Political economy of communications

Overview

The term "political economy" refers to a concept that emerged from criticism by thinkers such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Classical political economics, often also known as liberalism, was conceived by thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In his seminal book The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith argued that the sole purpose of production is consumption. Political economics theorists found limitations in the theories developed by classical economists. Classical economics highlights the individual as the core unit of analysis and the markets as the main structure in which the individual evolves. Thus, life is examined as the economic and rational decisions made by individuals in the marketplace. Critics of this view, on the other hand, held that individuals are social entities and argued for the community as the core unit of analysis. Moreover, socialists argued for establishing labor and the struggle between social classes at the core of political economy. Scholars who engage in political economy analysis as pertains to communication, argue that communication tends to flow from the elite to the people at the bottom of the economic ladder and is related to persuading and manufacturing consent. People are led to consume as their reason for existence, and because consumption is related to identity, commitments, and beliefs, identity and community, then, should be the focus of economic and political studies.

As an academic field, political economy is one of the most important theoretical frameworks in communications research. It encompasses the main forms of power, since economy and politics constitute foundational structures of society. These two foundations interact with other societal factors, such as communication and culture. Key in the field is the concept of cultural industry institutions, or the cultural industries, among which is the field of mass communication media.

Media—all the channels and technologies of mass communication—is vast, multidimensional and interacts dynamically with all aspects of society. As an industry, media enterprises are economic actors, linked and embedded with other institutions, forming a vast and complex network of power. To understand the economic dimension of the media, and its political power, it is useful to study the phenomena from the standpoint of political economy of communications.

By media, political economy understands not only the messages, production, and technologies that constitutes it, but also the media themselves as political actors. Moreover, media is also a space in which other actors—political, cultural, economic—constitute the public properly understood as such. The media, then, are a series of complex organizations and systems that constitute and create much of what pertains to social production and meaning—that is, values, ideals, identity, and so on. It is market imperatives and public preferences that drive and shape media production and dissemination. Thus, some experts argue that the media, as a system, is neutral. Others, however, disagree.

Noam Chomsky, among others, posits that society is inordinately influenced by the media. Media channels create entertainment products or "content," according to their agendas, which, in turn, shape the knowledge, perceptions, and values of their audiences. Therefore, and to the extent that the agendas are created by groups of people with views and ideologies of their own, they are hardly neutral.

In short, political economy includes various views that explain how politics and economic factors interact with culture and society. As a subset and more complex field of political economy, political economy of communications has as its main object of study social relations of power that drive the production, distribution, and consumption of symbolic goods, that is, all goods or services by which people define themselves or with which they identify. These include music, movies, fashion, cars, computer brands, and many others. Besides shedding light on relations of power, political economy of communications' main unit of analysis is cultural industries and mass media, within the framework of the capitalist economic system (Bolaño, Mastrini & Sierra, 2012).

By capitalist system, the field understands the prevailing economic system that serves not only as an economic model, but also as a social organization, characterized by a complex system of exchange relationships in which some economic groups dominate others. According to conventional political economy of communications, a dynamic and complex relationship exists between the media and all other social organizations. These are all structured according to political power wielded by a specific social order and conforming to specific forms of hierarchical social stratification. For the groups in power to remain at the top, they need the people below to be constantly persuaded to support them. Therefore, political economy of communications' research tends to examine phenomena such as how communication systems are constituted in capitalist societies. It emphasizes critical analysis, rooted in a historic framework—that is, the longer view of a phenomenon—and lately, focuses on global capitalism, as a system that is dynamic, problematic, and subject to constant change.

Traditionally, the field of political economy of communications looks at four elements: (1) the cultural industries, that is, television and cable, film, video, music, social networks, etc.; (2) the corporate environment of cultural industries and all mass media; (3) its commercialization and marketing; and (4) roles of the state and government institutions. These include examining the reach and diversity of the public and audiences, as well as ethical aspect, such as access, social justice, inequality, and the common good.

