Media Studies

Key Issues and Debates

Eoin Devereux, Eoin Devereux

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781446232705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Bringing together a range of renowned scholars in the field, this book examines eighteen key issues within contemporary media studies. Written in an accessible student-friendly style, Media Studies - Key Issues and Debates is an authoritative landmark text for undergraduate students.

Each individual chapter begins with a concise definition of the concept(s) under investigation. This is followed by a 5, 000 word discussion on the current state of play within research on the specific area. Chapters contain case-studies and illustrative materials from Europe, North America, Australasia and beyond. Each chapter concludes with annotated notes, which guide the student-reader in terms of future study.

With a preface by Denis McQuail, contributors include Janet McCabe, John Corner, David Croteau, William Hoynes, Natalie Fenton, Jenny Kitzinger, Jeroen de Kloet, Liesbet van Zoonen, Sonia Livingstone and Greg Philo.

Bridging the Mythical Divide: Political Economy and Cultural Studies Approaches to the Analysis of the Media

1

Natalie Fenton

DEFINITIONS

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Critical Political Economy is based upon a concern with the structural inequalities of production and the consequences for representation and access to consumption. By placing issues of economic distribution at its centre, it prioritises the relationship between the economy and forms of democratic politics.

Cultural Studies foregrounds the analysis of popular cultural practices over dominant or elite cultural practices. It emphasizes the social agency of individuals and their capacity to resist social determination and dominant cultural agendas.

Introduction

The process of making sense of the world and taking meaning from the things that surround us is one of the main reasons why people are fascinated with the role of the media in society. This is largely because of the centrality of the symbolic to media content and form – quite literally what do media images mean for the way we interpret and evaluate the world? In other words, how meaning has been thought to be relayed, consensus achieved and change considered possible through the media. How to come to terms with symbolic imaginings and to understand their place in our world draws on a wide range of theory from a range of disciplines that often disagree on the emphasis given in each approach; the balance of power between the producer, the audience and social and economic structures; the centrality of the media to social processes and the appropriate means to carry out research. This chapter considers the way meaning has been theorized in relation to the media in two key approaches that have often been pitched one against the other: political economy and cultural studies.

Political economy and cultural studies are considered to be the two main theoretical approaches in media studies and they have enjoyed a relationship of antagonism on several levels. Put crudely, political economy views the media as promoting the dominant ideology of the ruling classes: in spite of their liberating potential, the media of modern mass communication have contributed to the creation of new levels of social stratification – communication classes which in turn engender new forms of domination. The mass media are an obstacle to liberation and overwhelm all other forms of non-mass media.

A cultural studies approach starts with the basic argument that the mass media gives us citizens of the media: people who are able to manipulate imagery and information for their own ends, to build their own identities and local politics from the vast array of mediated bits and pieces they have at their disposal. Through this, social and political agency occurs offering the possibility of oppositional political projects emerging. Traditionally political economy has tended to read the state and other superstructural forces from the specific configuration of capital at any one time and insists that this is the starting point of social analysis. Cultural studies reminds political economy that the substance of its work, the analysis of communication, is rooted in the needs, goals, conflicts, failures and accomplishments of ordinary people attempting to make sense of their lives. Cultural studies has recognized the energising potential of multifaceted forms of social agency, each of which brings with it dimensions of subjectivity and consciousness that are vital to political praxis. Often this has been displayed through research that focuses on media consumption (see below), but cultural studies conceptions of power have a tendency to be rooted in individual subjectivities, their identities and collective action rather than as political economy would have it, structured in the institutions of society.

Although the two approaches have often been seen as entirely contrasting with irreconcilable differences (see for example, Garnham, 1995; Grossberg, 1995) this chapter argues that in practice such distinctions can be less clear-cut and there is much to be gained from embracing the differences where they do exist and moving towards a dialogic inter-disciplinarity. In sum, I will argue that debates from both camps are required to inform a thorough analysis of the role of the media in society. In other words, structural inequities must be taken on board, along with cultural complexities of consumption, to resist a simplistic retreat to either.

