Critical vs. consensus models

• Media and social consensus
  • Different interests compete on a level playing field
  • Competing interests and state agencies share a common culture and definition of the public good
  • Differentials of power and resources in society
  • Unequal material and social conditions are reproduced
  • Values and social goals are not always shared

Consensus models of media

• Liberal pluralism: media checks and balances, diverse views. Accountability for elites, information for democracy
• Libertarian theory: media as watch dog, free speech guaranteed by private ownership
• Social responsibility theory: private media don’t always support public needs, state intervention is needed
• Administrative research: supports the status quo. Seeks audience maximization and market efficiencies
• Functionalist approaches: media as ‘systems’ seeking stability and cohesion. Analysis of interdependent parts

Conflict models of media

• Frankfurt school critical theory: media’s role in rise of fascism and US conservation. How media suppresses social change
• Culture industries: media create consumer culture for passive audiences
• Neo-Marxist analyses of media: media as ideological vehicle of false consciousness (e.g. portraying the notion that Iraq is better now even though there’s more violence than before)
• Includes political economy, structuralism, semiotics and cultural studies

Political economy of media industries???

• Rejects neoclassical cultural economies, functionalist and liberal-pluralist views
• Holistic approach toward economy interrelation

Critical political economy

• Critical political economy approaches see the fact that culture is “the concern of the increasing role of private businesses in cultural production. Such approaches are heavily critical of media and cultural corporations”
• This approach is more holistic, relating political, social and cultural life, rather than separating them.
• It is historical and looks at long term changes in the role of the state, corporations, and the media in culture
• Centrally concerned with the balance between private and public intervention
• Asks basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good.

Versions of political economy include:

• Schiller-McChesney focus on US media industry and political interests of media elites
• European Cultural industries approach
• Sociology of cultural production

What is political economy?

Political economy involves: power, regulations, governments, media products, consumption, culture, communication, distribution…

One perspective is that it focuses primarily on what we might call “critical political economy”—emphasizing Marxian thought

It is always concerned with analyzing a structure of social relations and of social power. But it is particularly concerned to analyze the peculiarities of that system of social power called capitalism

The political economy approach stems from the late eighteenth century, witnessing the rise of industrial capitalism and of the concept of the nation-state. Like textual analysis and cultural studies, political economy is inherently Marxist in its ideals, focusing on power distribution between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. The approach is empirical in the way that it uses the simple communication model, but it also contains some theoretical aspects. There are three key dimensions to the political economy approach; the first examines how the different economic structures of the media, together with governmental policies and regulations influence the content of the media. The second key dimension examines the aforementioned power structure and how media content enforces, challenges and influences existing class and social relations, while the third is the `prescriptive mission’ of the political economy approach: The assumption that public good is not served by an untrammeled free market, that controls have to be in place.

In relation to the recording industry, the political economy approach looks at how the products and texts from the industry (everything from the CDs to advertising to legal rulings related to intellectual property) that reaches us as consumers are formed by government controls, ownership patterns, advertising, and the complex patterns of distribution and consumption.
Political economy’s strength is that it deals not only with the big players in media, say for example Rupert Murdoch, but also a variety of smaller institutions as well as factors such as time and money constraints, and the need for profit and even the structure of various organization. It has a strong belief in the `Liberal Theory of the Press’ – that the media should be out protecting the public from political untruths, and should help to construct an informed society.

Although the media do not offer sufficient grounds for outlining the domain of a political economy of culture, they are a necessary and central aspect of that field. The necessity lies in: examining the material foundations of what we have come to call the “public sphere,” in understanding our news and entertainment industries as capitalist enterprises, in media policy and regulation, and on the frontiers of “new media” development

Media industries in the past 2 decades took on the belief that ‘public interest’ is best served by the market

• The notion that: Government regulation is a damaging force and its presence should be minimized
• These changes in policy have shaped and also reflect the conception of what the information society should look like

False consciousness is the Marxist thesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society mislead the proletariat — and other classes — about the real relations of forces between those classes and of the actual states of affairs with respect to the development of various elements of pre-socialist society relative to the secular development of human society in general.