Political Economy of Communication

The early broadcast era and our current platform era bear some striking resemblances, but one parallel looms large: In the 1940s, we lost a key battle to build a potentially liberating and wondrous medium—and we are on the cusp of doing so again. Then as now, commercial operators defined the terms by which we could use our core communication and information infrastructures. While reaping tremendous profits from the public airwaves, a few corporate firms became the sole providers for much of the nation’s media.

This study examines whether and how public media systems contribute to the health of democracies in 33 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, the Middle East, Latin America, and South America. We gather national economic data and public media funding levels, audience shares, and regulatory data, primarily for 2018 and 2019 but in some cases earlier, due to lack of available data. We then assess correlations with strength of democracy indices and extend Hallin and Mancini's typology of North American and European media systems through hierarchical cluster analysis of these 33 countries. We find five models of public media systems around the world, ranging from "state-administered" systems with low levels of independence (Botswana and Tunisia) to systems aligning with Hallin and Mancini's "Democratic Corporatist" model, with strong and secure (multiyear) funding, large audience shares, and strong regulatory protection for their independence. In between, we identify three mixed models: a "Liberal-Pluralist" model, a "Direct Funding" model, and a "Commercial-Public" model. Correlations and cluster analyses show that high levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.

Iz uvodnika: "Prav v teh okoliščinah je še toliko pomembnejše, da politično ekonomijo komuniciranja vnovič vzpostavimo kot temelj kritičnega (če že ne celotnega) komunikološkega raziskovanja. Razlog ni le v dejstvu, da kritična komunikologija – s tem pa tudi politična ekonomija komuniciranja – vprašanj, povezanih z mediji, komunikacijskimi sistemi, informacijskimi tehnologijami ali komunikacijsko sfero ne obravnava zaradi njih samih, temveč zaradi njihove konstitutivne vloge, ki bi jo morali igrati v demokratičnih družbah. Še pomembnejši vzrok je: a) v fokusu tega pristopa, ki je odločno usmerjen v proučevanje asimetrij moči, globokih družbenih razkolov in skrajnih neenakosti v nadzoru nad proizvodnimi sredstvi, ter b) v njegovih temeljnih izhodiščnih značilnosti, ki jih v prevedenih besedilih omenjajo tako Meehanova, Mosco in Waskova kot McChesney, torej v zgodovinski perspektivi, združevanju in preseganju ločnice med teorijo in prakso, izhajanju iz družbene totalitete in moralni filozofiji oziroma normativnih predpostavkah, zaradi katerih je pristop odkrito političen. Ta izhodišča so še zlasti pomembna v času globoke krize, saj je skrajni čas, da se domnevno kritični del znanstvene sfere začne zavedati svojega poslanstva in se preneha pretvarjati, da je lahko izločen iz družbenih bojev."

Political control is one of the central and
conditioning aspects of the relationship
between journalists and politicians.
Through the perceptions of journalists
and politicians, this article analyzes the
validity, characteristics, and functioning
of one of the principal mechanisms of political
control: the journalistic oversight of
politics, which is linked to the watchdog
theory and political pressures on the media.
In addition, the degree of mediatization
of politics is measured with regard
to media autonomy. The methodology is
based on in-depth interviews of 45 participants
in Spain. The results indicate
the pre-eminence of political pressures
that are principally exercised via indirect
means (i.e., communications offices
and media enterprises). The latter are a
vehicle for channeling political control,
which reveals the weight of the factors
associated with political economy in the
relationship between journalists and
politicians. Finally, the low incidence of
journalistic oversight of politics reveals a
reduced level of mediatization in Spain.

This chapter discusses research on the policies, laws, and subsidies that create and shape the organizational
structures and practices that form the basis of the news media. The research reviewed treats news media
institutions as political actors and makes assumptions about journalism’s importance in a democratic society.
Although this line of research, with its emphasis on political economic and normative questions, often has been
marginalized in American mass communication scholarship, the authors explain its ongoing importance,
particularly in relation to the journalism crisis, and, suggest future directions.

A number of people have claimed that the ongoing financial crisis has revealed the problems with neoliberal thought and neoliberal policies in the 'Atlantic Heartland'. However, if we look at the history of the 'Heartland' economies then it becomes evident that they were never neoliberal in the first place - that is, the economic policies and discourses in these countries did not follow neoliberal prescriptions. /We Have Never Been Neoliberal/ explores this divergence between neoliberal theory and 'neoliberal' practice by focusing on the underlying contradictions in monetarism, private monopolies, and financialization. The book finishes by proposing a 'manifesto for a doomed youth' in which it argues that younger generations should refuse to pay interest on anything in order to avoid the trap of debt-driven living.

