International Mass Communication essay

Based on the readings and lectures explain what media ecology is?
Based on the readings and lectures explain what political economy of media is?
What is the “cultural/media imperialism” tradition?
How did the Soviet press system work and what were some of the main goals of Soviet-style socialist television?

Based on the course materials (readings, lectures, and screenings) please answer the following questions in an essay format. You can include short citations (i.e. McLuhan, 23) but you do not have to include bibliography. Each of your answers should be in the vicinity of 500 words. Type your answers on a single word document (12 font, single space) and submit it on Canvas. Each question is worth 25 points for a total of 100 points.

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Introduction

1.1. Life, the Universe, and Everything

What does it mean to be human? What are the conditions that shape and in-
fluence us as a species? How does human communication, consciousness, and
culture change over time, and in concert with the changing circumstances in
which we find ourselves? What drives human history? What defines the present
moment? And what might the future hold for us? Most important of all, as we
move forward, how are we to survive as a species? And beyond mere survival, how
are we to retain our humanity in the face of changing circumstances that often
seem altogether dehumanizing?

These are some of the concerns that have attracted scholars to media ecology,
and that have animated our conversations, as many of us have been interested in
the kinds of questions relating to, as humorist Douglas Adams put it, life, the uni-
verse, and everything. Of course, the big questions are not the only questions that
have been discussed in media ecology circles. There is ample room for the pursuit
of more modest concerns and specific topics, for research regarding a given his-
torical moment, or culture or subculture, or text, artifact or technological innova-
tion. But even media ecological studies that are relatively narrow in focus can be

Introduction

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2 | Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition

situated in a much broader context that accords them much greater significance
than such studies would otherwise enjoy.

My aim in writing this book is to provide an introduction to media ecology
that will serve both readers who are new to the subject and those who enjoy a great
deal of familiarity with it. For several decades I have been called upon repeatedly
to answer the question, what is media ecology? My answers over the years have var-
ied somewhat, in part depending on the situation and audience, in part because
my understanding has grown and evolved, by which I mean that it has deepened
rather than changed in any radical manner, and in part because, as the saying goes,
it’s complicated.

When the question comes up in conversation, I often respond by answering
the question with another question, specifically, have you ever heard of Marshall
McLuhan? I often follow this up by mentioning McLuhan’s famous aphorism,
the medium is the message, which in many ways sums up what is meant by media
ecology (a point I will elaborate on in Chapter 3). Often, I will follow up with a
question about Neil Postman, and then maybe some other scholars, also adding
the caveat that media ecology is not reducible to the work of any one individual.
But my main point here is that one of the best ways to answer the question, what
is media ecology?, is to instead answer the question, who is media ecology?, that is,
whose work does the term media ecology represent? I was given the opportunity
to answer that question on a broad scale, representing the field as a network of
scholars and their works, when Paul Soukup asked me to write a review essay
on media ecology for Communication Research Trends (Strate, 2004). I included
a revised and updated version of the review in my first book on media ecology,
Echoes and Reflections (Strate, 2006). I also discussed media ecology in relation to
several scholars in On the Binding Biases of Time (2011), and specifically in regard
to Postman in Amazing Ourselves to Death (2014), and to McLuhan in a volume
published in Mandarin translation, 麦克卢汉与媒介生态学 [McLuhan and Me-
dia Ecology] (2016).

The question of who is media ecology? is one that continues to be explored,
and as Walter Ong (1967, 1982) reminds us, there is no knowledge without a
knower, no scholarship without a scholar, and therefore no media ecology with-
out a media ecology scholar, or media ecologist (a designation that was introduced
in a spirit of playfulness and humor, that also allows us to include categories other
than academics, e.g., artists, musicians, poets, novelists, media producers, inven-
tors, entrepreneurs, managers and executives, politicians and activists, etc.). The
idea of media ecology does not exist in a vacuum; it is only known to exist in a
human context, so that there is no media ecology except for a media ecology of

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Introduction | 3

McLuhan, a media ecology of Postman, and so on. That these individual media
ecologies may overlap to a significant degree is what makes it possible to go be-
yond the scope of intellectual biography in our discussions of media ecology. But
in the end we are always dealing with media ecology as it is understood by a given
individual, or group.

This book, then, is my media ecology, my understanding of media ecology,
and were it not for the fact that it would defy the conventions of contempo-
rary publishing, the proper title of this book ought to be My Media Ecology or
Lance Strate’s Media Ecology. Lest you get the wrong impression and think that
in making this statement I mean to claim ownership of media ecology, or other-
wise indulge in some form of self- aggrandizement, let me assure you that that is
not the case. I fully acknowledge that my understanding of media ecology is an
exercise in what Alfred Korzybski (1950, 1993) termed time- binding, building
on the work of others that have gone before me, standing on the shoulders of
giants as it were. My understanding has also been influenced by colleagues and
contemporaries, and most certainly by my students. But I take pains to qualify
this work as my own so that none of the defects it unavoidably contains will be
ascribed to these others. Most importantly, I want to emphasize that my purpose
is not to impose my understanding on others, or to claim that this is the last
word regarding the subject matter. As Edward Wachtel, my friend, colleague, and
collaborator (Strate & Wachtel, 2005) has observed, anonymity in authorship is
directly related to the aura of authority, which is why dictionary definitions come
across as if they were the word of God (Wachtel, 1992). And that is why I want to
emphasize that this book represents my media ecology, in hopes that in this way I
will avoid conveying an impression of absolute anonymous authority over these
writings, although I do hope that they are given serious consideration. Moreover,
following the advice of Korzybski and others associated with general semantics, I
should also add that this book represents my media ecology circa 2016, because I
fully anticipate that my understanding of the subject will continue to grow and
evolve for as long as I am alive and lucid.

I do hope that my understanding of media ecology, as conveyed through the
medium of this book, will be helpful for others in gaining their own understanding
of media ecology, and in continuing that work as scholars and practitioners. I also
hope that this book, while providing a leg up in understanding media ecology, in
no way short circuits further study, but rather, demonstrates its absolute necessity.
Living within an electronic media environment, there tends to be an emphasis on
speed and instantaneity, and even among scholars working within an older, bookish
tradition, there is often a desire for quick learning, shortcuts to knowledge acquisi-

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4 | Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition

tion. No doubt, under some circumstances, a superficial understanding of the kind
to be gained from a Wikipedia entry may seem sufficient, even given a certain degree
of inaccuracy in its coverage. It may also be the case that under other circumstances
the sudden flash of insight that many associate with understanding media ecology,
that aha! moment, is sufficient for their purposes. But I would suggest that media
ecology scholarship is in many ways quite challenging, a form of scholarship that
requires a long term commitment, but also one that is, ultimately, quite fruitful.

Media ecology scholarship can be hard, but I hope that this book will make
it a little bit easier, by providing a clear and accessible introduction to the subject.
Rather than producing a survey of the field, as I have done before, my intent
is to provide a summary of what I consider to be media ecology’s foundational
concepts. I probably should add that this is not a textbook, as much as I might
want it to be adopted as a required text for various kinds of courses. A textbook is
a particular genre of publishing designed exclusively to serve a pedagogical func-
tion. Indeed, textbooks may be considered the first modern form of educational
technology, and holding aside differences of opinion on their value, their purpose
and function is to present students with a faithful reflection of scholarship as it
exists in a given area of study. And that is not my intent for this book. Rather, my
objective is to go beyond existing scholarship, and provide a new synthesis, one
that advances media ecology scholarship. For this reason, I believe that this book
will have some value even for seasoned media ecologists.

1.2. Defining Media Ecology

What is media ecology? A better question would be, what is the definition of media
ecology? Even better would be, what are the different definitions of media ecology that
have been put forth at various times, by various individuals? With that in mind, my
starting point is the first definition of media ecology that accompanied the formal
introduction of the term in an address delivered by Neil Postman. The context
was the 58th annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, held
in Milwaukee, during a program session entitled Media Ecology: The English of the
Future, on November 29, 1968. Postman’s address was listed as, “Growing Up
Relevant,” and a revised version of Postman’s address was published in 1970 as a
book chapter under the new title of “The Reformed English Curriculum” in an
anthology entitled High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Second-
ary Education, edited by Alvin C. Eurich. It is here that Postman (1970) defined
media ecology as “the study of media as environments” (p. 161). As this is the Ur-

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Introduction | 5

text as far as any formal discussion of media ecology is concerned, it would seem
altogether appropriate to review it here.

Postman (1970) began by arguing that the subject of English has become
largely irrelevant, having very little survival value, and that “children need to be
competent in using and understanding the dominant media of their culture”
(p. 160). He went on to refer to novels, poems, and essays as older types of media
that serve as the content of English education, and then suggested an alternative
that would better prepare students to function in an age when we have developed
the capacity both to leave behind the confines of the planet via space travel, and
to destroy it, via nuclear weapons:

I call the alternative “media ecology.” Its intention is to study the interaction between
people and their communications technology. More particularly, media ecology looks
into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understand-
ing, feelings, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our
chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure,
content, and impact on people.

An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings
certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It structures what we can see and say
and, therefore, do. It assigns roles to us and insists on our playing them. It specifies what
we are permitted to do and what we are not. Sometimes, as in the case of a courtroom
or classroom, or business office, the specifications are explicit and formal. In the case of
media environments (e.g., books, radio, film, television, etc.), the specifications are more
often implicit and informal, half concealed by our assumption that what we are dealing
with is not an environment, but merely a machine. Media ecology tries to make these
specifications explicit. It tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media
structure what we are seeing, why media make us feel and act as we do.

Media ecology is the study of media as environments. (p. 161)

While other attempts at defining media ecology have followed, this first definition
remains, in many ways, the most useful, and serves as the starting point for this
book. Postman’s definition is based on two analogies. The first may be taken as
a metaphor, that media can be understood as environments. The second analogy
is with the traditional definition of ecology as the study of environments, from
which it follows that media ecology would be defined as the study of media as
environments. As an analogical definition, it is suggestive rather than precise,
and therefore does not convey in any detail what exactly media ecology is. In this
sense, Postman’s definition can be taken to be deliberately subversive, informed
by Korzybski’s (1993) warning that, “whatever you might say something ‘is’, it is

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not” (p. 409). Indeed, the fuzziness of the definition lies in the fact that the terms
are left relatively open to interpretation, reflecting the complexity of what they
represent, and the fact that more specific definitions would inevitably be oversim-
plifications.

All definitions are constructed out of other terms that in turn require their
own definitions, based on other terms that require their own definitions, and so
on. The process is ultimately circular, and dictionaries are closed systems, which
is why it is impossible to use a dictionary unless you already know the language it
represents. I bring this up not to argue that any attempt at defining terms would
be futile, but rather to note the limitations and difficulties of such activities. At
this point, I simply want to emphasize that Postman’s definition is dependent on
two key terms, media and environments. Both terms are words that are commonly
used in everyday discourse, which may lead to the assumption that no formal defi-
nition is required, their meaning being widely shared. This would be a mistake,
however. In the context of media ecology, both terms take on special meanings.

The term media, when used in a fairly conventional sense, refers to what we
might call the usual suspects, television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines,
and now the new media, social media, mobile devices, etc. Postman (1970) does
not provide any sort of operational definition of media, and at first glance his us-
age seems fairly conventional insofar as he equates media with “communications
technology” at the start of the passage quoted above. But there is also a hint that
he is referring to other phenomena as well, for example in his reference to novels,
poems, and essays as media, and in equating books, radio, film and television
with courtrooms, classrooms, and business offices. Further into the address, he
brings up the effects of medical and aerospace technologies, and touches on the
topic of technology in general, as phenomena to be studied by media ecologists.
Postman’s use of media as a key term is based on McLuhan’s Understanding Media
(1964), and McLuhan uses the terms media, technology, and language more or less
interchangeably. I will discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 5, but here, suffice
it to say that the term media refers to a much broader array of phenomena in the
context of media ecology scholarship than it does elsewhere.

As for the other key term, environments, Postman (1970) refers to them as
complex message systems, echoing Norbert Wiener’s remark that the world “may
be viewed as a myriad of To Whom It May Concern messages” (quoted in Watz-
lawick, Bavelas, & Jackson, 1967, p. 258). In this instance, Postman’s influences
can be traced back to Claude Shannon’s information theory (Shannon & Weaver,
1949), as well as Wiener’s (1950) cybernetics, and the further elaboration of cy-
bernetics by Gregory Bateson (1972, 1979) as it evolved into systems theory.

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This certainly points to a different understanding of the term environments than
is commonly used. For this reason, I think it important to emphasize that Post-
man’s (1970) definition could actually be reversed to reveal an important and
too often unacknowledged aspect of what media ecology represents: the study of
environments as media.

1.3. The Study and the Object of Study

Media ecology is defined as a particular kind of study, the object of that study be-
ing environments, as well as media. In this formulation, there is a clear distinction
between the object of study and the study itself, just as there is a distinction be-
tween the environments that organisms inhabit as an object of study, and ecology
as the study of those environments. As a result of the environmental movement
that emerged during the 1960s, it has become common for the term ecology to
do double duty as the object of study as well as the study itself. That is, ecology
became synonymous with environment, especially when referred to as the ecology.
Substituting the ecology for the environment served to underline the fact that the
environment is not a static object, but rather a dynamic process involving inter-
dependent parts.

The term media ecology has undergone a similar mutation since its introduc-
tion in 1968, especially during the 1990s, with the popularization of the internet.
In part, this may be a reflection of references to the ecology in popular discourse,
in part it is due to the diffusion of the phrase media ecology and its adoption by
individuals with little or no awareness of its origins. References to the media ecol-
ogy, the new media ecology, and media ecologies can be found in academic work in
which media are the object of study, but these studies often are not media ecologi-
cal. Journalists and writers for the periodical press also use the phrase on occa-
sion, generally in reference to the interaction of different media, for example, the
ways in which streaming video over the internet poses a challenge to traditional
broadcasting, or how independent bloggers pose a challenge to newspaper organi-
zations. McLuhan (1964) acknowledges this kind of phenomena, noting that the
introduction of television after the Second World War forced radio to redefine
itself as a medium. But this is very much a minor point, tangential to McLuhan’s
central arguments about how media affect communication, consciousness, and
culture. Certainly, there may be interest in the question of how different media
interact with one another for anyone concerned with the media industries, and
media ecology scholars may take up that question, but it is at best a secondary

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concern, a far cry from the life, the universe, and everything type of questions that
are often associated with media ecology scholarship. Moreover, this other usage
of media ecology is based on common sense definitions of media, rather than the
broader understandings of medium associated with media ecology scholarship.

Of course, media ecology scholars are not prohibited from referring to the
object of their study as the media ecology, or some particular variation such as the
digital media ecology. After all, some terms refer to both the study and the object
of study, such as history, education, and communication. For the sake of clarity,
however, and also because the phrase media ecology has been adopted in areas
of intellectual and popular discourse that are disconnected from media ecology
scholarship, I believe it best to use terms like media environments to refer to the
object of study. An alternate definition of media ecology, then, might be the study
of media environments. Again, this defers the question of defining media ecology
onto the question of defining media environments, but I prefer the study of media as
environments (and environments as media) because media environments are some-
times differentiated from communication environments, symbolic environments,
information environments, or technological environments, not to mention bio-
physical environments. I will return to this point (in Chapters 4 and 8), but first,
however, a brief discussion of the origin of the term media ecology is warranted.

It is perhaps a reflection of our post-literate culture that there has been some
controversy within the media ecology community over who first came up with the
term, in other words, who first said the words media ecology within the context of
informal conversation, or possibly a seminar discussion. The problem is that, in
the absence of any documentation, there is no way to determine who first uttered
the phrase, so that any claim to have done so originally cannot be verified, and
could easily be mistaken due to faulty memory or the possibility that someone
else had actually said the words at an earlier point in time. In all probability, it
happened more than once, perhaps a number of times, that someone thought of
the phrase media ecology for what seemed to be the first time, or was the first time
for them, and for others present at that moment. This is why coinage, as the term
implies, is associated with printing, and publication. As far as I can determine,
the first time the term media ecology appeared in print was in the program for
the 1968 NCTE meeting that listed Postman’s “Growing Up Relevant” address,
in which he formally introduced the term. Some of the confusion that came up
in later decades is due to the fact that Postman at times attributed the coinage to
McLuhan, in part to give the term greater legitimacy; I have detailed my efforts
to uncover the origins of the term in Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s
Brave New World Revisited (2014). Suffice it to say that while McLuhan did not

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Introduction | 9

coin the term, he certainly did inspire it, and utilized ecology and environment as
metaphors in Understanding Media (1964), but in doing so, followed the example
of others who had gone before him, such as Lewis Mumford (1934) and Patrick
Geddes (1904, 1915).

