Page 31 - Culture Society and the Media

THEORETICAL APPROACHES 21
Of course, ‘idealism’ and ‘economism’ are terms which are readily exchanged
in arguments between Marxists, each protagonist invoking the name of the master
and the spirit of historical materialism. The ‘political economy’ account of the
media is well represented by Murdock’s article later in the reader, which argues
for the location of media power in the economic processes and structures of
media production. In a return to the base/superstructure metaphor, ‘political
economists’ conceive of ideology both as less important than, and determined by
the economic base. Ideology is returned to the confines of ‘false consciousness’
and denied autonomous effectiveness. Also, since the fundamental nature of
class struggle is grounded in economic antagonisms, the role of the media is that
of concealing and misrepresenting these fundamental antagonisms. Ideology
becomes the route through which struggle is obliterated rather than the site of
struggle. Murdock and Golding contend that the pressure to maximize audiences
and revenues produces a consistent tendency to avoid the ‘unpopular and
tendentious and draw instead on the values and assumptions which are most
familiar and most widely legitimated’ (Murdock and Golding, 1977, p. 37). The
role of the media here is that of legitimation through the production of false
consciousness, in the interests of a class which owns and controls the media. The
main concern of this form of media research is, therefore, the increasing
monopolization of the culture industry, through concentration and diversification.
Valuable though such research may be in summarizing the evidence on the
ownership of the media, there are problems with this return to the classic model
of base and superstructure. As Hall suggests, the advocates of ‘political economy’
‘conceive the economic level as not only a “necessary” but a “sufficient”
explanation of cultural and ideological effects’ (Hall, 1980, p. 15). Yet the focus
on general economic forms of capitalism dissipates distinctions between
different media practices and allows little in the way of specific historical
analysis beyond the bare bones of ownership. There is obviously some
justification in the arguments by political economists that ideology has been
given priority at the expense of serious consideration of the economic
determinants of the mass media. Yet political economy, in its present state of
development, would return us to the view of the media as a distorting mirror, a
window on reality, which misrepresents reality. This view of the media,
combined with a predilection for empirical analysis in the area of ownership and
media organizations, frequently seems to give political economy more in
common with pluralist accounts of the media than with other Marxist accounts.

‘Culturalist’ studies of the media

Culturalist studies of the media could be said to stand in an uneasy and
ambiguous position in relation to the theoretical concerns of structuralism and
political economy. On the one hand the indigenous British tradition of cultural
studies, initiated through the work of Williams, Thompson and Hoggart has