In the networked twenty-first century, digital platforms have significantly influenced capital accumulation and digital culture. Platforms, such as social network sites (e.g. Facebook), search engines (e.g. Google), and smartphones (e.g. iPhone), are increasingly crucial because they function as major digital media intermediaries. Emerging companies in non-Western countries have created unique platforms, controlling their own national markets and competing with Western-based platform empires in the global markets. The reality though is that only a handful of Western countries, primarily the U.S., have dominated the global platform markets, resulting in capital accumulation in the hands of a few mega platform owners. This book contributes to the platform imperialism discourse by mapping out several core areas of platform imperialism, such as intellectual property, the global digital divide, and free labor, focusing on the role of the nation-state alongside transnational capital.

Using objective measures of investor protections in 170 countries, I establish that the level of investor protection matters for cross-country differences in GDP growth: countries with stronger protections tend to grow faster than those with poor investor protections.

Netflix, as a tech company, is currently the largest global streaming platform challenging traditional US studios. This article analyses Netflix’s transnational business strategies disrupting such status quo by focusing, on one local example: Mexico. Literature on Netflix has identified some of the transnational strategies studied here, this article adds to the discussion the use of local elements to infiltrate the power hub of Hollywood. By using the holistic scope of Political Economy, this research presents an integrated examination of: (a) the structural conditions of the Mexican audiovisual system in which Netflix is immersed; (b) the tech company’s expansion strategies; (c) the case of the movie Roma as a pivot-like tactic to push forward different company goals. The article argues that Netflix, by setting a new form of audiovisual circulation through innovation technology, has understood the key areas to break the audiovisual market value chain allowing it to gain global domi...

This chapter brings into focus various structural threats to journalism, including monopoly control over media, the loss of public interest protections, digital divides, and the “Facebook problem”. The chapter also provides an overview of why media policy matters for journalism and how different ownership structures affect media content. The chapter concludes with an in-depth discussion of Facebook’s relationship to journalism and the different schools of thought regarding how we should rein in monopolies.

En la última década, los medios de comunicación públicos (MCP) están siendo objeto de un fuerte cuestionamiento por una parte importante de la ciudadanía en buena parte del continente europeo y, muy especialmente, en España. Las causas de la crisis de las corporaciones públicas de radiotelevisión son múltiples, y coincidentes en el tiempo, configurando así una suerte de “tormenta perfecta”. Por la crisis económica y financiera de 2008 que ha reducido, de forma muy sensible, los presupuestos de las corporaciones públicas de medios; debido a la transformación en los modos de consumir contenidos audiovisuales, con un importante auge del consumo bajo demanda y online, y la creciente expansión de las redes sociales en los medios radiofónico y televisivo, que ha fragmentado a la audiencia; y por la permanente campaña de desprestigio que ha perseguido a los medios de comunicación públicos, en el marco del descrédito de la gestión pública que ha promovido el pensamiento neoliberal.
Numerosos expertos vienen destacando desde hace más de una década que en las democracias liberal-representativas la participación ciudadana se ha limitado al ejercicio del derecho a voto, en un contexto en el que se está produciendo un “déficit de legitimidad social” de la democracia actual. Y uno de los “antídotos” más eficientes para proteger nuestra democracia es, precisamente, promover una mayor participación social, que los medios de comunicación públicos tienen la responsabilidad de impulsar, en un entorno mediático en el que los social media son cada vez más importantes. Es por ello que la “participación ciudadana” constituye una de las preocupaciones más relevantes en la agenda de los responsables de los medios de comunicación públicos.
En este primer volumen, Participación ciudadana y medios de comunicación públicos. 1. Conceptos y teorías, se aborda el estudio y análisis del concepto de participación ciudadana, desde múltiples perspectivas, con la colaboración de expertos nacionales e internacionales. Este libro ofrece la difusión de algunos resultados del proyecto de investigación “Participación ciudadana y medios de comunicación públicos. Análisis de experiencias de co-creación audiovisual en España y Europa (PARCICOM)”, código RTI2018-093649-B-I00, proyecto financiado por la Convocatoria 2018 de Proyectos de I+D+i “Retos Investigación”, del Programa Estatal de I+D+i orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, para el periodo 2019-2021, bajo la dirección de Javier Marzal Felici.