I think it important to add that when Postman (1970) introduced media
ecology in 1968, he only took credit for coining the term, stating that, “the first
thing to be said about media ecology is that I am not inventing it. I am only nam-
ing it” (p. 161). He then went on to explain that there are at least 20 living me-
dia ecologists, specifically Buckminster Fuller, Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan,
Peter Drucker, Herman Kahn, David Riesman, Ray Bradbury, Harold Lasswell,
Don Fabun, Walter Ong, Edward T. Hall, Paul Goodman, Lynn White, Jr., Reuel
Denney, Ronald Gross, Ashley Montagu, and Edmund Carpenter, as well as ap-
proximately 12 media ecologists who were no longer alive, specifically naming
Edward Bellamy, Harold Innis, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Norbert Wiener,
and Alfred North Whitehead. While the list of names would change, and espe-
cially expand over the years, the idea of answering what is media ecology by asking
who is media ecology would remain.

1.4. Field of Inquiry, Field of Study

In addition to introducing and defining the term media ecology, Postman (1970)
described it as a field of inquiry, which he contrasted to a subject:

Media ecology is a field of inquiry. Fields of inquiry imply the active pursuit of knowl-
edge. Discoveries. Explorations. Uncertainty. Change. New questions. New methods.
New terms. New definitions. A “subject” implies replicating, memorizing, ventriloquiz-
ing someone else’s well- established answers to someone else’s well- formed questions. A
field of inquiry implies “a finding out.” A subject implies “a parceling out.” That is why, in
the school of the future, subjects (as we usually think of them) will have very little value.
The school is no longer a viable medium for communicating what is already known, and
hasn’t been for at least quarter of a century. (p. 163)

Postman’s views on the value of schooling changed over time (i.e., Postman, 1979,
1995), but the important point is the contrast between a subject and a field of
inquiry. Both involve study, an activity that Ong (1982) notes was not possible
before the invention of writing. The kind of study that Postman associates with a
subject, with its well- established answers and well- formed questions, corresponds to
what is otherwise referred to as a discipline. That term’s root meaning of instruc-

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tion and knowledge has a longstanding association with punishment and a strict
emphasis on order that certainly fits the rigidity of Postman’s notion of a subject.
It shares the same origins as disciple, which means student or follower, and carries
that same sense of replicating, and maybe even memorizing and ventriloquizing, as
opposed to independent thinking.

In contemporary academics, discipline refers to a well- established subject, one
that has a widely accepted cannon, introductory curriculum, theories, methods,
etc. A field is often contrasted to a discipline, as being defined not by any estab-
lished body of knowledge, but by mutual interest in a particular topic. For this
reason, a field is generally understood to be interdisciplinary in nature. As a field,
media ecology may be described as interdisciplinary, drawing upon not only all
of the social sciences and humanities, but the fine arts and hard sciences as well.
Interdiscipinary and interdisciplinarity have become buzzwords in contemporary
higher education, and media ecologists may gain some advantage from this, hav-
ing suffered from the bias against interdisciplinarity in the past. I cannot help but
observe, however, that a significant portion of what is referred to as interdiscipli-
nary work may more accurately be referred to as nondisciplinary, by which I mean
ungrounded in any real sense of scholarly method. Or to put it in plain and vulgar
terms, bullshit. This echoes critiques that have been made by media ecology schol-
ars such as Postman (1995, 1999) and Camille Paglia (1990, 2000), and nota-
bly Henry Perkinson (1996), who discusses the creation of a risk- free intellectual
world, one in which criticism, let along falsification, is difficult if not impossible.
To be clear, I am not arguing that this is true of all interdisciplinary scholarship—
far from it. It just leads me to suggest the field of media ecology might better be
characterized as multidisciplinary, as scholarship in our field does require the use
of multiple disciplines rather than a complete abandonment of all disciplinarity.

Whether media ecology is described as an interdisciplinary or multidiscipli-
nary field, it is worthwhile noting that field itself is a metaphor, one related to area
(as in area of study) in using space as a metaphor for topic, itself a subtle metaphor,
as the root meaning of topic is place and space, as in topography, topology, topiary,
etc. Spatial metaphors can be traced back to the culture of ancient Greece, de-
rived via alphabetic literacy (Ong, 1982), and the ability that writing affords us
to rearrange and organize knowledge visually and categorically, in spatial arrange-
ments on a writing surface or page. The use of field may also be an agricultural
metaphor, as education has often been associated with sowing seeds, germinating
ideas, with cultivation (another agricultural metaphor, as is culture itself ) of the
intellect, growth, and of course with the fruits of knowledge (not to mention the
forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden’s Tree of Knowledge). In fact, field has

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Introduction | 11

many relevant connotations, including a field for farming— as noted, scholar-
ship also requiring toil and labor with the aim of producing food for thought; a
field of play, for athletics, games and contests— intellectual activity can be quite
competitive, or as Ong (1982) puts it, agonistic, but also can involve a great deal
of free play (Huizinga, 1955), something particularly prominent in the field of
media ecology; a field of battle, or battleground, in warfare— scholarship often
involves contested terrain and even vicious battles over turf and theory; a land-
ing field, in aviation, the place where aircraft take off and land— an area of study
can serve as a launching pad for new ideas and understandings; a field of rest, a
place for picnics, lovemaking, sleep and dreaming, or a final resting place— study
can be a form of leisure and relaxation rather than work, a form of passion, and
a site where scholars of the past are remembered; a field within a work of art, the
background upon which figures may be added— an area of study providing the
background out of which new discoveries can be added, figure- ground relation-
ships figuring prominently in the media ecology of McLuhan (1962, 1964); a
field within the video image, based on old cathode ray tube technology, a still
image that consists of only half the image, every other line, as alternate lines are
activated at any given moment— scholarship can only ever give us a snapshot of
thought, frozen in time, unable to keep up with changing times, or even capture
the present fully, and always unavoidably incomplete, a product of what Korzyb-
ski (1993) called the process of abstracting; a field of human activity, any sphere
of skilled work, not simply scholarship, but the field of medicine, of metallurgy,
of music, etc.—scholarship being connected, or at least ought to be connected,
to the human life world, to practice in the political, economic, and social spheres,
an idea that media ecologists take very much to heart; a field in geography, some
aspect of the physical environment, such as temperature, humidity, elevation,
population density, etc.—scholarship involves the study of some subset of our
environment, and of course media ecology being an environmental form of study;
an electromagnetic field— study often seeks to make visible aspects of the envi-
ronment that are invisible, and uncover patterns of energy and force that affect
other parts of the environment, media ecology having a special concern with how
effects are generated, and with electronic media as defining a new era in human
history; the field in astrophysics, the sum total of the space- time continuum—
this is the ultimate environment, suggesting the ultimate goal of scholarship, at
least according to some, of consilience, the unity of all knowledge, media ecology
again being about life, the universe, and everything, and perhaps having something
to offer even in this arena.

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12 | Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition

I will end this section by noting that, rather than field of inquiry, the more
commonly used phrase is field of study, and this is how I characterized media
ecology previously, in Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as Field of Study
(2006). Field of inquiry and field of study are synonymous, but field of inquiry bet-
ter represents the idea of media ecology as an approach, which is what I want to
stress in this book.

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Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens. Boston, MA: Beacon.
Korzybski, A. (1950). Manhood of humanity (2nd ed.). Lakeville, CT: The International Non-

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Chapter 1

What (is) political economy
of the media?

Introduction

If there have been times when the political and economic aspects of communication
could be neglected by scholars then it is surely not ours. Media industries and
practices are being rapidly transformed worldwide. The promises of digitalisation
to distribute communication power widely through society and the manner in
which such promises are hampered are vitally important issues. Our dependence
on communication resources, vividly realised across the keystrokes and connections
of daily life, is accompanied by increasing interest and concern in how these
resources are organised and controlled. Recognition of the importance of the
political and economic organisation (‘political economy’) of media has never
been greater.1

There is no definitive beginning but if we take the late 1960s as the start date,
critical political economy of communications represents half a century of scholarship.
Many of the questions asked by radical scholars in the twentieth century remain
salient – questions about control over the media, the impact of commercialisation,
public and private media ownership, inequalities and power relations affecting
communications. Yet the contexts in which these are asked and answered are
characterised by rapid and far-reaching changes. This book has two main aims:
first, to introduce and explore key features of the political economy of media
and, second, to contribute to debates about the salience, value and direction of
critical media studies in the twenty-first century.

The political economy of communications describes all forms of enquiry into
the political and economic dimensions of communication. This book discusses
and promotes such enquiry. Yet a more delimited approach, that of critical
political economy, is the main focus of this book. Within the study of media and
communications, attention to political and economic dimensions has often been
relatively marginal, with greater attention devoted to ‘texts’ and ‘audiences’ than
either ‘production’ or the wider contexts in which communication takes place.
Critical political economy describes a tradition of analysis that is concerned with how
communication arrangements relate to goals of social justice and emancipation.
‘Critical’, then, divides this tradition off from various alternative, often ‘mainstream’,

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approaches. I take the critical political economy approach to encompass studies
that consider political and economic aspects of communications and which are
critical in regard to their concerns with the manner in which power relations are
sustained and challenged. The vitality of critical political economy studies of
communication is demonstrated across recent collections of international scholarship
(Wasko et al. 2011; Winseck and Jin 2012) and work on regions such as Latin
America (Bolaño et al. 2012). There are several contributing factors that can help to
explain this revitalisation, but an overriding factor is that the organisation of
communication services has returned to prominence. The promise of limitlessness
(in digital communications, content creation, creative labour, global cultural
flows) encounters the constraining influences of money and power (the economic
and political) in a manner that is unavoidable for serious analysis. The tensions
here are not only with visions of limitlessness generated by those advancing the
wonders of digital capitalism but also for counter-hegemonic visions of global
solidarity and cultural exchange. This chapter introduces media political economy
analysis and situates this in relation to alternative approaches.

Political economy

Political economy originally referred to a tradition of economic thinking that
addressed the production, distribution and consumption of resources used to
sustain human existence. For Adam Smith, the eighteenth century Scottish
enlightenment thinker, political economy was the study of ‘wealth’, and was
concerned with ‘how mankind arranges to allocate scarce resources with a view
to satisfying certain needs and not others’ (Smith 1776: 161). For Smith this was
also the study of political decision-making, a ‘branch of the science of a statesman
or legislator’ concerned with the activities of government to aid economic
growth. The so-called classical political economists, such as Adam Smith, David
Ricardo, James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, were primarily interested in capitalism
as a system for the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of wealth.
In the nineteenth century Marx (1818–83) and Engels added class analysis,
underpinning their radical critique of capitalism.

A general definition of political economy is the ‘study of the social relations,
particularly power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution
and consumption of resources, including communication resources’ (Mosco
2009: 24). Mosco traces four ideas central to political economy: engagement
with social change and history, understanding the social whole, moral philosophy
and praxis (Mosco 2009: 26–36). One link between what we will examine as
critical political economy and what is known as classical political economy is that
the economic sphere is not separated off from related social and political
phenomena. The allocation of resources is recognised to involve political, not
merely economic, decisions whose moral consequences permeate social life.
Political economists sought to explain the emergence of capitalism but also to
assess its implications for human life across societies. This ‘holistic’ approach

4 Mapping approaches and themes

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contrasts with subsequent efforts by ‘neoclassical’ writers to establish economics
as a mathematics-based science, by bracketing out history, politics and ethics.
Yet the classical political economists in nineteenth century Britain were asso-
ciated with cold calculus themselves, from Nassau Senior’s opposition to welfare
relief during the great Irish famine, Thomas Malthus’s arguments for population
control and John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian moral philosophy.
Their limitations and pro-capitalist class bias are repudiated in Marx’s Capital,
presented as a ‘critique of political economy’.

Neoclassical economics

Initially broad in scope, classical political economy influenced the scientific study
of economics developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that
focused on the efficient satisfaction of wants in markets, known as neoclassical
economics. Its founders included Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Francis
Edgeworth and Leon Walras. Thus mainstream economics evolved largely as a
discipline professing value neutrality, while taking existing social relations as a
given, and in general supporting core principles of market-based systems, namely
that consumer and citizen welfare is best achieved through efficient market
mechanisms. Classical political economy had expounded the labour theory of
value, which located wealth creation in the surplus value extracted from workers
(Smith, Ricardo, Marx). Neoclassical economics propounded a new theory of
value derived from consumer preferences exercised in markets. This bypassed
the attention to social class divisions and injustice in the distribution of wealth
and income, which Marx had made central to his account of the exploitative
social relations of capitalism. Taking consumer preferences to be preformed
and beyond dispute helped to justify the narrowing of economic analysis to a
mathematical-deductive system studying supply and demand in markets.

While neoclassical economics became the orthodox approach in capitalist
systems, elements of more classical political economy persisted, alongside Marxian
and social welfarist approaches. Some neoclassical tenets are repudiated in
behavioural economics, whose analysis of irrationality in markets dethrones
rational economic ‘man’. There are also more socially oriented economists such
as the development economist Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel
Prize for economics in 2009 for her distinguished work on economic governance
and common ownership, which informs analysis of the digital ‘commons’.

Positive political economy

Today ‘political economy’ can refer to a range of contending approaches. One
such approach, antithetical to Marxism, is that of the so-called Chicago School,
also known as constitutional or ‘positive’ political economy, or as public choice
theory (Mosco 2009: 28). This neoliberal approach is associated with Ronald
Coase, Gary Becker, Richard Posner and George Stigler. Their work applies

What (is) political economy of the media? 5

and extends neoclassical economic tenets to focus on calculating ‘welfare’
maximising advantage and by applying this to all forms of social behaviour. It
does so, critics argue, by pursuing a narrow and conservative model of welfare
based on promoting the activities of acquisitive individuals exercising freedom
over their supposedly naturally acquired property rights. The purported aim is
to provide ‘positive’ or value-neutral analysis, yet the base assumptions are
anything but.

Critical political economy

Critical political economy refers to approaches that place emphasis on the
unequal distribution of power and are critical of arrangements whereby such
inequalities are sustained and reproduced. This critical tradition is influenced by,
although by no means limited to, Marxism, as we will examine. Marxian political
economy provides a historical analysis of capitalism including the forces and
relations of production, the production of surplus value, commodification, social
class divisions and struggles.

The political economy of communications

Any examination of communications that addresses economic or political aspects
may be included in a broad category of political economic analysis. More
narrowly, much ‘political economic’ analysis addresses aspects of the way in
which communications are organised and provided as services. Emerging in the
twentieth century the main focus has been on mass communication, defined as
‘the industrialized production and multiple distribution of messages through
technological devices’ (Turow 2010: 17).

The political economy of communication represents a broad field of work
drawing on economics, political science, communication and cultural analysis. A
more accurate term for the tradition that developed in media and communication
studies is critical political economy (or CPE). This ‘critical’ approach is at odds,
as we will see, with ‘mainstream’ traditions in communication research as well as
in economic, political and social theory.

Critical scholarship

The term ‘critical’ is usefully broad and encompassing, but it also has distinctive
historical roots in communication research. It alludes to the academic practices
and values of critique in intellectual enquiry – questioning, interrogating and
challenging the adequacy of explanations of phenomena. For Mosco (2009: 128)
political economy is critical ‘because it sees knowledge as the product of com-
parisons with other bodies of knowledge and with social values’. As a descriptor
for political economy, however, ‘critical’ has a more precise meaning for scholarship
that is critical of the deficiencies of capitalism and of rule by elites. The term critical

6 Mapping approaches and themes

is associated with the Institute of Social Research established at the University of
Frankfurt in 1923. The ‘Frankfurt School’, as it became known, investigated
culture in ways that revised, and revived, Marxist theory and integrated this
‘Western Marxism’ with other social theories and with Freudian psychoanalysis.

These scholars rejected positivist claims that knowledge could be value-free
and argued instead for a critical–normative perspective that was also reflective
about how forms of knowledge contributed to sustaining or challenging existing
social conditions. This approach was critical in that it assessed knowledge and
social practice against normative values such as fairness in the distribution of
wealth and resources. Its origins lie in the analysis of capitalist economies and
authoritarian political systems, ranging from fascist to parliamentary, in the
1930s and 1940s. Yet the scholarship that evolved is not restricted to Marxist
thought or even socialist principles. Its enduring values are rather liberal and
democratic ones; ‘[i]t is committed to political enfranchisement, freedom of
speech and intellectual inquiry, and social justice’ (McChesney 2004a: 47).

The term ‘critical’ then helps to connect together traditions of critique as well
as values of investigating and questioning arrangements. Yet it also has ‘negative’
associations: we do not (always) appreciate criticism; naysayers with relentlessly
negative attitudes may be viewed as rigidly prejudging events, or just not great
company. Whether ‘critical’ is too constraining and self-limiting an organising
term for the approaches discussed here is an important question, but descriptively
at least it helps to delineate approaches which I hope to show are anything but
rigid or ‘negative’.

Critical political economy rests on a central claim: different ways of organising
and financing communications have implications for the range and nature of
media content, and the ways in which this is consumed and used. Recognising
that the goods produced by the media industries are at once economic and cultural,
this approach calls for attention to the interplay between the symbolic and
economic dimensions of the production of meaning. One direction of enquiry,
then, is from media production to meaning-making and consumption, but the
other is to consider the relationship of media and communication systems to
wider forces and processes in society. It is by combining both that CPE seeks to
ask ‘big’ questions about media.

