Page 150 - Culture Society and the Media

140 CONTROL OF THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRIES
fifteen communications companies; and EMI and Associated Newspapers were
each linked to ten.
At one level then, the available evidence gives reasonable support to the
instrumentalist position. Media corporations are increasingly integrated into the
core of British capitalism and the material they produce for mass consumption
does tend to support, or at least not to undermine, capitalism’s central values of
private property, ‘free’ enterprise, and profit. However, this evidence only
describes the general coincidence between patterns of ownership and patterns of
output. It does not explain it, although instrumentalists often present it as though
it did, as in the Morning Star’s evidence to the last Royal Commission on the
Press.

All the national newspapers have property holdings and substantial links
with a wide range of financial and industrial undertakings. They are thus
closely integrated with Monopoly Capital as a whole. [Hence] it is not
surprising that the national capitalist newspapers strongly defend private
enterprise. (Royal Commission on the Press, 1975b, p. 2)

This argument moves from correlation to causality by assuming that the
capitalist class act more or less coherently to defend their shared interests. At its
crudest, this produces a version of conspiracy theory. At the very least, it has to
assume that the owning class intentionally pursue their collective ideological
interests through their control over cultural production. There are fundamental
problems with this position.
Although it ultimately depends upon an empirical account of influence and
control it cannot supply the necessary evidence due to the difficulties of
investigating corporate decision making at the higher levels. So in the absence of
direct evidence instrumentalists are obliged to fall back on the second-hand
sources provided by inside accounts together with what can be gleaned from the
publicity surrounding take-overs and board struggles and scandals of various
kinds. Apart from their obvious partiality, these accounts necessarily deal with
atypical situations and so they cannot offer an adequate base for analysing the
routine exercise of power and control. It is very easy to become fascinated by
what goes on in the corridors of corporate power, by the personality clashes, the
clandestine deals, the backstabbings and so on. But even if a reliable range of
relevant information were available, this version of instrumentalism would still be
open to the theoretical objections that it concentrates solely on the level of action
and agency and that it identifies the core interests of capitalists with the active
defence of key ideological tenets.
This second assumption is not absolutely necessary, however. Other variants of
instrumentalism stress the centrality of economic interests and see the production
of legitimating ideology as the logical outcome of the search for profits. In Ralph
Miliband’s words: