the new communications companies were
members of the general capitalist class and they used their control over cultural
production to ensure that the dominant images and representations supported the
existing social arrangements. Subsequent work has attempted to develop this
general argument by looking in more detail at the ideological and material links
between the communications industries and the capitalist class. At the ideological
level commentators have tried to specify the ways in which the dominant media
images bolster the central tenets of capitalism, while at the material level studies
have focused on the economic and social links binding the key controllers of
communications facilities with other core sectors of the capitalist class. Marx
himself provided a model for these kinds of analyses in his article, ‘The Opinion
of the Press and the Opinion of the People’, which he wrote for the Viennese
newspaper Die Presse, on Christmas Day 1861.
The American Civil War was at its height at the time and Marx was trying to
explain why the leading London newspapers were calling for intervention on the
side of the South when popular opinion seemed to support the North. His answer
was that intervention was in the interests of a significant sector of the English
ruling class headed by the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, and that this group
was able to influence the press coverage through their ownership of leading
newspapers and their social and political connections with key editors.

Consider the London press. At its head stands The Times, whose chief
editor, Bob Lowe, is a subordinate member of the cabinet and a mere
creature of Palmerston. The Principal Editor of Punch was accommodated
by Palmerston with a seat on the Board of Health and an annual salary of a
thousand pounds sterling. The Morning Post is in part Palmerston’s private
property…. The Morning Advertiser is the joint property of the licenced
victuallers…. The editor, Mr Grant, has had the honour to get invited to
Palmerston’s private soirées…. It must be added that the pious patrons of