CPE analysis is not defined or limited in respect of its object of analysis. CPE
considers all kinds of communication processes, although it tends to ignore some,
such as psycho-cognitive and affective processes. It is not defined or limited in
respect of methods of analysis. A great variety of research methods are used,
although documentation analysis, historical research, textual and media content
analysis, economic, statistical and market analysis are the most prevalent. What
characterises CPE above all are the questions asked and the orientation of
scholars. Whose voices and concerns get to be heard? How are people, ideas and
values represented in media discourses – and what is it that affects how this
occurs? What is the quality of information, ideas and imagery available through
media, and to whom is it available? This tradition asks questions about power in

What (is) political economy of the media? 7

communications and the conditions for realising democracy. These connect, in
turn, to two major influences: Marxism, and the theories and practices of
democratic politics.

Karl Marx’s work and legacy has had a profound influence on ways of
understanding power, domination and inequality within the CPE tradition.
Marx contributed to socialist and revolutionary politics but his major legacy is
derived from his elaboration of a materialist philosophy (historical materialism)
and critical analysis of capitalism. CPE draws on this complex legacy in analysing
capitalist production and social relations. Mansell (2004: 98) summarises ‘[i]f
resources are scarce, and if power is unequally distributed in society, then the
key issue is how these scarce resources are allocated and controlled, and with what
consequences for human action’. Critical political economy insists on connecting
the study of media to broader patterns of social existence and in particular to
questions of the allocation of resources. As British political economist Nicholas
Garnham argues, this means identifying how communication and culture relate
to processes of production and reproduction within capitalist society. The political
economy of culture needs to be situated within an overall analysis of capitalism
with ‘a political economy of mass communication taking its subsidiary place
within that wider framework as the analysis of an important, but historically
specific mode of the wider process of cultural production and reproduction’
(Garnham 1979: 123). Mosco (2009: 94–95) describes this approach as ‘decentering
the media’.

One key influence, then, is Marxism, although political economists have
grappled with the limitations and criticism of ‘classical Marxism’ to a greater
extent than many dismissive criticisms allow. In particular, the revising of a
Marxist tradition within political economy has occurred through the confluence
of two other influential currents – democratic theory/politics and cultural
theory/politics. Political economy shares many of the democratic aspirations of
liberal pluralist accounts of the media in serving citizens, but it challenges the
ability of corporate-owned media to adequately do so, and mounts a critique of
the capitalist market relations on which liberalism is contingent. Political economy
draws upon classical democratic theory’s insistence that democracy is based on
an informed, participating citizenry, to assert that such political culture can only
be generated by a more diverse, democratised media system. Shaped by Marx’s
critique of capitalism, the Western Marxist critique of commodification, reifica-
tion and the ‘culture industry’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997 [1944]), and by
theories of ‘strong’, participatory democracy, political economy criticises the
capitalist market system for its failure to deliver economic fairness, social justice
or the basis for a democratic polity (McChesney 1998, 2008; Mosco 2009;
Murdock and Golding 2005; Hardy 2010b).

The principle of democratic governance, rule by the many, has been a guiding
inspiration for critical scholars and a corrective to the ideas and legacy of
centralised state control exercised by Communist states under the influence of
the Comintern. Western Marxism embraced tenets of participatory democracy

8 Mapping approaches and themes

in its rejection of Soviet Communism and embarked on a positive reassessment
of the institutions and processes of civil society, for instance in Habermas’s
influential analysis of the public sphere. Democratic theory has thus served to
complement, challenge and exceed the limitations of Marxism in theory and
practice. This connects to the third key influence, that of cultural theory/politics.
CPE scholars have been influenced by and have contributed to a wide range of
radical traditions that examine and contest forms of discrimination and oppression
based on gender, race, sexuality, disability, age and geocultural relations. How
these connect to class conflict and class relations are ongoing debates, but CPE is
shaped by the influence and tensions across Marxism, democratic theory and
organisation, and cultural theory and politics.

CPE approaches to media

Critical political economy of media examines how the political and economic
organisation (‘political economy’) of media industries affects the production and
circulation of meaning, and connects to the distribution of symbolic and material
resources that enable people to understand, communicate and act in the world.
This has three main implications for studying media. First, it requires careful
study of how the communications industries work. Here, political economists
focus on ownership, finance and support mechanisms (such as advertising), and on
how the policies and actions of governments and other organisations influence
and affect media behaviour and content. Another key concern is the organisation
of cultural production, addressing questions of labour processes and relations,
managerial control and creative autonomy for cultural producers. This opens up
to the second main topic, the influences and consequences of different ways of
organising the media: commercial, state, public and their complex combinations.
Analysts engage in historical and contemporary studies of the changing nature of
‘structural’ influences, such as dependence on advertising finance, the range of
political, social and cultural influences on media institutions, and the interactions
of all those seeking to influence the media. This connects with the third main
area: the relationships between media content and communication systems, and
the broader structure of society. To understand any specific media form requires
addressing ‘how it is produced and distributed in a given society and how it is
situated in relation to the dominant social structure’ (Kellner 2009: 96). In particular,
CPE asks a question that distinguishes it from various ‘mainstream’ approaches
that either ignore, support or accept prevailing social relations: what contribution
do the media make in reinforcing or undermining political and social inequality?
(McChesney 2003).

For Murdock and Golding (2005: 61) political economy approaches are dis-
tinguished in four main ways. They are holistic, seeing the economy as interrelated
with political, social and cultural life, rather than as a separate domain. They are
historical, paying close attention to long-term changes in the role of state, corpora-
tions and media in society. They are ‘centrally concerned with the balance

What (is) political economy of the media? 9

between private enterprise and public intervention’, between the private and
public provision of services. Finally, ‘and perhaps most importantly of all’, they
go beyond ‘technical issues of efficiency’ (in terms of market transactions
between producers and consumers) ‘to engage with basic moral questions of
justice, equity and the public good’.

Culture and industry

CPE takes up the notion of the industrialisation of culture, and culture as
industry, from the Frankfurt School theorists, notably Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer. Media, argues the Western CPE tradition, are ‘first and foremost
industrial and commercial organisations which produce and distribute commodities’
(Murdock and Golding 1974: 205–6). The study of media production has intrinsic
value in understanding how and under what conditions media are ‘made’. However,
CPE rests on a larger claim, that understanding ‘production’ is necessary in order to
fully understand media ‘content’ and ‘audiences’. To repeat a central proposition:
different ways of organising and financing communications have implications for
the range and nature of media content. For Golding and Murdock (1977): ‘It is
only by situating cultural products within the nexus [interlinking] of material interests
which circumscribe their creation and distribution that their range and content can
be fully explained’. According to a later formulation (Murdock and Golding
2005: 60) CPE ‘sets out to show how different ways of financing and organising
cultural production have traceable consequences for the range of discourses, representa-
tions and communicative resources in the public domain and for the organization of
audience access and use’ (my emphasis). This formulation bears traces of a
debate on the relative importance of economic factors for a full understanding of
the (ideological) meaning of texts. As a much earlier essay puts it, to understand
the production of meaning requires not only analysis of how ideology is inscribed
in texts and readings, but ‘grasping the general economic dynamics of media
production and the determinations they exert’ (Golding and Murdock 1979:
210). We will address these issues of ‘determination’ further below.

Core themes

So what has been the focus of work coming from this CPE tradition? According
to Murdock and Golding (2005: 64) ‘five historical processes are particularly
central to a critical political economy of culture: the growth of the media; the
extension of corporate reach; commodification; the universalization of citizenship;
and the changing role of state and government intervention’. These important
themes also serve to emphasise CPE’s efforts to examine how the media connect
to broader social arrangements. I want to begin though with a more media-centric
overview of themes.

A conventional mapping divides media analysis into three areas: production,
content and audience. Numerous problems and limitations with this model have

10 Mapping approaches and themes

been highlighted. It is more suited to a transmission model of ‘mass commu-
nication’, of one-to-many communication, and locates production and audiences
at opposite poles. This framework has been found particularly ill-suited to
grapple with more recent shifts in relations between production and consump-
tion, signalled by terms such as ‘produser’ and ‘prosumer’, with user-generated
content, demassification and convergence between ‘vertical’ mass media and
‘horizontal’ mediated communications. Nevertheless the model is useful in
mapping what remain core foci in media analysis, as well as helping to identify
points of ‘divisions’ in the field.

Production

CPE is most associated with the study of ‘production’ and in a caricatured, but
prevalent, version is limited to an account of media ownership and finance.
A related, and more nuanced, criticism is that CPE has tended to offer a limited
account of media texts (content) and has tended to ignore important aspects of
audiences and consumption – how audiences and users read and make meaning
from texts. These are important criticisms that we will address, but the equation
of CPE scholarship with ‘production’ is inaccurate and must be rejected. What
does characterise CPE analysis is an insistence on addressing the organisation of
production. Against analyses that narrowly focus on textual construction (‘textualist’)
or on the consumption of media meanings, CPE calls for analysts to engage with
the manner in which media communications are produced and, more broadly,
with the conditions that influence production practices. Amongst the key topics
examined are media ownership, finance, governance and regulation, the organisation
of media work, influences on media, including owners, managers, advertisers,
sources and users.

Content

If production matters for CPE analysis it can nevertheless be distinguished from
approaches that deal solely with the economic aspects of media industries and
markets, because CPE calls for attention to the ‘interplay between the symbolic
and economic dimensions’ of the production of meaning (Murdock and Golding
2005: 60). Attention to the production of culture is combined with regard for the
complex nature and properties of cultural commodities (symbolic value). The
goods manufactured by cultural industries ‘play a pivotal role in organizing the
images and discourses through which people make sense of the world’ (Murdock
and Golding 2005: 60).

A key focus for CPE is to examine how media and communications serve to
sustain the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Media are connected to the ways
in which power is sustained through meanings. There are tensions, however, in
regard to analysis of ideology, of ideas that serve to sustain relations of dominance
(Thompson 1990; Eagleton 2007). First, such ideology critique has been regarded

What (is) political economy of the media? 11

by some political economists as too textualist, disconnecting the interpretation of
texts from an appreciation of the conditions in which they were formed. A second
criticism is of over-simplistic readings of dominant ideologies within texts. Third,
has been criticism of the supposed effects and influence of ideology on audiences.
A fourth area of dispute concerns epistemology. Ideology critique involves challen-
ging the construction of reality in discourse, and truth claims. Poststructuralism,
which vies as a leading paradigm in media and cultural studies, regards ‘reality’
as a product of language. As Lee (2003: 154) writes of one influential grouping,
the Yale school deconstructionists such as Paul de Man and Stanley Fish, there are
‘no facts, only interpretations; no truths, only expedient fictions’. Can appeals to
reality be sustained without falling back into naïve realism? CPE adopts a critical
realist epistemology. Critical realism is a philosophy of science that distinguishes
between real structures, actual processes or events and empirical evidence (traces
of events) (Jessop 2008: 45). It recognises ‘the reality of both concepts and social
practices’ (Mosco 2009: 128) and engages in efforts to use empirical evidence to
help assess which concepts and theories are more or less valuable. It rejects
epistemologies based on ideas alone (ideographic) or ‘facts’ alone (positivism) and
seeks to engage and balance theoretical and empirical considerations, conceiving
reality as ‘made up of both what we see and how we explain what we see’
(Mosco 1996: 2). For the Marxist scholar Christian Fuchs (2011: 265):

Empirical ideology critique tests whether certain claims about reality can be
questioned by looking for counter-evidence that supports the assumptions
that the claims are mythological and contradict evidence about the state of
reality. It introduces a different level of reality to claims about reality and
thereby tries to increase epistemological complexity. It is based on the
assumption that reality is complex and contradictory and that one-dimensional
representations of reality lack complexity and should therefore be questioned.

CPE scholars challenge the perceived image of their subfield as confirming, over
and over, that ownership of the means of media production by capital manifests
itself as, and explains, control over meaning. For Garnham (1979: 136) ‘Because
capital controls the means of cultural production … it does not follow that these
cultural commodities will necessarily support, whether in their explicit content or in
their mode of cultural appropriation, the dominant ideology’. Critical scholarship
needs to examine both iterations of ideology and yet remain alert to signs of
conflict, contestation and contradiction in the production and consumption of
meanings (Mosco 2009: 96).

Audience

A common view associating CPE with the study of ‘production’, to the relative
neglect of media consumption and audiences, needs revision. There has been
very strong and extended engagement with audiences within CPE scholarship.

12 Mapping approaches and themes

What characterises this work, however, is an insistence on connecting audience
experience to the economics and power dynamics of media provision. There has
been historical and contemporary analysis of how audiences are commodified
and sold to marketers (Meehan 2005; Wasko and Hagen 2000; chapter six).
Another key focus has been on the implications of audience valuation for media
finance, examining how advertising serves as a system of subsidy that privileges
media serving audiences valued by advertisers, from Oscar Gandy’s work on the
consequences for Black and minority media, to Turow’s (2011) work on the
implications of profiling and targeting across the Internet. The ways in which
wealth, time, gender and other factors structure access to communications is
another central theme. Yet, CPE scholars have acknowledged the tradition’s
relative neglect of meaning-making processes in the reception, consumption and
use of media products, and made various efforts to remedy this by drawing on
the insights of cultural studies and other traditions to examine the production
and circulation of meaning. As feminist political economist Ellen Riordan (2002: 8)
maintains ‘it is not sufficient to look only at how corporations limit and constrain
cultural representations; we must also interrogate the consumption of these
ideological images by groups of people who are in turn sold to advertisers as a
niche market’. One ambitious effort to combine political economic con-
textualisation and audience reception analysis was the Global Disney Audiences
project (Wasko et al. 2001; Biltereyst and Meers 2011).

Media scholarship involves choices and decision about which aspects of the
circuit of communications, encompassing production and consumption, to focus
investigation on. Despite its caricature image as being focused on ‘production’,
CPE analysis can claim to have a greater regard for holism (Deacon 2003) than
many other approaches, not least those that ignore conditions of production. It is
certainly true that the demands of holism are rarely fully realised, but the effort
to trace relationships and consequences of the organisation of communications is
a principal feature of CPE analyses. Curran (2006) gives an example of such an
approach in examining crime coverage in US local television news. In the context
of deregulation and marketisation, increased competition in supply and rising
pressure to meet corporate owners’ and investors’ expectations for profit, coverage
of crime sharply increased in US television in the 1990s, being both cheap and
popular. By the mid 1990s reporting violent crime accounted for two-thirds of
local TV news output in fifty-six US cities (Klite et al. 1997). Incessant coverage
contributed to a growing proportion of Americans judging crime to be the most
serious problem facing the nation, despite crime levels actually falling. Research
by Iyengar and others showed that ‘Local TV news tended also to focus on
decontextualised acts of violent crime by black perpetrators in ways that
strengthened racial hostility, and fuelled demands for punitive retribution’
(Curran 2006: 140). Such analysis requires that we address the organisation and
culture of journalists, the influence of sources, news agendas, media discourses
and media influence. Yet equally, it shows that we must address the political
economic context and policy changes to fully grasp why news changed, with

What (is) political economy of the media? 13

consequences for the way in which both public issues and socio-ethnic groups
were ‘framed’.

How do media relate to power sources in society? Whose interests are repre-
sented? Who is represented in media? Who has access to communication
resources – and what can they do with them? Political economy argues that to
answer such questions we need not only the analysis of texts, or texts and readers,
but analysis of the forces and interests shaping media and the conditions of
production. How you judge political economy will depend on how you view the
focus of investigation – the questions it poses and tries to answer. It will also
depend on whether you share perspectives that insist there are ‘problems’ in our
media systems, whether you are persuaded that it is important to examine these
problems and consider how to try to put them right. Critical political economy of
communications is a critical realist approach that investigates problems connected with the

political and economic organisation of communication resources.

Critical political economy and its others

The tradition of critical political economy is commonly defined, in part, by way
of its distinction from three main alternatives: neoclassical/mainstream media
economics, liberal pluralist communication studies and cultural studies (Mosco
2009: 128; Hesmondhalgh 2013). Two are broadly defined as ‘mainstream’
traditions (media economics and liberal communications) while the third is a rival
cluster of radical approaches. Defining CPE from its ‘others’ has value but also
limitations; it risks perpetuating a tired, rigid classification and entrenching crude
and out-dated divisions of a field that is ceaselessly changing. It is also important
to resist imposing a false coherence upon any of these approaches, all of which
have great internal diversity, dynamic interconnections and complex affiliations.
We will engage with the value and validity of these divisions more fully, but they
do have some explanatory value. They help us to trace, recover and reassess the
influences, points of difference, as well as the often coded shorthand, through
which analysts have worked, disagreed and debated.