Considering the divide: conflict and continuity

The apparent conflict between political economy and cultural studies has been rehearsed on several occasions. It is depicted variously as the disagreement over how to theorize power and culture: between scholars who hold on to a Marxian premise of labour/class in socio-relational analysis (political economists) and those who reject this approach (culturalists); as a split between studies of production (political economy) and studies of consumption (cultural studies); as the attempt to study the social totality (political economy) and those who renounce the possibility of ever achieving such grandiose aims; and/or as economic reductionism (all social relations boil down to economic determinants) versus cultural specificity. Each criticism masks work in the field that is inclined to acknowledge and appreciate the necessary continuities between the two.

Kellner (1989) states that the Frankfurt School of the 1930s was the first to incorporate both culture and communications in a critical social theory of mass communications. Much like many media studies departments today, by combining political economy of the media, cultural textual analysis, and audience reception studies the Frankfurt school theorists worked through theories of mass production, commodification, standardization and massification. In the work of Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) we see a political economic analysis based on the industrialization of the mass media into a culture industry. Other theorists in the Frankfurt School also looked at the audience and a close consideration of how ideology is carried out through the media and other public institutions (see the work of Benjamin, 1973). There was, of course, much disagreement and debate between them but they existed side by side, each enhancing the critique of the other and between them they provided a systematic approach to the media that included political economy and socio-cultural approaches.

Kellner (1989) maintains that the inter-disciplinary approach of the Frankfurt School integrated political economy and cultural studies within the context of capitalist society and the manner in which culture and communications were produced and the roles they played. However, as critical social theory transformed over time into cultural studies, there was a shift away from some of the foundational pretexts of the first generation of scholars of the Frankfurt School. In short, the idea of the ‘culture industries’ as ideological and manipulative was questioned (Kellner, 1998), and later rejected as the belief in oppositional cultural practices increased. Similarly, class, which has always been at the core of political economy approaches, became less central to critical studies as other cultural signifiers, such as race, gender, nationality and audience identities, were brought to the fore. This development led to a movement away from the audience position as constructed by the text, towards the examination of the pleasures of the actual audiences. It was the political move by feminist media theorists to focus on women’s pleasure that first prompted conceptions of the audience as active. Combined with the work of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), in particular, that of Stuart Hall, the active audience paradigm came into being.

Stuart Hall’s article Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse, which was first presented in the early 1970s, provided the impetus for active audience studies. Hall believed that more attention should be paid to the ‘practice of interpretative work’ in the decoding of televisual signs by audiences and, in particular, how that reception frequently involved the ‘active transformation’ of meaning. He predicted that such a realisation promised ‘... a new and exciting phase in so-called audience research, of a quite new kind’ (Hall, 1993: 94).

So, as an antidote to a life condemned to ideological slavery came the active audience. Active audience theorists have stressed that audiences are capable of arriving at their own decisions about the meaning of a media text. In other words, meaning does not reside within the text, or at least not exclusively so. Many also stress that texts are ‘polysemic’, that is, they are capable of more than one interpretation (e.g. Ang, 1985; Radway, 1984). Polysemy refers to the potential for multiple meanings to be taken from one text, thus allowing ambiguity and interpretative freedom. Textual determinism was rejected and ambiguity and interpretative freedom heralded as intrinsic to significatory systems. This marked an unbridgeable divide between political economy and cultural studies that is challenged below.

Political economy

Political economy was developed in the late 1960s through a concern with the increasing role of private businesses in cultural production. Golding and Murdock (2000) made a distinction between traditional political economy and critical political economic approaches to the media by highlighting four key differences:

• Critical political economy sees the economy as interrelated with political, social and cultural life rather than as a separate domain.
• It is historical, paying close attention to long-term changes in the role of the state, corporations and the media in culture.
• Critical political economy is centrally concerned with the balance between private enterprise and public intervention.
• A critical approach goes beyond technical issues of efficiency to engage with the basic moral questions of justice, equity and the moral good.