The goal of this article is to add a complementary perspective to the study of social network sites by surveying how the political economy of social media platforms relates to the structure of free-to-play games in their commodity form. Drawing on the theory of multisided markets and critical political economy, this article surveys the political economy of game apps and investigates how it is symbiotically related to the technological and economic logic underlying connective platforms operated by Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. These social media platforms operate app stores that sustain the transformation of games as fixed, physically distributed products that follow a transaction logic, into digitally distributed, freely accessible, or “free-to-play” apps. Through a case study of the popular casual game Candy Crush Saga it is contended that the connective properties of social media platforms affect the form and format of game apps as cultural commodities. Candy Crush Saga developer King Digital Entertainment has been able to attract hundreds of millions of players and build a business model that combines the commodification of virtual items, connectivity, user attention, user data, and play. It is argued that the free-to-play commodity form comprises three commodity types: the product commodity, the “prosumer commodity,” and the player commodity. Furthermore, Candy Crush Saga’s commodity form is structured by a platformed modality of cultural production and circulation and therefore embedded in the political economy of its host platform.

The Political Economy of Media and Power is an interdisciplinary collection intended to foster critical pedagogy.  Contributors cut through media spectacle and make visible the intersections between mass media and the politics of power in the contemporary social world.  Chapters explore ways in which media connect with a broad range of topics and issues, including globalization; war and terrorism; foreign affairs; democracy; governmental relations; the cultural politics of militarization; gender inequality and the sexist saturation of the public sphere; media representations of women; media spin and public relations within the broader context of corporate and ideological power. 

Contents: Cees J. Hamelink: Preface - David Miller/William Dinan: Introduction - Jeffery Klaehn: Discourses on Power - Sylvia Hale: Promoting War: The Power Politics of Manufacturing News - Richard Lance Keeble: Hacks and spooks - Close Encounters of a Strange Kind: A Critical History of the Links between Mainstream Journalists and the Intelligence Services in the UK - Gerald Sussman: A Regime of Propaganda: The Systemic Bases of Promotional Political Culture - Stuart Allan/Donald Matheson: Images in Wartime: The Mediation of Power - Robin Andersen: The Power of Images at Times of War - Henry A. Giroux: Public Pedagogy, Cultural Politics, and the Biopolitics of Militarization - Andrew Mullen: Bringing Power Back In: The Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model, 1988-2008 - Robert Jensen: The Faculty Filter: Why the Propaganda Model is Marginalized in U.S. Journalism Schools - James Winter: Reporting on the Pharmaceutical Industry: Profit before People - Yasmin Jiwani: Soft Power: Policing the Border through Canadian TV Crime Drama - Richard Poulin/Melanie Claude: Appearance, Intimacy Exhibition, Hypersexualization and Pornography - David Berry: Radical Mass Media Criticism, History and Theory - Justin Lewis: The Myth of Commercialism: Why a Market Approach to Broadcasting Does Not Work

In Democracy Without Journalism? Victor Pickard argues that we’re overlooking the core roots of the crisis. By uncovering degradations caused by run-amok commercialism, he brings into focus the historical antecedents, market failures, and policy inaction that led to the implosion of commercial journalism and the proliferation of misinformation through both social media and mainstream news. The problem isn’t just the loss of journalism or irresponsibility of Facebook, but the very structure upon which our profit-driven media system is built. The rise of a “misinformation society” is symptomatic of historical and endemic weaknesses in the American media system tracing back to the early commercialization of the press in the 1800s. While professionalization was meant to resolve tensions between journalism’s public service and profit imperatives, Pickard argues that it merely camouflaged deeper structural maladies. Journalism has always been in crisis. The market never supported the levels of journalism—especially local, international, policy, and investigative reporting—that a healthy democracy requires. Today these long-term defects have metastasized.

The US media system is primarily a commercial one dominated by a small number of lightly regulated corporations, and offset by weak public alternatives. This was not inevitable ; it resulted from the outcomes of specific policy battles and from specific values triumphing. One way of understanding this logic is to focus on "corporate libertarianism", which emphasizes negative freedoms (freedom from) as opposed to positive ones (freedom for). Historically, much US media law and policy has been framed in negative terms, exemplified by the First Amendment. But there are also largely forgotten traditions that draw from a positive rights discourse. This social democratic orientation privileges media diversity and protects collective rights held by publics, audiences, and communities over the individual rights of corporations. Drawing from historical case studies, this chapter considers media policies for the digital age founded on positive freedoms.