Neoclassical/modern media economics

Critical political economy starkly diverges from principles of neoclassical economics
that continue to influence ‘mainstream’ economics. Neoclassical economics pre-
sumes the desirability of a capitalist market economy. This set of values is most
pronounced in neoliberal thought, where economics is harnessed to a political
programme whereby the creation of efficient and unfettered markets is
the principal goal of public policy. Neoliberalism ‘refers to the set of national
and international policies that call for business domination of all social affairs
with minimal countervailing force’ (McChesney 2001). Market competition is
promoted as the best mechanism not only for economic ‘growth’ but also for
social organisation and the distribution of resources. Yet, modern economic

14 Mapping approaches and themes

thought is far from unified, and some economists, including ones working on
media and communications, critique the neoclassical assumptions of rational
actors calculating utility maximisation, or the conditions for perfect and imperfect
competition, drawing on economic history, psychology and psychoanalytic
theory (Sackrey et al. 2010; Miller 2008).

Media economics is a subfield of economics that analyses the media, commu-
nications and cultural industries using economic concepts. This work takes different
forms with varying levels of ‘integration’ into media and cultural analysis. The
influence of specialist economic analysis on communications research media has
been rather limited historically. It has informed legal policy studies, ‘political
economic’ analysis, and to a lesser extent ‘cultural economy’ work, but has generally
remained a largely separate, specialist domain. This is changing, however.
Recognition of the importance of economics in understanding dynamic changes
in media markets has informed mainstream communications research and
teaching. The significance of financing, business operations and markets to
understanding the challenges and transformations of media services, underscores
this. There is an expanding body of literature on media economics, examining
media markets, convergence, digitalisation, transnationalisation and labour
(Doyle 2002b; Hoskins et al. 2004; Alexander et al. 2004; Hesmondhalgh 2013).

Critical political economists draw on this media economics literature but
highlight certain limitations arising from either the ‘uncritical’ application of
economic concepts, or claims made for free-market mechanisms. What is at issue
is less the tools and techniques of economic analysis, or even its insights, than the
conceptual and value framework. The CPE tradition is sceptical concerning
claims made for markets; it challenges the neglect of asymmetry in regard to the
power of actors in markets, and it challenges the contraction of ‘value’ to the
measure of market-based exchanges.

Liberal pluralist communication studies

In the post-war period Western scholarship was dominated by what Pietilä
(2005: 105–26) calls ‘classical behavioural mass communication research’.
According to the behaviourist paradigm, researchers should examine only those
behaviours that can be directly observed and measured, with the goal of deriving
propositions that could be tested, thus applying methods from the physical
sciences to the social sciences. This privileged empirical research and techniques
while leaving unquestioned the social organisation of media provision and
tended to neglect ethical and critical perspectives. Most influential in the United
States, this positivist tradition prompted critical reaction elsewhere (see Nordenstreng
1968; Christians et al. 2009: 184). Early researchers in the CPE tradition did not
reject empirical investigation, in fact they insisted on gathering material evidence,
but did reject empiricism, ‘the reduction of all intellectual activity to the production
of falsifiable statements about observed behaviour’ (Mosco 2009: 79). Instead
scholars argued for a critical approach that acknowledged the relationship

What (is) political economy of the media? 15

between observed reality, truth claims and power interests, an approach developed
in the influential work of the Frankfurt School.

The main division between CPE and liberal pluralism concerns the analysis of
power and power relations. Liberal pluralist political thought conceives of interest
groups who vie for power in a manner which is open and contingent. Inequality
in power and resources between interest groups is acknowledged, but no group
dominates. Sustained dominance is rejected because it would undermine the
affirmation of the ‘democratic’ political system that liberalism defends, and dis-
tinguishes from authoritarian systems. This means that forms of systematic and
structured inequality are ‘downplayed in favour of an implicitly optimistic notion
of society as a level playing ground where different interest groups fight for their
interests’ (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 32). A rich strand of liberal media sociology
offers much needed empirical and ethnographic studies of media organisations,
media work, as well as participation and engagement by users. However, this
work has also been challenged for its relative neglect of economic influences
(Golding and Murdock 1979: 200). Differences between liberal pluralist and
radical approaches to media are examined more fully in the next chapter.

Cultural studies

Cultural studies emerged as another strand of radical scholarship. Its origins lie
in the work of British social historians and literary scholars including Richard
Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and later Stuart Hall. Cultural
studies explores the dynamics of power and culture across an unbounded terrain,
including cultural globalisation and diaspora, analyses of race, gender, sexuality
and disability. It has challenged narrow, often elitist, orderings of what constitutes
cultural value, to embrace a very wide range of phenomena and to apply
insights and approaches to broader sectors including the economy. It has drawn
on a wide range of sociocultural theory from work on psychoanalysis, semiotics,
language and affect, to cultural theories of social organisations, behaviour and
interaction, and cultural policy and politics.

Very much has been written on the ‘long-standing theoretical and methodological
affinities and tensions’ (Chakravartty and Zhao 2008: 10) between CPE and cultural
studies, and the institutionalised debate that has flared with often bitter heat for
nearly three decades. The 1980s and 1990s saw sometimes vitriolic exchanges
from traditions that both claimed a radical legacy and mission, and defended
themselves against the putative existential threat posed by the other. Divisions
between cultural studies and political economy structured the field of media
studies in some educational environments, notably the UK; relations between
these ‘camps’ became hostile, combative and ‘adversarial’ (Mosco 2009: 80).
There are compelling arguments both for and against revisiting this ‘cultural
studies vs. political economy’ divide. The principal case against is that many of
the heated divisions are of their time, marking out the intellectual and material
environment of the 1980s and 1990s, and are arguably of greatest interest

16 Mapping approaches and themes

to historians. The principal case for revisiting is that the division can help
new generations of students to map and decode differences formulated in
contemporary as well as historical writings.

The shared intellectual roots of cultural studies and political economy have
been described by many scholars (Babe 2009). This excavation has often been
allied to an effort at reintegration or a redrawing of the map to realign critical
scholars working across cultural studies and CPE traditions (Meehan 1999;
Couldry 2000; Fenton 2007; Hesmondhalgh 2007). This is vital work, to which
this book seeks to contribute. For Babe (2009: 4):

Cultural studies may be loosely defined as the multidisciplinary study of culture
across various social strata, where culture refers to arts, knowledge, beliefs,
customs, practices, and norms of social interaction. Studies in political economy
of media, in contrast, focus on the economic, financial, and political causes
and consequences of culture.

Babe argues that there are common roots in cultural materialism, an approach
developed in the work of Raymond Williams. Williams (1983: 210) called for a
‘cultural materialist’ approach that should pursue ‘analysis of all forms of
signification [ … ] within the actual means and conditions of their production’.

Williams (1980: 243–44) outlined ‘a theory of culture as a (social and material)
productive process and of specific practices, of “arts”, as social uses of material
means of production’. This emphasised that cultural forms and activities needed
to be comprehended in more encompassing social processes. The legacy was
complex, though. As Schiller (1996: 187) discusses, Williams’s cultural materialist
theory generated an ‘ambiguous oscillation, for it explicitly assigned to language,
communication and consciousness as such “a primacy co-equal with other forms of
the material social process, including … ‘labour’ or ‘production’ ” ’, yet reproduced
the dualism in the terms used in discussion, tending to separate language (or
consciousness) and production (or being). The field of communications, argues
Schiller (1996) has struggled to overcome such dualistic thinking, dividing mental
and material and cultural and economic in Western thought, a dualism that
Peck (2006) argues structured the mid 1990s debates on political economy versus
cultural studies between Nicholas Garnham and Lawrence Grossberg.2

The formative intellectual context in which CPE and cultural studies developed
has been mapped, albeit in fragmented ways. Schiller (1996: 186) highlights the
turn to culture in the 1960s and 1970s, informing political economic analysis of
‘transnational corporate communication’ and British cultural studies’ ‘engagement
with the history and present status of the British working class and, soon, with the
anti-racist and feminist movements that began once again to burgeon. In both
cases “culture” appeared to satisfy, or at least, to raise the prospect of satisfying
the need for drastic conceptual revision of entrenched Marxian formulations’.
Curran (2004) traces how the influence of Marxism and literary studies led to
British cultural studies and along a path through textual analysis, psychoanalytic

What (is) political economy of the media? 17

theory and ideology to postmodernism and towards idealist thought and
acquiescence. Likewise, McGuigan (1992) charts the shifts from cultural materi-
alism to cultural populism and a more celebratory account of consumer/user
power in cultural markets. Against the much better known Birmingham School
of British Cultural Studies (whose first directors were Richard Hoggart, then
Stuart Hall), Curran (2004) describes a Westminster tradition where Nicholas
Garnham, Curran and others took a more materialist path focused on policy
and regulation, media institutions and work, technology and history. Babe (2009:
84) argues that in their formative years political economy and cultural studies
approaches ‘were fully integrated, consistent, and mutually supportive’. CPE
shares common roots and integrates well with critical cultural studies (char-
acterised by Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism) but the other scion of
postmodernist cultural studies is inimical. Critical of the postmodernist (and
populist) turn in cultural studies, Babe advocates the reintegration of a cultural
materialist, critical cultural studies with political economy. We will return to
examine these issues at various points but to do so it is important to identify key
differences informing relations between varieties of cultural studies and CPE,
some of which remain salient. However, divisions at the level of ontology, episte-
mology, methods, political philosophy and outlook belie easy summary, much
less synthesis (see Ferguson and Golding 1997; Mosco 2009; Curran 2002;
Meehan and Riordan 2002; Cottle 2003a; Babe 2009). Three key areas of division
are epistemology, politics and political and social theory, and theories and analysis
of culture and communications.

Epistemology

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and is concerned with the nature, sources
and extent of the knowable, and the justifications for beliefs. As discussed above,
CPE generally operates in an epistemological framework of critical realism. This
realist epistemology is based on the ‘assumption that there is a material world
external to our cognitive processes which possesses specific properties ultimately
accessible to our understanding’ (Garnham 1990: 3). That reality is only accessible
to us through concepts and discourses, but there is a material reality independent
of discursive construction. For some culturalist critics such ‘realism’ is conflated
with positivism, a crude belief in the capacity to determine ‘objective’ facts from
external reality. Cultural studies, influenced by postmodernist thought, tends towards
post-positivist, constructionist and subjectivist epistemologies (Hesmondhalgh
2007: 46). Yet, plenty of culturalist scholars share the main tenets of critical
realism. Instead, a more general critique made of CPE is that it is empiricist,
privileging observable ‘facts’ at the expense of interrogating meaning systems
and articulations with rigour, in other words doing precisely what the Frankfurt
School decried. The charge itself reflects tensions traceable to the humanities’
influences on cultural studies and the social scientific influences on CPE (Philo
and Miller 2001). Some observations; first, it is problematic to conflate empirical

18 Mapping approaches and themes

analysis with naïve realism since this tends to discount the methods and material
of empirical analysis which are indispensable tools for investigating media and
for any ‘cultural materialism’. Second, debates on realism are ongoing within
contemporary critical scholarship, with notable efforts to provide theoretical
sophistication (Garnham 2000; Fuchs 2011). Third, there are, as Babe examines,
deeper and more irreconcilable divisions between critical realism and
postmodernism.

Politics and political and social theory

Cultural studies has been particularly associated with pluralising what constitutes
the political. This has been influenced by feminist, LGBT, postcolonialist, and
new social movement critiques of the exclusivity, selectivity, narrowness and
hierarchisations of what constitutes the ground of politics. At a theoretical level
Foucault’s rejection of a conception of power as repressive in favour of one
where power is productive, diffused through discursive interactions, has been
particularly influential. Identifying with the marginalised and subaltern, cultural
studies has aligned with radical social movements but has tended to remain
suspicious and disconnected from ‘organised’ labour movement politics, in con-
trast to stronger links within CPE with labour and organised working class
movements. There are, of course, vital debates about the scope, orientation and
organisation of ‘progressive’ political change. Writers in the traditions of cultural
studies and political economy have sought to clarify, and sometimes exacerbate,
these divisions and so this remains fraught territory to navigate, with a legacy of
reductive positioning and caricaturing. For some CPE writers, cultural studies
approaches privilege social identity at the expense of addressing the political and
economic forces that structure entitlements, inequality and oppression under
capitalism (Mosco 2009). Cultural studies writers in turn have challenged CPE
as privileging class-based politics and organised labour movements that are
regarded as complicit with, or less radical in countering, other forms of oppression,
notably those based on gender, sexuality and ethnicity.

One key division has been in regard to the politics of recognition and associated
power dynamics. Much of this is traceable to an older debate about Marxian
class politics and its privileging of social class over gender, race and other divisions
of power. The industrial working class as subject of history was challenged by
both the evident failure of this unified subject to overthrow capitalism and the
ordering of power which displaced other sources of oppression including those
generated by the revolutionary (male) subject. However, it has been an unfor-
tunate characteristic of radical ‘left’ movements to engage in often bitter and
arcane sectarian divisions amongst themselves. The struggle has had added heat
in academia for various reasons. It is much more a ‘war of words’, as shared
commitment to praxis (theory-in-practice) and public–political engagement is more
difficult to realise. Further, the debate strikes at core values and self-images for
avowed radicals. As many now argue, in Euro-America at least, the times

What (is) political economy of the media? 19

demand that those seeking to sustain and advance critical work find common cause
against neoconservatism (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 47), and the threat to criticality
arising from marketisation pressures in higher education.

Cultural theory

A core organising tenet for cultural studies is to challenge the condescension,
elitism and cultural hierarchism that justifies denigrating or disregarding ordinary,
everyday culture. Here cultural studies identifies elitist perspectives from the
political left, as well as right-tending conservatism, with the Frankfurt School’s
critical pessimism ritually condemned in textbook accounts. Within cultural studies
a reading of contemporary culture emerged that challenged at key points the
critical perspectives of CPE. Cultural studies ‘had a fairly positive perspective,
counting on the potential resistance of working-class culture in the face of capitalist
domination’ (Christians et al. 2009: 185). The critical concerns with mass media
power and influence were mitigated and minimised by counter-assertions.
Commercial mass media dominance was less consequential because its content
was raw material used for refashioning into more autonomous and oppositional
cultures and meanings (Jenkins 1992). For Lull (1995: 73) ‘Popular culture … is
empowering. The mass media contribute to the process by distributing cultural
resources to oppressed individuals and subordinate groups which they use to
construct their tactics of resistance against hegemonic strategies of containment’.
This perspective became dominant in a more optimistic version of cultural studies
variously described as ‘cultural populism’ (McGuigan 1992) and ‘celebratory
cultural studies’ (Babe 2009). A key dynamic in cultural studies was to reject the
assumed passivity of audiences and emphasise instead the interpretative capabilities
of ‘active audiences’, the productive refashioning of cultural texts by subcultures and
fans, and more recently interactivity and co-creation online. Cultural studies has
foregrounded issues of ‘textuality, subjectivity, identity, discourse and pleasure in
relation to culture’ (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 42). The ‘new’ audience researchers
emphasised the active construction of meaning and the appropriation of media
products to fashion independent, even oppositional, cultures.

The CPE critique is that cultural studies progressively abandoned attention to
the structural factors that influence the production of media content (McChesney
2004a: 43). CPE scholars have charged that the relative absence of analysis of
capitalism and the structuring influence of class relations restricts the explanatory
reach of cultural studies and contributes in some versions to an uncritical
account of market provision (‘cultural populism’). In some areas of enquiry what
began as an informed criticism of economism and reductiveness in analysis
ended up as an evasion of problems of power in all but the most micro of
contexts.

The problems of corporate control over communications, emphasised by
critical political economists, could be answered by a more consoling account
that granted independent creativity and agency to audiences. Political

20 Mapping approaches and themes

economists argued that active audience accounts reproduced liberal ‘uses and
gratifications’ research, taking media provision as given (offering an uncritical
account of what was made available for audiences) and downplaying the highly
unequal power dynamics between producers and consumers (Mattelart
1994: 237).

An influential model developed by scholars at the Open University (UK)
conceptualised a ‘circuit of production linking processes of representation, identity,
production, consumption and regulation’ (Du Gay: 1997). They argued that all
these foci are required to ‘complete’ a study, and that any can serve as entry
points for analysis. By contrast, CPE scholars argue for an ordering and
sequencing of analysis that recognises the antecedence of production; ‘production is
processually and temporally prior to consumption’ (Born 2000: 416). For Murdock
(2003: 17) analysing ‘the dynamics that are currently reshaping the professional
production of public culture’ is ‘an essential first step to understanding the symbolic
textures of everyday life’.