Further Insights

Political economy has contributed, in the field of communications, to research that examines the cultural industries and mass media. These investigations have included the factors of ownership, such as the interconnections between leadership interests in the industry of communication and their interactions with all other corporate industries; their financing modes; and the structures and dynamics of the market. The objective is uncovering how the economy affects technologies, politics, and information, as well as culture and society overall. Because it often focuses on social relations that are dominated by economic processes within communications industries, it is really examining the ways in which power operates through these, by using strategies such as persuasion and manufacturing consent. Therefore, the operational and productive elements of the media industries, and their impact on society, cannot be fully understood without the theories and methodology of political economy.

Political economy is interested in the ways in which the modes of production and the development of consumption are articulated, at both the large and small group or individual level. In other words, it serves to examine the interrelations between how communications and cultural goods or products are consumed by specific groups—that is, the micro level—and the ways in which they are interlocked in macro systems of inequality and power. Political economy, then, examines the micro level or context, but also transcends it, by looking at the larger structures that support them. In this sense, then, political economy has centered its areas of research on two main elements: (1) the economic system that supports communication media and systems, and their relation to the large scale social structure; and (2) the specific and concrete observation of how mechanisms of ownership, finance and public policies impact the products and actions of media. One of its main tenets is, in fact, that the whole media conglomerate system is culturally dominant and supports the hegemonic economic system (capitalism) by bolstering the established social system. A very important part of this system of support is promoting a constant consuming behavior in its audiences through its cultural products and nonstop bombardment of advertising, both subtle and overt. This moved thinkers such as Michel Foucault to conceive of power as a persuasive and productive, yet invisible, web into which individuals are born and cannot really escape.

The field of political economy, as explained by one of its foremost pioneers, Dallas Smythe, sheds light on the dominance and effect of power, control, and economy in all aspects of life. Power and control, to Smythe, are inherently political because they impact relationships between people and communities and all aspects of production. Although Smythe's views are widely shared by many in the field of political economy of communications, some critics point out that his theories tend to discount the inherent consciousness, agency, and will of people who are more than passive receptacles of media content.

It is true that Smythe posits that for the media, the audience is a commodity, that is, a product that can be packaged and sold to corporations such as advertising agencies. Moreover, audiences are produced by media companies. Cable companies, for example, segment their audiences according to age, gender, or preference. However, Smythe also calls for a deeper understanding how the audience "works," as well as its historical contexts.

The historic trajectory of political economy of communications saw its first inklings from the 1920s to 1940s, when the Marxist intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, a research institution based in Berlin, began to examine the effects of media technologies on popular culture and mass audiences. They considered all modes of production as transient, in constant movement and change, reflecting the society in which they were embedded. The Frankfurt School thinkers were among the first to theorize the roles of media technologies in shaping the views and behavior of the public. For them, the culture industries were pervasive and massive instruments of power and control that were meant to distract the working classes from discontent brought by inequality. To keep the masses distracted, powerful institutions sought to "enchant them," that is, engage them in a behavior of constant consumption and distraction while terrible events, such as the war and the Holocaust, raged on.

Another foundational field in political economy of communications is that of cultural studies, especially through the work of British thinkers such as E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Angelia McRobbie, among others. Thompson, for example, wrote the seminal work The Making of the English Working Class (1963), which examined how the thoughts of the British working class are determined by the media and social relations that pervade their birthplaces and with which they interact involuntarily. This class identification is shaped by their experiences, which are rooted in a specific culture, with its own preferred institutional forms and media.

Other pioneering thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Marshall McLuhan, posited that media needs to be analyzed as the message, rather than just the "carriers of the message"; that is, scholars should focus on specific media channels or technologies, and the different effect that each of these have on their publics. In the twenty-first century, Robert McChesney published The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (2008), in which he expressed the notion, held by many contemporary communication scholars, that the media is increasingly both centralized and global, driven by powerful monopolistic capitalist interests. These have inevitably led to the erosion of an honest and effective press, the disinformation of audiences, the excessive commercialization of culture, and, ultimately, a weakening of democracy. In fact, for McChesney and his followers, the corporate mass media system as it exists is inherently corrupt and urgently in need of reform.

Scholars in the fields of race and gender—a core area in the field of media and communications studies—focus on political economy of communications pertaining to the politics of representation, that is, the ways in which race, gender, class, age, sexuality, and other social factors are represented by the media and all cultural industries and shape the perceptions of its publics.