In their own words, a critical political economy:

… sets out to show how different ways of financing and organising cultural production have traceable consequences for the range of discourses and representations in the public domain and for audiences access to them. (Golding and Murdock, 1991: 15)

Critical political economy is especially interested in the ways that communicative activity is continuously structured by the unequal distribution of material and symbolic resources. Classically, theorists adopting this approach point to the fact that media production has been increasingly commandeered by large corporations and moulded to their interests and strategies. In recent years we have seen a push towards privatization and the declining vitality of publicly-funded cultural institutions. The expansion and growth of commercialization has inevitably pushed smaller-scale operations out of business or into consolidation with larger companies. Newspapers have merged into each other or into other groups in order to stay alive as they try to survive in an ever more competitive market place. General economic conditions will also influence the product of the media industries. The production output of the mass media is concerned both with commodities and creation, the balance is precarious and framed by the general economic context within which production takes place. In periods of economic stringency the criteria of cost effectiveness are likely to be the deciding factor of output, the result being a systematic rejection of the unpopular and unprofitable and a reversion to tried and tested formulae with a proven market. Critical political economists argue that the nature of the mass media cannot be adequately considered apart from more general economic changes, which in turn require a historical perspective which will locate changes in the mass media within the general context of the processes of industrialization.

Part of the debate within critical political economy focuses on issues of ownership and control of the media. Having power in or control over media is argued to impact upon the capacity to determine or influence the contents of the media products and meaning carried by them. This has grown out of a strictly Marxist perspective which states that the class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control, at the same time, over the means of mental production. The fact that culture is produced and consumed under capitalism is fundamental to understanding inequalities of power, prestige and profit. Early work in the field was concerned to address the extent to which the cultural industries serve the interests of the rich and powerful. Since these early Marxist days, theories have developed so they are no longer structuralist theories of power, which are now thought to be too simplistic in their notions of a direct transmission of the ruling ideology to subordinate groups (as in the likes of Miliband, 1977 and Althusser, 1971). Now the focus is on ideas and concepts which people use to make sense of the world and are to some extent dependent on the media. In other words, the frameworks offered by the media are articulated by the nexus of interests producing them. A critical political economy looks at the intentional action (by owners, editors etc.) and structural constraints (such as resources of time and money), at each level of the production process.

In Manufacturing Consent, published in 1994, Herman and Chomsky propose a mass media propaganda model for a modern Western liberal democratic society, in which cultural mechanisms for the maintenance of the status quo are less overt, but not less effective, than in systems such as totalitarian dictatorships.

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of larger society. (Herman and Chomsky, 1994: 1)

Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model is based on media ‘filters’, through which information must pass before it can reach the public. The first filter, limitation of media ownership, is the result of a process of consolidation that began in the nineteenth century, (Herman and Chomsky, 1994: 2). By 2000, there were ten major players in the global entertainment and media industries: Disney, General Electric, AOL-Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Bertelsmann, AT&T, and Liberty Media. (McChesney, November 2000) Though not all of these are dedicated media companies, all develop, produce and distribute a plethora of disparate cultural products in many countries through countless corporate entities.

…the dominant media firms are quite large businesses; they are controlled by very wealthy people or by managers who are subject to sharp constraints by owners and other market-profit-oriented forces. (Herman and Chomsky, 1994: 12)

In free market societies, cultural products are also likely to pass through the advertising filter, which links the entertainment industry with other sectors. Through their public association with media producers, advertisers gain ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Bridging the Mythical Divide: Political Economy and Cultural Studies Approaches to the Analysis of Media
• 2 The Media Industry: Structure, Strategy and Debates
• 3 Mass Media and New Media Technologies
• 4 Unravelling the Web of Discourse Analysis
• 5 News Content Studies, Media Group Methods and Discourse Analysis: A Comparison of Approaches
• 6 Framing and Frame Analysis
• 7 Mass Media Re-Presentations of the Social World: Ethnicity and ‘Race’
• 8 Media Representations of Social Structure: Gender
• 9 Media, Power and Political Culture
• 10 Proximity and Scope as News Values
• 11 Text and Textual Analysis
• 12 Analyzing Fictional Television Genres
• 13 From Family Television to Bedroom Culture: Young People’s Media at Home
• 14 Fan Culture - Performing Difference
• 15 Community Media and the Public Sphere
• 16 Media and Diaspora
• Index