Today the re-examination of production and consumption stimulates fruitful
dialogue and integration across CPE and culturalist work, for instance in work
on the dynamics of corporate synergy and intertextuality. Corporations seek to
exploit their brands and intellectual property across a wide range of media
platforms, forms and allied merchandise, which are promoted and cross-promoted
through their various media outlets. The strategies of recycling, reversioning and
repurposing have been analysed by CPE scholars as strategies to maximise revenues,
including using corporate forms of transmedia storytelling, as in the Matrix
trilogy and spin-off products, to create ‘narratively necessary purchases’ (Proffitt
et al. 2007: 239; Meehan 2005). Within culturalist literature such ‘top down’
critiques of power tend to be reversed in favour of a more celebratory account
that takes themes of active audiences and resistant readings into an analysis of
fan-generated production. The best work, however, is alert to the contradictory
tensions in fandom (Hills 2002) and draws on the strengths of CPE and cultural
studies to examine the nature of the constraints and opportunities of inter-
textuality. Jenkins (2006) examines the contradictions for media companies in
their desire to police intellectual property while encouraging lucrative forms of
immersion by fans. Waetjen and Gibson (2007) argue that Time Warner’s Harry
Potter films and merchandise created a ‘corporate reading’ that supplanted the
contradictory and polysemous discourses on commodification encountered in the
J.K. Rowling books. Such studies highlight the value of considering how corpo-
rate activity seeks to order ‘(inter) textual space’, encouraging analysis of the
contending forces and sites of communicative exchange involving user-generated
content alongside corporate promotions and journalistic commentary (Hardy
2010a, 2011). In turn this allows for a critical political economy that is alert to
contradictions within cultural production and exchange, and can draw on the
insights of cultural theory. Far from diminishing critical accounts this strengthens
analysis of power dynamics, including corporate strategies to impose proprietary
control over symbolic meanings.

What (is) political economy of the media? 21

6
SEPTEMBER 11 AND THE
STRUCTURAL LIMITATIONS OF
US JOURNALISM

Robert W. McChesney

The questions before us are elementary. What explains the nature of US news media
coverage of the political response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the
United States? Is September 11 a defining event for US journalism? We have been
roundly told that “September 11 changes everything,” but does it change journalism?
I argue that the US press coverage of the political response to the September 11
attacks was exactly what one would expect from looking at historical precedent.
September 11 may be changing a lot of things about our world, but with regard to
journalism it has merely highlighted the antidemocratic tendencies already in existence.

The war against terrorism and the US press coverage

The September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, for
most Americans, were similar in effect to having a massive attack from outer space.
Almost entirely ignorant of global politics, devoid of any understanding of the Islamic
world, educated primarily by Hollywood movies featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Bruce Willis, and Sylvester Stallone, Americans were ideally prepared for a paranoid
and hysterical response. Mix in an opportunistic class of politicians and powerful
special interests that benefit by militarism, and you have the recipe for much of what
transpired thereafter. The immediate consequence of the September 11 attack was for
Congress to pass, by a virtually unanimous vote, and with no substantive debate, an
act granting President George W. Bush the power to engage in global war against
enemies he is free to define with little accountability to Congress. At the same time
Congress authorized a sharp increase in military, intelligence, and national security
spending. Within a few weeks the United States began its aerial bombings of
Afghanistan. In his public statements President Bush was emphatic that the United
States was engaged in a global war on terrorism, and that those nations and peoples
who did not support the US effort would be regarded as sympathetic to the enemy

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and dealt with accordingly. Insofar as this was a war without borders, that logic
would apply domestically as well as abroad. Moreover, this was to be a war with no
end in sight, for as long as terrorists lurked the prospect of another deadly attack
loomed, and our forces needed to be on guard. Pre-emptive strikes were justified and
necessary. The initial name the US government gave for the war, Operation Infinite
Justice, captured the world-historical nature of the conflict. In short, we were in the
early stages of World War III.

Central to this process were the news media, and the media system more broadly.
Moments like these are the “moments of truth,” so to speak, for establishing the
commitment to democracy of a nation’s media system. The decision to enter war, not
to mention world war, is arguably the most important any society can make. Tens of
thousands, perhaps millions, even tens of millions, of lives will be lost, and those that
survive will be vastly less happy than they would have been otherwise. The political-
economic cost of war is very high as well. Standards of living must be cut, govern-
ment non-military services reduced, and civil liberties curtailed. In a free society, such
a decision must be made with the informed consent of the governed. Otherwise, the
claim to be a democratic nation is dubious, if not fraudulent.

Over the last hundred years, as the United States has emerged as the dominant
economic and military power in the world, it has engaged in hundreds of wars and
invasions and bombing missions across the planet. According to a list compiled by the
Congressional Research Service, the United States has employed its military forces
in other countries over 70 times since 1945, not counting innumerable instances
of counterinsurgency operations by the CIA. The American people were ignorant
of most of these actions; they were made in our name but without our informed
consent. Such is the price of being the dominant superpower in the world.

When the wars go from quickie carpet bombings or bankrolling mercenaries and
death squads to full-scale hostilities, the citizenry cannot remain in the dark. Gov-
ernments need active support for the war effort, both to pay for the cost of war, and to
provide the soldiers willing to die for the war. It has proven to be a difficult job in
the United States to enlist such popular support for war. Over the last hundred years
the US government has worked aggressively to convince the citizenry of the necessity
of going to war in numerous instances. In cases like World War I, Korea, Vietnam,
and the Gulf War, the government employed sophisticated propaganda campaigns to
whip the population into a suitable fury. Candidates won the presidency in 1916 and
1964 on peace platforms when the record shows they were working diligently to go
to war. It was well understood within the establishment at the time—and subse-
quently verified in historical examinations—that the government needed to lie in
order to gain support for its war aims. The Pentagon Papers provided the most chilling
documentation imaginable of this process.

And how have the media served us during these various war campaigns? Despite all
the talk about being a feisty Fourth Estate, the media system in every one of those
cases proved to be a superior propaganda organ for militarism and war. This is widely
understood among US journalism educators, and when we teach of these historic
episodes of journalism it tends to be addressed with remorse and concern. This is the

The structural limitations of US journalism 105

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context for understanding the media coverage since September 11. The historical
record suggests that we should expect an avalanche of lies and half-truths in the ser-
vice of power. Journalists, the news media, should be extremely skeptical, demanding
evidence for claims, opening the door to other policy options, and asking the tough
questions that nobody in power wants to address; the historical track record is emphatic
in this regard. Such a free press would “serve the governed, not the governors,” as
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black once put it.

What is most striking in the US news coverage following the September 11 attacks
is how that very debate over whether to go to war, or how best to respond, did not
even exist. It was presumed, almost from the moment the South Tower of the World
Trade Center collapsed, that the United States was at war, world war. The picture
conveyed by the media was as follows: A benevolent, democratic, and peace-loving
nation was brutally attacked by insane evil terrorists who hated the United States
for its freedoms and affluent way of life. The United States needed immediately to
increase its military and covert forces, locate the surviving culprits and exterminate
them; then prepare for a long-term war to root out the global terrorist cancer and
destroy it.

In fact, the leap from the September 11 attacks to unchecked world war was
hardly natural or a given. Extraordinarily logical questions, questions that would be
posed by US journalists arguably to any other government in a similar situation, were
ignored or marginalized. Why should we believe that a militarized approach would
be effective? Moving beyond the September 11 attacks, why should the United States
be entitled to determine—as judge, jury, and executioner—who is a terrorist or a
terrorist sympathizer in this global war? What about international law? Why shouldn’t
this be regarded like most other terrorist acts, as crimes against humanity and not as
formal acts of war? The list went on and on.

Most conspicuous was the complete absence of comment on one of the most
striking features of the war campaign, something that any credible journalist would be
quick to observe were the events taking place in Russia or China or Pakistan: There
are very powerful interests in the United States who greatly benefit politically and
economically by the establishment of an unchecked war on terrorism. This con-
sortium of interests can be called, to use President Eisenhower’s term, the military-
industrial complex. It blossomed during the Cold War when the fear of Soviet
imperialism—real or alleged—justified its creation and expansion. A nation with a
historically small military now had a permanent war economy, and powerful special
interests benefited by its existence.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US military-industrial complex has thus
been seeking a substitute for the Cold War with which to justify its massive budgets
and privileges. Various alternatives have been offered: a war on terrorism, the struggle
against “rogue states,” a “clash of civilizations” (Islam and China versus the West,
offered up as a proposal by Samuel Huntington), a war on the global drug trade, and
humanitarian intervention—all of them up to now seen as unsatisfactory, but suffi-
cient to keep the military budget from shrinking drastically after the Cold War. As
General Colin Powell voiced the problem in 1991: “Think hard about it. I’m

106 Robert W. McChesney

running out of demons. I’m running out of villains” (Toronto Star 1991; see also
Gibbs 2001). The military lobbyists so dominated Washington politics that both
parties agreed to maintain high levels of military spending, even with no powerful
adversary. In 2000 the United States accounted for around one-third of all military
spending in the world.

The war on terrorism was a gift from heaven for the military-industrial complex.
(Just like the military response to terrorism may well be a gift from heaven to the
terrorists.) It justified vast increases in budgets and power, and less accountability to
Congress. It was a war that was endless and could never be won. And it was a war
that the public would never have any way of monitoring, since the terrorist enemy
was by definition detached from governments that could be defeated. Moreover,
the very nature of terrorism lent itself to a hysteria that was highly conducive to
emotional support for war and discouraging to the possibility of rational inquiry.

For journalists to raise issues like these did not presuppose that they opposed
government policies, merely that the policies needed to be justified and explained, so
the support would be substantive, not ephemeral, the result of deliberation, not
manipulation. Such has not been the case.

In sum, much of mainstream US journalism has been, to be frank, propagandistic.
The propagandistic nature of the war coverage was made crystal clear by CNN a few
weeks after the war began in Afghanistan. CNN was not only the leading US cable
news network; it was the leading global cable and satellite news network. Yet the war
has put CNN in a pickle. If it broadcast the pro-US coverage it generated in the
United States to international audiences, audiences would react negatively. Interna-
tional audiences received a much more critical take on the war and the US role in
their newspapers and other media, and they would not watch CNN if it was seen as a
front for the Bush administration. On the other hand, if CNN presented such critical
coverage to US audiences, it would outrage people in power here. CNN President
Walter Isaacson solved this dilemma by authorizing CNN to provide two different
versions of the war: a critical one for global audiences and a sugarcoated one for
Americans. Indeed, Isaacson instructed the domestic CNN to be certain that any
story that might undermine support for the US war needed to be balanced with a
reminder that the war on terrorism was a good war.

In this climate it should be no surprise that most Americans supported the war,
though they knew next to nothing about the region we were fighting in and its
history, or the US role in the world.

The structural limitations on US journalism

This distorted coverage reflects the weaknesses of professional journalism as it has
been practiced in the United States, as well as the control of our major news media
by a very small number of very large and powerful profit-seeking corporations.
It does not reflect explicit state censorship. As George Orwell observed, the genius of
censorship in free societies is that “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient
facts kept dark, without any need for an official ban” (cited in Pilger 1998: 486).

The structural limitations of US journalism 107

As I will argue, the coverage following September 11 conformed to the main pattern
of US news coverage on other important political stories in recent years.

Professional journalism emerged in the United States around 100 years ago for a
handful of important reasons. One crucial factor was the need among monopoly
newspaper owners to offer a credible “non-partisan” journalism so that their business
enterprises would not be undermined. To avoid the taint of partisanship, profession-
alism makes official or credentialed sources the basis for news stories. Reporters report
what people in power say, and what they debate. This tends to give the news an
establishment bias. When a journalist reports what official sources are saying, or
debating, she is professional. When she steps outside this range of official debate to
provide alternative perspectives or to raise issues those in power prefer not to discuss,
she is no longer being professional. Background stories and contextual pieces that
contradict and compromise the range of debate among official sources may appear
briefly in the news, but they die off quickly without official source amplification.
Most journalists have so internalized this primary role as stenographers for official
sources that they do not recognize it as a problem for democracy. The best profes-
sional journalism is when there are clear and distinct debates between official sources;
this provides considerable room for journalists to roam as they prepare their stories.

In matters of international politics, the phrase “official sources” is almost inter-
changeable with the term “elites,” as foreign policy is mostly the preserve of the
wealthy and powerful few—C. Wright Mills’ classic power elite. At its worst, in a
case like the current war on terrorism, where the elites and official sources are unified
on the core issues, the nature of our press coverage is uncomfortably close to that
found in authoritarian societies with limited formal press freedom.

Many working journalists would recoil at that statement. Their response would be
that professional reliance on official sources is justifiable as “democratic” because the
official sources are elected or accountable to people who are elected by the citizenry.
This is a crucial issue, so permit me a bit of a digression from the discussion of
September 11. The problem with this rationale for stenography is that it forgets a
critical assumption of free press theory: Even leaders determined by election need a
rigorous monitoring, the range of which cannot be determined solely by their elected
opposition. Otherwise the citizenry has no way out of the status quo, no capacity to
criticize the political culture as a whole. If such a watchdog function grows lax, cor-
ruption invariably grows, and the electoral system decays. If journalism that goes
outside the range of elite opinion is dismissed as unprofessional or partisan, and
therefore justifiably ignored, the media merely locks in a corrupt status quo and can
offer no way out. If journalists require having official sources on their side to pursue a
story, it gives people in power a massive veto power over the exercise of democracy.

Consider the Enron scandal which unfolded in late 2001 and the early months of
2002. Although this was a stunning example of supreme political corruption—a story
that could topple governments in many nations—the coverage increasingly con-
centrated upon the business collapse of Enron, rather than the sleazy way in which it
worked, legally as well as illegally, using the political system to make billions of dollars
ripping off consumers, taxpayers, and workers. Why did it not turn into a political

108 Robert W. McChesney

crisis that ended careers and led to major reform? Because the opposition Democrats
were in no hurry to push the story to its logical political conclusion, since so many of
them would have been implicated as well. So professional journalism is restricted to
the range of what those in power pursue, and the balance of the population has
no one representing its interests. What about those who simply want the whole truth
to come out, and the system changed so this sort of corruption is less likely to ever
occur in the future? They are out of luck.

Another telling example is the manner in which the press reported President
Bush’s “victory” in the 2000 election. It is now clear that the majority of the people
in Florida who went to vote for President in November 2000 intended to vote for
Al Gore (see Vidal 2001). The semi-official recount conducted by the major news
media in 2001 showed that by every conceivable way the votes might be counted
Al Gore won Florida (see also Nichols 2001). But Al Gore wasn’t President. Why is
that? Or, to put it another way, why didn’t the press coverage assure that the true
winner would assume office? After all, if the free press cannot guarantee the integrity
of elections, what good is it? The primary reason is due to sourcing: Throughout
November and early December of 2000, the news media were being told by all
Republicans that the Republicans had won the election and Al Gore was trying to
steal it. The Democrats, on the other hand, were far less antagonistic and showed
much less enthusiasm to fight for what they had won. Hence the news coverage,
reflecting what their sources were telling them, tended to reflect the idea that the
Republicans had won and the Democrats were grasping for straws. When Greg Palast
broke the story in Britain in November 2000 that the Florida Republicans had sys-
tematically and illegally excluded thousands of poor Floridians from voting—in itself,
almost certainly enough to cost Gore the state—no US mainstream news medium
dared pick it up, though the story was true. Why? Most likely this was because
journalists would have been out on their own, because the Democrats had elected
not to fight on this issue (see Palast 2002). Once the Supreme Court made its final
decision, the media were elated to announce that our national nightmare was over.
The media had helped anoint a President. The only losers were the irrelevant and
powerless souls who clung to the belief that whoever gets the most votes should win
the election, and that the press should tell the whole truth and let the chips fall where
they may.

The willingness of the mainstream US news media to suspend criticism of
President Bush almost in toto after September 11 should be considered in this light.
When the recount report indicating that Gore won Florida was released two months
after September 11, what was striking was how almost all of the press reported that
the results were mixed or that Bush had won. The reason for the press making this
judgment was it only looked at the recount in the few counties where Al Gore had
requested it; who actually won the actual election in Florida seemed not to interest
the press one whit. In a manner of thinking, the press had no choice but to provide
this interpretation. If the media conceded that Gore, in fact, had won the race in
Florida, it would have made people logically ask, “Why didn’t the media determine
this when it mattered?” Moreover, a concession that the United States had an

The structural limitations of US journalism 109

unelected President would make the laudatory coverage of President Bush after
September 11 look increasingly like the sort that paeans to “maximum leaders”
expected from the news media in tinhorn dictatorships. As soon as the leaders
are not the product of free and fair elections, the professional reliance on official
sources—which is wobbly by democratic standards to begin with—collapses.

In addition to this reliance on official sources, experts are also crucial to explaining
and debating policy, especially in complex stories like this one. As with sources,
experts are drawn almost entirely from the establishment. Since September 11, the
range of “expert” analysis has been limited mostly to the military and intelligence
communities and their supporters, with their clear self-interest in the imposition of
military solutions rarely acknowledged and almost never critically examined. Since
there has been virtually no debate between the Democrats and Republicans over the
proper response, the military approach has simply been offered as the only option. As
National Public Radio’s Cokie Roberts put it on October 8 when asked on air if
there was any domestic opposition to the bombing of Afghanistan: “None that mattered.”

The full-throttle jingoism of the press coverage was tempered by late September,
as it became clear that a full-blown war might be counterproductive to US military
and political aims. The range of debate has broadened somewhat in elite circles, with
some assuming the more “internationalist” position that the United States needed to
win the “hearts and minds” of potential adversaries through more sophisticated
peaceful measures, as well as have an unmatched military. This expansion of elite
debate will almost certainly lead to a broadening of journalism, but this should not be
confused with a genuine democratic debate or democratic journalism. Fundamental
issues will remain decidedly off limits. The role of the military as the ultimate source
of power will not be questioned. The notion that the United States is a uniquely
benevolent force in the world will be undisputed. The premise that the United States
and the United States alone—unless it deputizes a nation like Israel—has a right to
invade any country it wants at any time if it so wishes will remain undebatable. And
any concerns that US military actions will violate international law will be raised not
on principle, but only because it might harm US interests to be perceived by other
nations as a lawbreaker.