Issues

Among the most contentious and pressing issues studied by political economy of communications scholars is new media and the Internet and the privatization of the Internet. In 1995, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the government agency that controlled the Internet, transferred its regulatory duties to the private sector. Nevertheless, it did so under the proviso that it provided free access to information, albeit allowing firms to engage in advertising practices. The developments in the late 2010s, were the culmination of a long process of privatization begun then.

The nature of the Internet is digital technology, yet it is also a social space. As such, the Internet has proven vital to the spread of information, commercial transactions, and economic growth worldwide. Moreover, despite the deep digital divide caused by inequality, it also offers crucial spaces and opportunities to disenfranchised communities and non-government organizations and activists. Thus, in the view of political economy, the Internet serves to both fuel profit-making and economies, as well as to build bridges among communities and contest the most oppressive tendencies of the capitalism. Social relations in the Internet are, however, embedded in the political economy of informational and international corporations. For example, the shift of terrestrial globalization to an electronic globalization by way of the Internet, has re-shaped our understanding of time and space; as German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues in his work In the World of Interior Capital (2014), the Internet is an "interior" environment that, eschewing most externalities, creates ideas, relationships, solidarities, and worldviews that are as artificial as if nothing external to it exists. As opposed to the "real" world, the Internet is a global marketplace and a social environment which is open 24 hours. On the Internet, one can always consume, purchase, and engage in myriad interactions with others across time and space. While social networks have been hyped as a liberating space that works by interconnecting people from around the world, critics argue that it is an antisocial and alienating environment, meant to commercialize and manipulate its users. As an example of its potential harmfulness, they tout the growing violence and polarization of discourse in the Internet.

Critics also point out that the overtaking of the Internet by private interests has led to the commodification of its users and, in turn, to the erosion of personal privacy, as demonstrated by the public debacle of the social network Facebook and its secret sharing with other companies of its users —and non-users— private information.

In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman, Ajit Pai, announced a plan to repeal landmark protections for net neutrality, a set of consumer protections. The ruling, which greatly reduces the government's regulatory power in favor of allowing corporate actors to manipulate the delivery of Internet services, is seen by opponents as benefiting corporate interests at the expense of the public good, while supporters consider it as a measure that allows a freer, more innovative Internet. The repeal of net neutrality rules was upheld by a federal appeals court in 2019 and reaffirmed by the FCC in 2020.

In all these cases, the field of political economy of communications can provide insight on the interests and attitudes, over time, that move and shape the media and cultural industries. These prove useful not only to academics and scholars, but also to legislators, media producers, marketers and advertisers, social scientists, and students in general.

Bibliography

Banks, M. (2017). Creative justice: Cultural industries, work, and inequality. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Berry, David. (Ed.). (2017). Revisiting the Frankfurt school: Essays on culture, media and theory. London: Routledge.

Bolaño, C., Mastrini, G., & Sierra, F. (2012). Political economy, communication and knowledge: A Latin American perspective. New York: Hampton Press.

Faltesek, D. (2018). Selling social media: The political economy of social networking. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Herasimenka, A. et al. (2023, Apr.). The political economy of digital profiteering: communication resource mobilization by anti-vaccination actors. Journal of Communication, 73(2), doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqac043

Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2011). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of mass media. New York: Pantheon.

McChesney, R. (2008). The political economy of media: Enduring issues, emerging dilemmas. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Paxson, P. (2018). Mass communications and media studies: An introduction. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Saha, A. (2018). Race and the cultural industries. Cambridge: Polity.

Shepardson, D. (2020, October 27). U.S. FCC votes to maintain 2017 repeal of net neutrality rules. Reuters. www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet/u-s-fcc-votes-to-maintain-2017-repeal-of-net-neutrality-rules-idUSKBN27C2EO

Sloterdijk, P. (2013). In the world of interior capital. Cambridge: Polity.

Sweeney, E. (2018). 22 attorneys general sue to block FCC's net neutrality repeal as Senate mounts legislative effort. Fiercehealthcare, 1. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=127422619&site=ehost-live