Here we should recall the media coverage of the US invasion of Vietnam in the
1960s and 1970s. From the time the United States launched its ground invasion in
earnest, in 1965, until late 1967 or early 1968, the news coverage was a classic
example of the “big lie” of all war propaganda. The war was good and necessary for
freedom and democracy; those who opposed it were trivialized, marginalized, dis-
torted, or ignored. By 1968 the coverage began to take a more charitable stance
toward antiwar positions. But while it reflected growing public opposition to the war to
a certain degree, this coverage was influenced much more by the break that emerged in
US elite opinion by this time: some on Wall Street and in Washington realized that
the cost of the war was far too high for any prospective benefits and favored getting
out. The news coverage remained within the confines of elite opinion. The United
States still had a “007” right to invade any nation it wished; the only debate was
whether the invasion of Vietnam was a proper use of that power. The notion that the

110 Robert W. McChesney

very idea of the United States invading nations like Vietnam was morally wrong was
off limits, although surveys revealed that such a view was not uncommon in the
general population.

Another flaw of establishment journalism is that it tends to avoid contextualization
like the plague. The reason for this is that providing meaningful context and back-
ground for stories, if done properly, tends to commit the journalist to a definite
position and enmesh him in the controversy professionalism is determined to avoid.
Coverage tends to be a barrage of facts and official statements. What little con-
textualization professional journalism does provide tends to conform to elite premises.
So it is that on those stories that receive the most coverage, like the Middle East,
Americans tend to be almost as ignorant as on those subjects that receive far less
coverage. Such journalism is more likely to produce confusion, cynicism, and apathy
than understanding and informed action. Hence one of the paradoxes of professional
journalism: It is arguably better at generating ignorance and apathy than informed and
passionately engaged citizens.

Structural limitations and September 11

Considerable context and background have been generated in the US news media
since September 11, but the context conforms to elite premises. So it is that there
have been numerous detailed reports on Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network,
and related investigations of factors concerning the success or failure of prospective
military actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Information about the fundamental
context that falls outside the range of US elite interests may appear periodically, but it
gets little follow-up and has negligible impact. This becomes abundantly clear when
one peruses the Internet to see what is being reported in the international press or in
the US independent and alternative media. Here, one often finds stories about US
complicity and the complicity of US allies with terrorists and terrorism. Here, one is
more likely to find a much more complex world where the US government’s
motives are held to the same standard as those of other governments. (See, for
example, the superior US website, www.accuracy.org, which collects much of this
material.) But these stories, often by world-renowned journalists like Robert Fisk, are
all but unknown in the news consumed by the preponderance of the US population.

The weaknesses of the coverage are augmented by the structural context for
US journalism. Over the past two decades the US news media have become con-
solidated into the hands of a very small number of enormous media conglomerates.
For many of them, journalism accounts for a small percentage of their revenues and
profit. These new owners have paid huge sums to acquire their media empires,
and they expect to generate maximum returns from their assets. Accordingly, a baldly
commercial logic has been applied to journalism in recent years. As a result, among
other things, the number of overseas correspondents has been slashed, and inter-
national political coverage has plummeted, as that is expensive and generates little
revenue. Whereas Americans once tended to be misinformed about world politics,
now they are uninformed. The US citizenry is embarrassingly and appallingly

The structural limitations of US journalism 111

www.accuracy.org

ignorant of the most elementary political realities in other nations and regions. It is an
unmitigated disaster for the development of a meaningful democratic debate over
international policy, and highlights a deep contradiction between the legitimate
informational needs of a democratic society and the need for profit of the corporate
media.

The US media corporations also exist within an institutional context that makes
support for the US military seemingly natural. These giant firms are among the pri-
mary beneficiaries of both neoliberal globalization—their revenues outside the
United States are increasing at a rapid pace—and the US role as the pre-eminent
world power. Indeed, the US government is the primary advocate for the global
media firms when trade deals and intellectual property agreements are being nego-
tiated. Coincidentally, at the very moment that the corporate broadcasters are singing
the praises of “America’s New War,” their lobbyists are appearing before the Federal
Communications Commission seeking radical relaxation of ownership regulations
for broadcasting, newspaper, and cable companies. Such deregulation will, by all
accounts, lead to another massive wave of media consolidation. For these firms to
provide an understanding of the world in which the US military and economic
interests are not benevolent forces might be possible in some arcane twisted theory,
but it is incongruous practically.

There is no simple or easy solution to the complex problem of how to best pro-
vide for a journalism that serves democracy, especially when powerful forces are
pounding the drums of war. But it is a problem that must be addressed if we are to
have any prospect of living in a humane and self-governing society. A viable solution
ultimately will require reform of our media system, as well as broader reform of the
US political economy. But this is not an issue to be decided here; it is an issue that
deserves the attention and participation of all concerned with the future of democracy
and peaceful international relations.

Note

Parts of this essay appeared in an earlier form in McChesney, R. W. (2002) “The US
news media and World War III,” Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism, 3 (1): 14–21.

References

Gibbs, D. N. (2001) Washington’s new interventionism, Monthly Review, 53, September:
15–37.

Nichols, J. (2001) Jews for Buchanan, New York: The New Press.
Palast, G. (2002) The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, London: Pluto Press.
Pilger, J. (1998) Hidden Agendas, London: Vintage.
Toronto Star (1991) General advocates cuts to US military budget, April 9: A3.
Vidal, G. (2001) Times cries eke! Buries Al Gore, The Nation, December 17: 13–15.

112 Robert W. McChesney

Chapter 7

Globalisation, media
transnationalisation and culture

Introduction

Critical political economy is closely associated with a critique of imbalances and
inequality in the global flow of media and cultural goods

This cultural imperi-
alism thesis was advanced by prominent CPE scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. It
was challenged and lost ground in the 1980s as various critiques coalesced
around a cultural globalisation thesis (Tomlinson 1991, 1999). In the conven-
tional version told, crude, neo-Marxist accounts of cultural imposition, American
hegemony and ‘one-way’ cultural flows have given way to an appreciation of
multidirectional cultural flows. Yet such framing offers a misleading account of
the analysis and contribution of critical scholarship: past and present. Both theory
and analysis have developed to try to match the ever more complex patterns and
implications of media globalisation. Critical political economy is not char-
acterised by adherence to formulations of cultural imperialism from the 1970s
but rather to exploring problems of power in communications that belie more
benign accounts of reciprocation and cultural exchange.

Rival perspectives on cultural domination have structured debates on media
transnationalisation and so reviewing these serves as a good way into making
sense of contemporary analysis. Yet approaching these debates through media
and cultural studies literature alone makes it all too easy to disconnect them
from their historical and political economic contexts and their relevance
to interventions in policy arenas. This chapter seeks to place contemporary
debates on globalisation and media in a wider framework, encompassing the
geopolitical shifts to neoliberalism and the political challenges to inequalities in
media and cultural flows. Rival polarities of cultural imperialism and cultural
globalisation still influence debates but, after reassessing their legacy, this chapter
goes on to examine divisions (not least amongst radical scholars themselves)
between ‘strong’ globalisation theories and those emphasising the continuing
importance and influence of the state and ‘national’ media systems. The chapter
also assesses current developments in the transnational political economy
of media.

Hardy, Jonathan. Critical Political Economy of the Media : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pitt-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1715800.
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Modernisation theory

A loosely affiliated group of scholars in North America promoted an account of
social and economic transformation in which the advanced capitalist economies
would lead the development of market economies in other nations by non-coercive
means. This account assigned a key role to communications and to the diffusion
of communications technologies, media content and media models derived from
the West. For Daniel Lerner (1969, quoted in Schiller 1989: 139)

The long era of imperialism (subordination) is recently ended: the campaign
for international development (equalisation) has just begun.

[ … ]

Under the new conditions of globalism, [international communication] has
largely replaced the coercive means by which colonial territories were seized
and held.

[ … ]

The persuasive transmission of enlightenment is the modern paradigm of
international communication.

Modernisation theorists such as Lerner, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Wilbur Schramm,
argued that the phase of imperialism was ending with the creation of newly
independent nation-states and that communication had a vital role in ‘training
for self management’ and promoting the aspirations of a modernised market
economy to both citizens and elites. Capital would have rich new seams of
cheaper labour and emergent consumer markets. Transformation would be
aided by the benign diffusion of enlightened values. ‘Backward’ and particularist
forms of thought would be replaced by more ‘universalistic’ values of enterprise
and possessive individualism. In reality, the media systems in many developing
nations supported authoritarian power rather than popular emancipation and
education and on this the US modernisers were ambivalent, paying little attention
to how media pluralism could be secured (Curran and Park 2000b).

Cultural imperialism

Radical scholars advanced the concept of cultural imperialism in the 1960s and
1970s. Its major achievement, argues Nordenstreng (2001) was to challenge the
then dominant, benign account of Western modernisation; radical scholars
argued instead that ‘Western culture’ was being imposed on newly independent
states in the ‘third world’, eroding cultural autonomy. Their core claim was that
the imperialism had not ended with decolonisation; rather colonial powers had
found other means to sustain relations of dominance, including the unequal
exchange of cultural products, technologies, skills and resources (Said 1993;

158 Critical investigations in political economy

Boyd-Barrett 1977). Scholars drew on dependency theory, grounded in neo-Marxist
political economy, which argued that core nations maintained peripheral nations
in relations of economic and political dependence. Transnational corporations,
mostly based in the North, exercised control over developing countries in the South
through setting the terms of global trade and exchange, aided by the active
support of their respective governments. Dependency theories were developed
by Latin American scholars in particular but influenced and joined a broader
swathe of subaltern and anti-imperialist work. These analyses also informed the
work of CPE scholars in North America (Dallas Smythe, Herbert Schiller,
Hamid Mowlana) and Europe (Karle Nordenstreng, Peter Golding).

Leading authors of modern critical economy such as Herbert Schiller and
Dallas Smythe were trailblazers for international media analysis. They set out to
understand global geopolitical and economic forces and their relationship to
communications and cultural exchange. They also made efforts to understand
the increasingly complex relations between transnational and national cultural
production. However, to reduce their work to the stock features of what is
labelled, and critiqued, as the cultural imperialism thesis is misleading. Criticisms
can certainly be made of their analysis but they invariably engaged in more
sophisticated ways than the standard critique allows with the patterns of an
emerging transnational political economy and its cultural implications. Schiller’s
work, in particular, examined the growth of transnational media corporations in the
period after 1945 and the transformation of US national firms into ‘huge, integrated,
cultural combines’, that controlled the means of producing and distributing ‘film,
TV, publishing, recording, theme parks, and even data banks’ (Schiller 1991: 14).
Such concerns were supported by studies of global television markets showing
that programming flows were dominated by US production. A UNESCO report
found that more than half the countries studied imported over 50 per cent of their
television, mostly entertainment and most imported from the US (Nordenstreng
and Varis 1974; Straubhaar 2002: 194). Calculating an ‘index of dependence’
based on the proportion of imported television programmes, one UNESCO
study in 1972 found that 40 per cent of Latin America television broadcasts
came from the US; Guatemala had an index of dependence on US television of
80 per cent.1 Another focus was the ideological encodings of internationally
distributed (mainly Western) media and advertising, and the importation of
forms, models and practices derived from Western commercial media and
advertising. In How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, Ariel
Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (1975) argued that Disney texts promote Western
capitalism, caricature and denigrate ‘third world’ cultures and consistently carry
messages of how such people should aspire to live.

Cultural imperialism (CI) emerged in the context of the wider struggles crystal-
lised in demands for a new world information and communication order, which
arose against a background of decolonisation (Mattelart and Mattelart 1998:
137–38; Mosco 1996: 75–76). Pressure to remedy inequality in information and
communication flows was an important but always relatively minor aspect of

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 159

contestation over a new world economic order. These debates occurred in the
1970s when the so-called non-aligned states, including many newly formed nations,
could exert pressure at a moment of heightened influence. The two Cold War
superpowers, the US and the USSR, vied for their support while capitalist crises
that followed in the wake of the OPEC oil price rise in 1973 shifted the bargaining
power to resource-rich regions. The United Nations had been established as a for-
mally inclusive body with voting equality between member nations. While largely
deemed unworkable by US leaders, as the ‘executive’ powers of the Security
Council remained locked in Cold War antagonists, the UN provided a platform
and forum for debate. UNESCO began to promote the international circulation of
media, the protection of journalists, and promotion of Article 19 of the UN
Declaration of Human Rights (1948). By the 1970s the ranks of the UN had
swelled as former colonies gained independence and many were unsurprisingly vocal
in opposing Western efforts to retain or reimpose arrangements of dependency
(Schiller 1996: 99). A UNESCO meeting of experts 1969 concluded:

At the present time, communication takes place in one direction … the
image given of developing countries is often false, deformed, and what is
more serious, this image is the one presented in these countries themselves.
The participants in the Montreal meeting believe that the exchange of
information and of other cultural products, particularly in developing
countries, is in danger of modifying or displacing cultural values and of
causing problems for the mutual understanding among nations.

(cited in Mattelart 1994: 180)

Amidst broad-ranging concern about inequality in cultural flows from North to
South and from core to periphery a key target was news and news agencies.
According to Masmoudi (1979) five Western news agencies were responsible for
80 per cent of the world’s news – only a quarter of which was about developing
countries. At a UNESCO meeting in Montreal in 1976 the proposal for a New
World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) was launched by non-
aligned countries and in 1977 UNESCO established an International Commission
for the study of communications problems. The Commission, backed by some
hundred studies, papers and submissions, was presided over by Sean MacBride,
a former Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army who went on to become an
Irish Government Minister and human rights campaigner. The MacBride
Commission report (1980) produced eighty-two recommendations for action set
out under the following themes: strengthening independence and self-reliance;
social consequences and new tasks; journalistic professional integrity and standards;
democratising communication; and fostering international co-operation. It called
for guaranteed pluralism, a more just world communication order, support for
third world development, limits on the activities of transnational corporations,
measures to tackle media concentration, better conditions for journalists, and
democratisation of communications, including the abolition of censorship. It

160 Critical investigations in political economy

called for equal distribution of the electronic spectrum as well as national protection
against cross-border satellite communications. The report was fiercely attacked by
corporate media in their own news outlets, in publications (Righter 1978), and in
lobbying, serving as a foretaste of the mobilisations carried out since by TNMCs
such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation against politicians threatening
their interests in Australia and Britain. The United States left UNESCO in 1984,
unhappy at the turn of debate and maintaining its doctrine of ‘free flow of infor-
mation’ which for its critics advanced free speech claims while buttressing the
existing dominance in US exports and influence. Britain left too in 1985 but the exit
of the US, UNESCO’s major funder, was a significant blow and the body has not
regained the same resources or influence since, even though the US rejoined in 2003
in time to intervene in debates on what became the Convention on the Protection
and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO 2005).

The MacBride report marked an end point; its conclusions were worthy but
woolly and it failed to provide a guide for action in a hostile environment. The
report ‘failed to galvanize private and public sector participants into action to
promote the massive investment … needed’ argue Mansell and Nordenstreng
(2007), who draw parallels with the influence of civil society organisations in the
World Summit on the Information Society 2003–5. Yet, there were some posi-
tive outcomes, notably regional initiatives to support cultural production and the
expansion of the Inter Press Service news agency (originally founded in Argentina
1964) across Latin American and Africa.

The new world communication order sought by non-aligned countries of the
South did not just fail because of Western neoliberalism. Third Worldism
became discredited because of the practice of reactionary states. Contradictions
were exposed between the authoritarian, statist demands to control commu-
nication inside national borders and pleas to democratise communications and
deepen cultural diversity. Calls for a new world order were used as an alibi for
failures of domestic action. Internal inequalities were exacerbated between elites
welcoming new circuits of modernisation and large sections of society (Iran
under the Shah; Kenya under Moi). Internal state attacks on popular culture
(such as reggae and Rastafarianism in Jamaica) exposed contradictions, as did
the high levels of internal political censorship, state repression and media control.
There were ongoing efforts by some states to erect barriers to foreign media
influence. The Soviet Union moved to block satellite transmissions. In 1996, the
Taliban shut down Afghanistan’s only TV station when it took control of Kabul,
banning televisions, videocassette recorders and satellite dishes.

Cultural imperialism was invoked to support authoritarian controls in the
developing world. ‘Defence of Asian values and eastern essentialism against
Western imperialism is even now a standard pretext used by conservatives and
communists alike to legitimate illiberal controls against their own people’
(Curran and Park 2000b: 5). NWICO, argues Miller et al. (2005: 76), offered an
inadequate theorisation of capitalism, class relations and postcolonialism; it
‘risked cloaking the interests of emergent bourgeoisies seeking to advance their

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 161

own market power under the sign of national cultural self-determination,
national capital over transnational capital’ (Miller et al. 2005: 80).

The relationship between radical critics of cultural imperialism and these
outcomes is an important but complex one. One key charge is that the CI thesis
framed the problem as the erosion of authentic culture whereby ‘culture is
defined in national terms, within which it is reasonably integrated and homo-
geneous’ (McKay 2004: 71). On the contrary, Dan Schiller, Herbert Schiller’s
son, argues, persuasively in my view, that the radical critics of cultural imperialism
saw culture as in formation; far from assuming an affinity between statist and
popular perspectives they saw the struggle for cultural self-determination as part of
a struggle for revolutionary social change. In Communication and Cultural Domination
(1976: 96), Herbert Schiller draws on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
(1963) and Amilcar Cabral’s writings to advocate a cultural revolution, not
through nativist traditionalism but communications policy reform: ‘National
communications policy making is a generic term for the struggle against cultural
and social domination in all its forms, old and new, exercised from within or
outside the nation’. An appreciation of these tensions is certainly evident too in
Herbert Schiller’s (1976: 9) statement that:

The concept of cultural imperialism today best describes the sum of the
processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and
how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes
bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote,
the values and structures of the dominating centre of the system.

Yet, Dan Schiller also rightly acknowledges that the response to these contra-
dictions was inadequate; faith in the triumph of popular communication was
exposed as naïve.

Various critiques are bundled together as the ‘cultural imperialism thesis’
often to dispatch them more swiftly, but each needs to be assessed on its merits.
One such is analysis of the links between the ‘military-industrial complex’ and
the media, developed by Hans Enzenberger, Schiller and others, examining the
growth of state-sponsored information and propaganda as part of wider military
and covert operations to secure compliant states. As well as producing commu-
nications directly, the State–Military complex financed and participated in
Hollywood production; President J.F. Kennedy instructed the US Information
Agency to use film and television to propagandise, establishing funding for 226
film centres in 106 countries (Miller et al. 2005: 106–7). More contemporary
links between Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the US military and government across
information management and imagery are explored by Rampton and Stauber
(2003). The various forms of US government support for the interests of
TNMCs have also been examined, showing how film and other cultural exports
were regarded as vital as key economic sectors, for their role in encouraging
the consumption of other goods and services, and in contributing to ‘soft

162 Critical investigations in political economy

power’ (Nye 2005) promoting strategic and popular support for US-led global
capitalism.

What is labelled the ‘cultural imperialism thesis’, was in reality a short-lived
formulation which was criticised ‘from within’ by critical scholars such as Tunstall
(1977) and Mattelart et al. (1984), within a revising tradition of critical political
economy. Armand Mattelart argued for recognition of growing complexity in
cultural flows (Mattelart et al. 1984: 22):

One could easily continue to accumulate evidence of the dominant position
of American firms. But in so doing we run the risk of enclosing ourselves
within a condemnation without perspective.

[ … ]

For just a few illustrations will … show that there are nuances to the map of
global ‘one-way traffic’.

Tunstall (1977: 40) both confirmed and challenged the CI thesis; focusing on TV
exports, the ‘television imperialism thesis ignores the much earlier pattern of the
press and news agencies which quite unambiguously did have an imperial character’.

Cultural globalisation

Three kinds of criticism, in particular, informed what became the ‘revisionist
orthodoxy’ of cultural globalisation theory in the 1990s and beyond (Curran
2002: 171). Multiple flows: the notion of predominantly ‘one-way’ flows from the
West to the rest, was challenged by evidence that global flows were always but
increasingly ‘multidirectional’ and so, it was argued, not reducible to a dependency
model that conceived influence emanating from ‘core’ nations to ‘peripheral’ ones
(Sreberny-Mohammadi 1996). Media audiences: the second main area of critique
focused on the failure to analyse and appreciate audience reception and meaning
making. While much can be said about media and cultural flows, the implications
for those who consume them remained largely obscure. Early studies assumed
that the transnationalisation of cultural production led to transnationalisation of
reception (Madger 1993). In his nuanced critique, Thompson (1995: 171) argues
that Herbert Schiller ‘tries to infer, from an analysis of the social organization of
the media industries, what the consequences of media messages are likely to be
for the individuals who receive them’. Such inferences are speculative and ‘dis-
regard the complex, varied and contextually specific ways in which messages are
interpreted by individuals and incorporated into their day-to-day lives’. Media
consumers are active and creative in selecting and appropriating meanings,
argued Liebes and Katz in their reception study of Dallas, the global TV export
phenomenon of the 1970s (Gripsrud 1995). The affective as well as inter-
pretative relationship of audiences had been neglected (Ang 1991). Cultural

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 163

domination: the third main challenge concerned the notion of imposition of culture,
usually conceived as Americanisation or Westernisation. By contrast, it was
argued that cultural imports, whether products or ideas, are indigenised, hybri-
dised and appropriated in various ways that transform their meaning (Tomlinson
1991). Where cultural imperialism had feared growing cultural homogenisation,
it was now argued that more complex processes of differentiation were taking
place. Insofar as there was a predominant flow of ‘cultural discourse’ from the
West (or North) this should not be regarded as a form of domination but as a
multiply directed transition to global modernities.

According to cultural globalisation theories, the global and transnational is
eroding the national. Above all, this constitutes a shift from the dominance of
national media, such as national broadcasting, to a new media order whereby
‘[a]udiovisual geographies are thus becoming detached from the symbolic spaces
of national culture, and realigned on the basis of the more “universal” principles
of international consumer culture’ (Morley and Robins 1995: 11). For García
Canclini (1995), migration and modernity have broadened cultural territory
beyond the traditional nation-state. According to Thompson (1995: 175), ‘As
symbolic materials circulate on an ever-greater scale, locales become sites where,
to an ever-increasing extent, globalized media products are received, interpreted
and incorporated into the daily lives of individuals’.

Beyond cultural imperialism and cultural globalisation

Globalisation theory challenged and helped to discredit the cultural imperialism
thesis. In place of what were regarded as crude domination theories, cultural
globalisation emphasised popular agency, yet downplayed the problems of
power, inequality and imposition that gave rise to the original CI thesis. There
are ongoing efforts to move beyond the limitations of both paradigms and to
integrate cultural theory into critical media scholarship more effectively. We will
examine these perspectives below but first it is helpful to identify some key
responses from critical political economy and key areas of divisions.

Imbalances in cultural flows

That cultural flows are diverse and multidirectional is uncontested; what is
challenged is the claim that significant imbalances no longer remain as problems
to tackle. While US cultural hegemony is declining, the US remains the world’s
leading exporter of audiovisual content. There was a fivefold increase in US film
and TV exports between 1992 and 2004, largely serving the massive expansion
of private TV channels worldwide. There are contra-flows, ‘subaltern’ flows such
as films from the global South and East. There is increasing global circulation of
products from a much wider range of creative hubs such as Mumbai challenging
US cultural hegemony, yet no cultural exports match the global reach and
influence of US-led Western media, which represent the dominant media flows.

164 Critical investigations in political economy

Western TNMCs have regionalised and localised their content, with many
Southern media organisations involved in this production and cultural glocali-
sation. Against tendencies to valorise the rise of non-Western media, Thussu
(2007: 11) cautions this ‘may reflect a refiguring of hegemony in more complex
ways’. A ‘global popular’ is being created with ‘media content and services being
tailored to specific cultural consumers not so much because of any particular
regard for national cultures but as a commercial imperative’ (Thussu 2007: 21).
Much of the contra-flow highlighted in accounts of increased cultural diversity is
commercial and interlocks into a global corporate system. The diversity of multiple
flows advanced within cultural globalisation masks the global extension of a
commercial system. This does not produce homogenisation of cultural output;
commercial dynamics respond to a diversity of local tastes and interests. However, it
does mean that there is sameness arising from the commercial dynamics towards
privileging entertainment and other content that does not mount sustained
challenges to governing interests and values.

The neglect of economic power

Cultural globalisation theory conceives globalisation as a decentred process. In
doing so it ‘[f]ails to capture the agency of large profit making corporations
in affecting, but not completely determining the new cultural world order’
(Hesmondhalgh 2007: 238). It reflects what Curran describes as a ‘blind spot’ in
cultural globalisation theory, a reluctance to critically address economic power
(Curran 2002: 174). Instead we must begin with an analysis of corporate capitalism.

The critical discourse of cultural imperialism has been challenged for its
inadequate account of cultural processes (how culture makes us, individually and
collectively, and how we make use of culture). Its continuing relevance is in
foregrounding questions of inequalities in the distribution of cultural resources
and the organisation of cultural markets. It is primarily concerned with cultural
resources: who has access to the resources to produce, circulate, consume and use
cultural forms (Hardy 2008)? Yet, cultural imperialism has always been an
‘evocative metaphor’ (Sreberny-Mohammadi 1997: 49) rather than a distinct
analytical concept and cumulative critiques have prompted efforts to revise and
reformulate the problem.

From American cultural imperialism to transnational
corporate domination

Throughout the twentieth century, especially after Europe was ravaged by two
world wars, American industries grew to become the dominant cultural exporters.
The variety of factors explaining American cultural dominance makes the case
for a synthesis of strictly political economic and broader cultural explanations.
We must account for both the push and pull of American culture (Gitlin 2002;
Morley and Robins 1995), for the influences that honed cultural forms and formats

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 165

valued by audiences worldwide (Tunstall 1977). American popular culture has
become the ‘central bank of international mythologies, circulating two major
dreams: the dream of freedom and the dream of wealth’ (Gitlin 2002: 22–23).
Key political economic factors have been the size and wealth of the domestic
market in the US, allowing products to be sold to other markets at lower prices. In
the 1980s the cost of acquiring one hour of Dallas would pay for approximately
one minute of original Danish drama production (Gitlin 2002: 25). Economic
resources also helped to create the formats, production values that cultivated
audience tastes and expectations.

Another key factor was the active role of the US state in promoting its cultural
industries abroad (Hesmondhalgh 2013: 271–72). Yet the notion of American
cultural exports has always been vulnerable on empirical and theoretical
grounds. What is ‘American’ about them? For some critics of domination theories,
part of the attraction of US productions is that they are oriented to appeal to a
culturally rich and diverse audience at home, qualities that help explain their
wider global appeal (Hoskins et al. 2004). Large-scale film and television
productions engage international teams of cultural workers so that locating
‘Americanness’ is problematic. In response, for Schiller (1996), the critical charge
is not the export of American culture but ‘transnational corporate cultural
domination’. An essentialist notion of ‘Americanisation’ has been replaced by an
emphasis on the reach and influence of commercially driven transnational
corporations.

Radical accounts such as Herman and McChesney (1997) examine ‘a world
communication order led by transnational businesses and supported by their
respective national states, increasingly linked in continental and global structures’
Thussu (2006: 64). This is not an Americanisation thesis; McChesney (2002: 157)
writes, ‘the notion that media are merely purveyors of US culture is ever less
plausible as the media system becomes increasingly concentrated, commercialised
and globalised’. Instead, the global system is better understood as ‘advancing
corporate and commercial interests and values and denigrating or ignoring that
which cannot be incorporated into its mission’ (McChesney 2002: 157). Globa-
lisation here is largely conceived as a process driven ‘from above’, by the activ-
ities of transnational communication conglomerates supported by neoliberal
states and supranational institutions such as the WTO and the EC. Herman and
McChesney (1997: 9):

regard the primary effect of the globalization process … to be the implan-
tation of the commercial model of communication, its extension to broad-
casting and the ‘new media,’ and its gradual intensification under the force
of competition and bottom-line pressures.

The focus is on the nature and influence of corporate transnationalisation and
links to commercialisation of culture. Commercialisation of media systems
around the world has created new private networks that are primarily interested

166 Critical investigations in political economy

in markets and advertising revenues. There is cultural critique here but it is not
founded on essentialising American culture but on arguing that there are values
promoted within a system driven by profits from sales and commercial advertising.
Yet such reformulations do not entirely evade problems of cultural definition.
For Thompson (1995: 169), Schiller’s ‘transnational corporate cultural domination’
‘still presents too uniform a view of American media culture (albeit a culture
which is no longer exclusively at the disposal of American capital) and of its
global dominance’.

Measuring exports does not resolve the problems. Transnational co-production,
co-ownership, as well as ‘translation, franchising, reversioning, and piracy’ make
the task of distinguishing the originating sources, much less linking these to
‘national’ cultural characteristics, increasingly difficult (Tunstall 2008: 251).
Other analysts highlight the complexity and contradictions within cultural texts.
As Mirrlees (2013) shows, Avatar can be read as engaging counter-hegemonic
discourses as well as hegemonic ones of imperialism and orientalism. Avatar is a
form of global popular culture whose transnational creative production, mainly
across the US and New Zealand, problematises national cultural frames, as do
the diverse interpretations of the film including the appropriation of the Na’vi as
symbols of the people and groups oppressed by neoliberalism and militarism
worldwide. Produced by News Corporation, Avatar became the highest grossing
film of all time, the top selling cinema release in China and with some 70 per cent
of revenue generated outside the United States. Critical political economy
rightly highlights the structural imbalances in cultural flows and points to detri-
mental consequences, but this must be allied to analysis of the influences shaping
specific cultural production, circulation and reception, and considerations of the
ideological boundaries and polyvalency of texts.

Another set of problems concerning ‘transnational corporate domination’
concerns the articulation of relationships between capitalist enterprises, states
and imperialism. Boyd-Barrett advocates a ‘reformulation’ of media imperialism,
replacing the international, territorially based concept of imperialism with one of
‘colonization of communications space’, the latter taking greater account of the
increasing hybridity of media systems (Boyd-Barrett 1998: 167). McPhail (2006)
proposes electronic colonialism. Yet such reformulations are challenged for their
conflation of economic, cultural and political power. For Pieterse (2004: 34) the
idea of ‘corporate imperialism’ ‘is a step too far and a contradiction in terms, for
it implies non-state actors undertaking principally political (not just economic)
projects’. This is certainly not to argue that corporations do not support political
regimes or ‘projects’, or that political power is not used instrumentally to further
corporate interests. Rather, different kinds of power and agency, while interlocking,
still need to be distinguished analytically. Most transnational corporations, Pieterse
argues (2004: 34) ‘can achieve their objectives without control over sovereignty;
economic influence of the type provided by the IMF, World Bank, and WTO
regulations suffices, along with lobbying and sponsoring political actors’. This
debate raises an important set of issues addressed in theories of imperialism,

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 167

capitalism and empire. Harvey’s concept of ‘capitalist imperialism’ serves as a
rejoinder to Pieterse. Capitalist imperialism refers to a shared system of capital
accumulation and power that aims to create worldwide conditions favourable for
‘economic power to flow across and through continuous space’ (Harvey 2003: 26).

As we have seen, in some Marxist accounts the state is regarded as an agent
for capitalism. In crude versions imperialism is undertaken by the state on behalf
of capital to meet its expansionist needs and to overcome crises of accumulation.
However, most critical theorists advance a more complex account. One entry
point is historical analysis. The pursuit of state interests through territorial
imperialism and the advancements of capitalist economic interests took multiple
forms. For instance, the Dutch East India Company ruled territories in Java with
its own apparatus of sovereignty. Winseck and Pike (2008) show that state and
private agencies were complexly interlocked in providing the telegraphic cable
networks on which imperialism depended. Global media evolved as part of a
project of creating a worldwide system of accumulation and modernisation, they
argue. Yet, if imperialism contributed to capital’s survival and expansion, it also
conflicted with capital; ‘imperialism created and reinforced rigid boundaries among
the various global spaces that blocked the free flow of capital, labor and goods
precluding the full realization of the world market’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 305).
The second entry point is theoretical elaboration based on analytical distinctions
between economic and political processes and actors. As Jessop (2008) argues, there
is no determinate relationship between processes of accumulation, institutional
orders and forms of consciousness. Capitalist dynamics of the profit-oriented,
market-mediated process of accumulation may be supported by different forms
of state and supranational governance. Capital accumulation depends upon
extra-economic factors and so cannot be regarded as the cause of these.

Capitalist development

To understand fully the problems of global cultural exchange requires an
understanding of the development and management of capitalism. A key process
has been capital becoming freer of controls exercised by states and state systems.
The organisation of economic life around nation-states emerged gradually but
was the dominant form by the time of the First World War and the Russian
Revolution. In the period from around 1870 to 1914 businesses in advanced
economies were subject to increased state oversight. Capital mobility was
restricted by imperial networks and trade protectionism, while industrial pro-
duction tended to be organised territorially under state jurisdiction. Increased
public scrutiny with the rise of electoral democracy and public criticisms of
‘irresponsible’ capitalism also contributed to efforts to make businesses more
publicly accountable and regulated (Curran 2002: 175). The period from the
1940s to the 1970s saw further attempts to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism
responding to the scarring crises of global depression in the 1930s and the
unresolved crises of imperialist expansionism that had led to a second world war.

168 Critical investigations in political economy

Western European social democracies sought to secure welfare states, by sup-
porting macroeconomic intervention including state-run industries to provide
‘full employment’, social and health provision for all. In advanced capitalist
economies the period from the 1950s to the early 1970s had been marked
by economic growth and rising living standards. Western liberal democracies
established welfare systems providing unemployment and other benefits, free or
heavily subsidised healthcare and state pensions. Such policies drew on the
organised strength of the labour movement and the support of the industrial
working class. Europe had fascist and authoritarian states during this period but
in democratic systems even mainstream conservative parties, such as the Christian
Democrats, supported key tenets of welfare state provision. Demand for labour-
saving consumer electronic goods helped to create a ‘golden age’ for Western
capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as fuel the expansion of East Asian
economies.

A global financial regulatory system was established following the Bretton
Woods reforms of 1944–46. This organised an international system to manage
cross-border capital flows, fix exchange rates (to the dollar standard), gradually
reduce protectionism by removing trade tariffs, and make credit available to
countries facing economic difficulty. This system of global governance was
organised primarily through national governments. The influence of sovereign
states was highly unequal, but the system ‘enabled the governments of developed
economies to give precedence to employment and social welfare over those of
global financial interests’ (Curran 2002: 176). From the late 1960s this system was
strained and gradually undermined. In what Brenner (1998) calls the ‘long down-
turn’, the advanced capitalist economies suffered a series of shocks, such as the
OPEC oil price rise of 1973, and severe recessions, in 1974–75, 1979–82 and
1991–95. Profit rates fell across all sectors but especially in manufacturing,
causing waves of unemployment. Growing competition to US manufacturing
output from Germany, Japan and the newly industrialised ‘tiger’ economies in
East Asia, led to a crisis of overproduction in the automobile and other industries.

Capitalist states responded by attacking the labour movement with states and
private businesses reducing pay levels for the majority of workers, although wage
cuts and increased labour productivity proved insufficient to sustain growth
(Harvey 2011). At a domestic level this encouraged a shift away from forms of
state intervention that had prevailed since the 1950s. Keynesian policies to
maintain growth through state spending failed in recessionary conditions and
were repudiated by an increasingly assertive ‘new right’, who advocated deep
cuts in public spending. Within international financial governance, the fixed
exchange rate system was abandoned in 1971–73, capital controls were relaxed
or abandoned amongst OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s, financial
deregulation increased in the European Union and in other ‘free trade’ areas.
Where the earlier settlement had broadly reflected the strengths of social
democracy in curbing market liberals, the latter regained their ascendency with
the rise of a neoliberal agenda. During the 1970s multinational corporations

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 169

expanded their size and operations. Increasingly able to relocate production,
operations and finance they gained leverage over governments forced to compete
for their patronage under terms that favoured transnational capital at the
expense of labour and frequently of national capital too.

In the 1980s and 1990s the financialisation of capitalism increased with the growth
in private banking, currency and derivative trading (including by multinational cor-
porations). International transactions were facilitated by new technology, notably
satellite and fibre optic cable communications and computing. Market pressures
and government liberalisation produced an increasingly unregulated flow of
capital between countries on an unprecedented scale. The main features have
been a weakening of state-centred economic sovereignty, and the emergence and
consolidation of a neoliberal global order formed from the second half of the
1980s. The transformation to a neoliberal governance system was precipitated
by the collapse of bureaucratic party-states in the communist East. The welfare
states in the capitalist West were weakened. Post-war settlements based on institu-
tionalised compromise between capital and labour shifted to neoliberal economic
policies based on liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, market proxies in the
residual public sector, internationalisation and reduced direct taxation – a set of
policies intended to alter the balance of forces in favour of capital. The inter-
national financial and trading system was reshaped. The implications for media
and cultural policy are examined further in the next chapter.

Since the ascendency of neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s there have been a
series of crises in global capitalism, with a major global recession in 2007–8. As the
rise of the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) illustrates,
some economies have been relatively insulated from or aided by crises affecting
the older advanced economies. China was insulated from the crises afflicting
Western capital in the 1970s and grew its economy in the 1990s with China’s
telecommunications market, the world’s largest, developed by national capital
and the party-state (D. Schiller 2007: 180, 177–97). US hegemony, including
cultural hegemony, has been weakened, although the US remains the world’s
geopolitical superpower (Tunstall 2008).

The consequence of the global reorganisation of capital has been a significant net
loss for democratic governance. The consequence of an adverse reaction from
financial markets has disciplined governments into maintaining a raft of policies
favoured by private capital interests from privatisation and deregulation, cuts to
welfare programmes and tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals.
Multinational corporations have used diverse means to extract market-friendly
policies from huge investment in lobbying to regulatory and industrial arbitrage.
The second main consequence has been to strengthen capital and weaken labour.

Globalisation, states and culture

Informing the clash between cultural globalisation enthusiasts and radical political
economy’s critique of neoliberal ascendancy are differences in conceiving the state.

170 Critical investigations in political economy

Where both agree that the powers of the nation-state are being eroded, the
cultural globalisation literature associates the nation with ‘invented tradition,
manipulative ideology, hierarchical control, intolerance, conformism and
nationalism’ (Curran 2002: 178). Globalisation is thus seen as a largely emanci-
patory force allowing new identities and solidarities to be forged that enable a
new progressive politics to come into being. Global capitalism is viewed as an
enabling force for cultural pluralisation.

A central concern in radical analysis is the weakening of democratic controls
and oversight as a consequence of power shifting from national electorates and
organised labour to global capital. Within CPE there are strong anti-statist,
libertarian and anti-nationalist strands, but most share a general conception of
the democratic state as a key agency in the realisation of social and economic
objectives. More narrowly, the state remains the principal agency in commu-
nications policy and central to prospects for greater democratic oversight of
media and cultural provision. The internationalisation of communications systems
and ownership makes it more, not less, imperative to assess how states use their
actual powers of imperium (law and regulation) and dominium (use of resources,
subsidies and support mechanisms) over communications and cultural activities.

Morris and Waisbord (2001) argue that it is premature to conclude that the
state is withering away and to assume a post-state world. States remain funda-
mental political units retaining significant law-making powers. Globalisation has
challenged but not eliminated states as power centres, as sets of institutions
where decisions are made regarding the structure and functioning of media sys-
tems. For Mattelart (2002: 609):

[the nation-state] remains the place where the social contract is defined. It
has by no means reached the degree of obsolescence suggested by the crusade
in favour of deterritorialization through networks. It takes the nearsightedness
of techno-libertarians to support this kind of globalizing populism, which
avails itself of the simplistic idea of a somewhat abstract and evil state in
opposition to that of an idealized civil society – an area of free exchange
between fully sovereign individuals

Rather, a task for organised civil society is ‘to ensure that the state is not robbed
of its regulatory function’ (Mattelart 2002: 609). Cultural (globalisation) theory
addresses media processes, and theorising about and beyond ethnocentric
frameworks, but has tended to neglect national organisation of communications,
to overstate the decline of the nation-state and to ignore the political economic
dynamics of ‘globalization’.

Media internationalisation

Two radically different perspectives, transnational corporate domination and
cultural globalisation, agree that transnational media are eroding national

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 171

media. The first is critical, neo-Marxist, and highlights imbalances in the global
flow of communications output. The second, cultural globalisation, focuses on
reception and cultural identity formation and generally regards transnationalisation
more favourably (in some cases akin to the modernisation paradigm). Yet, both
tend towards a one-way unilinear model of change. Both ‘strong globalisation’
arguments tend to focus on processes eroding state-based media from above. An
alternative perspective argues instead that we need to be more discriminating
in assessing the nature and influence of transnational media flows. This might be
called ‘weak globalisation’ but that is misleading since the argument does not
revolve around the strength or weakness of global forces but rather on the need
to attend to how these are manifested differentially within and across media
systems. The objection is not to evidence of ‘strong globalisation’ but rather to
its generalisation and organisation into normative narratives of change. A better
term is internationalisation (Hesmondhalgh 2013).

Media internationalisation is pervasive but uneven. Globalisation is trans-
forming ‘media fiction and music’ (Curran 2002: 179) while production and
consumption (as opposed to gathering) of news remains largely organised around
the nation-state and locality. The audience for global news channels such as
CNN remains small and, with exceptions such as Al Jazeera, has remained pre-
dominantly elite. While terrestrial broadcasters’ audience share has certainly
eroded, this ‘has not to any significant extent been caused by the rise of a global
news service taking viewers for their national products as part of the growth of a
global public sphere’ (Sparks 2000a: 84). Cross-border press readership is mostly
small and elite (Hafez 2007), with the important exception of minority ethnic
and diasporic press readerships. Local media ownership tends to be relatively
independent of the global media operators described by Herman and McChesney
(Sparks 2000a: 86) and the overwhelming majority of news outlets target
national or sub-national audiences. The main categories of multi-region media
globalisation are:

� mass market entertainment including audiovisual, audio, computer games,
music

� news and information serving business elites (CNN, Wall Street Journal, etc.)
� media serving diasporic communities
� media serving specialist transnational communities of interest
� subaltern media flows especially in news (i.e. Al Jazeera) but also in Third

Cinema and other contra-flows.

To analyse these complex flows requires attention to all the factors shaping
market supply and demand, which means political economic and cultural elements.

The analysis of television provision and cultural proximity is a good example of
the need to integrate the two. Across Western media systems, US premium fiction
commands the greatest share of imports, but the maturation of commercial networks
in Western Europe ‘has dented the appeal of US fiction as audiences demonstrate

172 Critical investigations in political economy

liking for home-grown programming’ (Iosifides et al. 2005: 6). Audiences around
the world prefer to watch their own locally made programmes in their own
national language (Tunstall 2008). This preference for ‘cultural proximity’ is
an important corrective to ‘strong globalisation’ theories, although the pattern
varies. As Straubhaar (2002: 200) argues ‘National cultures vary in their appeal
to domestic audiences, although this tends to be a crucial local advantage.
National media’s ability to compete with foreign imports varies depending on
homogeneity and acceptance of local culture’. Cultural proximity also provides
another dimension of localisation. Producer behaviour ‘follows commercial
imperatives but will tend to follow the demands of the domestic market or
audience when resources allow’ (Straubhaar 2002: 200).

Flows, formats, production and labour

The importance of integrating political economic and cultural analysis is espe-
cially evident in tracing contemporary features of media globalisation, notably
the cultural and economic dimensions of formats and the internationalisation of
cultural labour. In fact, early academic formulations of cultural imperialism were
attentive to the diversity of such flows, even if these were conceived within a
restricted conception of interstate relations. In his ‘generic’ concept of media
imperialism Boyd-Barrett (1977: 120) identified transnational flows as taking four
main forms:

1 the shape of the communication vehicle
2 a set of industrial arrangements
3 a body of values
4 specific media contents.

Dissemination ranged from hardware and content to professional values as well
as domination of international news reporting by Western agencies. Later scholars
extended analysis of the range of cultural flows, encompassing language, religion,
education and travel (Sreberny-Mohammadi 1996), and acknowledging media
as only one part of broader cultural interconnectedness (Held et al. 1999). Above
all, multidirectionality came to be emphasised, and by the late 1990s at least was
confirmed by the growing media influence and ‘software’ exports of East Asia
(Japan, South Korea), Latin America (especially Brazil and Mexico), Australia,
India and China (Tunstall 2008).

The transnationalisation of media production has long been a focus for CPE
scholars but more recent work has brought renewed attention to labour. The
spatial mobility of capital has been enhanced, weakening state power and
weakening the power of organised labour. Capital has shifted from regarding
developing countries as suppliers of raw materials to treating them as setting the
price of labour. Developing countries, regions and ‘free trade zones’ within states
compete to attract capital investment. Shifts in bargaining and power relations

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 173

between capital and labour have been facilitated by transportation and ICTs.
Miller et al. (2005) propose a New International Division of Cultural Labour,
adapted from the concept of a New International Division of Labour (NIDL).
They examine how Hollywood has reorganised production to take advantage of
labour costs and resource efficiencies. Hollywood’s proportion of productions
shot overseas increased from 7 to 27 per cent in the decade to 2000 (Miller et al.
2005: 137). Production is disaggregated across space, and labour is organised
across a world centre (Hollywood), intermediate zones (Western Europe, North
America, Australia) with outlying regions of labour subordinate to the centre (the
rest of the world).

There is a diminishing need for co-location of aspects of production and post-
production. So firms can take advantage of lower studio costs in Eastern Europe
and Mexico, high tech but lower costs post-production in India, tax incentives in
Europe, and so on. The result has been to depress labour costs and unevenly
deskill workers, whilst boosting jobs in lower-wage economies. The development
of digital technologies and global transportation are factors, but Miller et al.
(2005: 131) highlight corporate efforts to weaken organised labour and boost
capital accumulation; ‘Hollywood’s hegemony is built upon and sustained by the
internal suppression of worker rights, the exploitation of a global division of
labour and the impact of colonialism on language’. The international division of
cultural labour depends on a range of factors determining capital outlay including
favourable exchange rates and tax regimes, the weakness of organised labour,
specialist skills requirements, through which Hollywood investors seek to minimise
costs and maximise revenue in the organisation of film production, manufacturing
and services distributed around the globe. This approach engages a ‘political
and ethical regard for labour and its alienation into a model of citizens and
consumers that allows us to question the role of states and markets in extending
or stemming global Hollywood’ (Miller et al. 2005: 350–51). It also contributes to
necessary synthesising of political economic and culturalist studies. By examining
the ‘global infrastructure of textual exchange’, the authors invite examination of
the kinds of texts that get produced and circulate, the patterns of (unequal)
exchange, and their consequences.

Formats

The importance of integrating political economic and cultural analysis is also
illustrated by formats. To understand the growing market in formats we need to
examine the capital accumulation logics, the relationships between capitalist (and
PSM) firms, the trading and management of intellectual property rights as well
as the drives to various forms of localisation, adaption and cultural hybridisation.
While the US remains the world’s leading exporter of audiovisual programmes,
the UK has become the leading exporter of TV formats. In 2004 the UK
exported sixty-four formats, France fifty-six, Germany fifty, the US forty-six and
the Netherlands forty-six (Ofcom 2006: 118). The format for Who Wants to be a

174 Critical investigations in political economy

Millionaire? has been sold to at least 106 countries, and the Pop Idol format has
been shown in countries as diverse as Iceland, Kazakhstan and Lebanon. France
earned ECU108 million ($136 million) in 2004 with worldwide sales of its ani-
mation series Totally Spies, including to Time Warner’s Cartoon Network, as well
as documentaries and dramas.

Yo Soy Betty, la Fea, a television show developed by a private channel in
Colombia RCN in 1999 and later also aired on Telemundo (one of the largest
Spanish-language American television networks) was licensed as a format
worldwide, including as Ugly Betty in the US. It was adapted by Sony for India,
where the show became hugely popular, with over twenty worldwide adaptions
including in Russia, Germany, Israel and Egypt, blending elements of the Latin
American telenovella, the US soap and localised features. The story of Betty,
rooted in the Ugly Duckling and other fairytales, had wide cultural appeal and
adaptability but also held appeal for businesses as a vehicle for brand promotion.
In China, Betty returned to her original work-setting of an advertising agency,
rather than magazines as in the US version, providing an ideal vehicle for brand
integration. Dove (skin care products) were brand partners for a fifty minute
episode in the first series in China in which Betty works on a pitch for the Dove
account.2

As Arsenault and Castells (2008: 708) observe: ‘local and regional players are
actively importing and/or re-appropriating foreign products and formats while
corporate transnational media organizations are pursuing local partners to deliver
customized content to audiences’. Transcultural adaptions are creating hybrid
formats – rooted in local markets in which audiences have knowledge and
expectations of different genres, visual and narrative styles. With format licensing
amongst other transactions we see national firms ‘eagerly and actively enter into
strategic alliances with TNMCs to serve their local profit interests. Media
imperialism, which assumes the coercive domination of one national media
industry by another, is not the appropriate way to describe the global-local
relationship between TNMCs and NMCs’ (Mirrlees 2013: 101).

Conclusions

Cultural imperialism was too crude and vulnerable both to critique and to geo-
political and cultural changes. However, the orthodoxy of cultural globalisation
that supplanted it failed to address economic power and the detrimental influence
of global capital on cultural diversity, labour and democracy. What is needed?
Put simply, attention to economics, politics and culture. There is no need to
privilege economics or overstate its explanatory value in understanding cultural
texts, processes and reading. Yet efforts to explain media internationalisation
without adequate regard for economic and political aspects are non-starters and
should be challenged just as relentlessly as the caricature of cultural imperialism
chased off the stage by neo-modernisation theories. The rejection of ‘crude’
domination theories gave way to a reluctance or refusal to acknowledge power

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 175

imbalances in cultural flows that had inspired the original critique. There is
much to be done to make up deficiencies but synthesis of political economy and
critical cultural analysis demonstrates ways forward.

Notes
1 Access to television schedules worldwide, for instance via www.tvguide.com, offers a
useful tool for carrying out similar research today.

2 In the US the first series, shown on ABC in 2006–7, won a Golden Globe award but
over four series audiences fell and in 2010 ABC announced it was ceasing production.

176 Critical investigations in political economy

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