En el actual contexto de desconfianza hacia los medios de comunicación públicos, la “participación ciudadana” constituye una de las preocupaciones más relevantes en la agenda de sus responsables y entre los investigadores de los medios, como clave para recuperar su relevancia social. Para profundizar en el conocimiento del concepto de participación, se han organizado tres focus groups, formados respectivamente por académicos, profesionales y expertos en dinamización social, desarrollados en Castellón en noviembre de 2019. Se presentan los resultados y se debaten las principales recomendaciones surgidas para la gestión de la “participación ciudadana” en los medios públicos.

Th e 1940s was a contentious decade for US media policy. Activists, policy- makers, and media industries grappled over defining the normative foundations that governed major communication and regulatory institutions. At this time, a reform agenda took shape at both the grassroots social movement level and within elite policy circles. An analysis of the rise and fall of this postwar media reform movement
holds at least three key lessons for contemporary media activists. First, it reminds us of the imperative to maintain a strong inside/outside strategy that keeps regulators connected to the grassroots. Second, we learn that media activists retreat on structural reform objectives at their own peril. Finally, we must remember that media reform rises and falls with other political struggles and radical social movements. With these lessons in mind, media reformers should seek to build liberal- left coalitions and, perhaps, a new popular front.

El artículo presenta hallazgos de las dos primeras etapas de la investigación de doctorado desarrollada por el autor (sobre estrategias de las agencias de noticias estatales del sur Global) para el recorte geográfico de América Latina y Caribe. Desde categorías de análisis desarrolladas con base en la literatura especializada en agencias de noticias (Boyd-Barrett, Thussu y otros) y perfeccionadas a partir del recojo de datos documentales de aceso público, se hace comparación entre ellas a fin de identificar tendencias, innovaciones y dificultades enfrentadas en cada una de las agencias. Se busca trazar un panorama actualizado y empírico del sector de agencias de noticias en el contexto de la perifería global y en el latinoamericano en particular. Hasta el momento, es posible constatar movimientos como la opción por el contenido abierto – que pone en jaque la relación suministrador-cliente, típica de las agencias –, la reestructuración de agencias en los países de la “Vuelta hacia la Izquierda”, la distinción de modelos entre las esferas latina y anglosajona, y una pelea contra los conglomerados privados por hegemonía en la circulación de contenido periodístico, especialmente para la prensa regional y periférica.

Overview: The aim of this course is to provide a general introduction to a range of theories that seek to explain why we communicate as we do. The first part of the course establishes a general overview of communication theory, from both theoretical and historical points of view. We will examine the relationship between communication, ideology, power, and social consciousness; the development of alphabetic writing; and theories of orality and literacy. We will also review the concept of the self in the context of communication studies. The second part of the course will focus on specific fields within the area of communication, including: the study of popular culture; media analysis; film studies; advertising; and the political economy of communication. We will also examine the rise of technology studies in communication, and consider the way in which the electronic media (in particular computers and the Internet), have refashioned both human consciousness and culture. In this context, we will discuss issues of privacy and democracy in the emerging digital culture; and conclude the course with a brief discussion of global communication.

This chapter provides an overview of the entire American media landscape, with an emphasis on the various degradations caused by commercial imperatives. As media outlets desperately chase increasingly elusive revenues, they further debase journalism. Problems that emerge from journalism’s decline range from the turn to invasive and deceptive forms of advertising to a growing precarity in news labor.  The chapter systematically goes through potential alternatives to the advertising revenue model and concludes that a public option is the best model going forward.

The practices and cultures of remix are often thought to emerge in opposition to cognitive capitalism. This is for a number of reasons:

As a practice that blends bottom-up circulation with new discursive practices, remix offers possibilities for forms of criticality in opposition to commercial mass media. More specifically, as it thrives on social production and the free exchange of information, knowledge and culture, remix presents a direct sabotage to an economy that extracts value from the enclosure of intellectual products. Finally, acts of circulation and attention involved in the production and dissemination of remixed artefacts are often thought to fall outside of traditional labour relations and as such are not conceived of as directly 'productive' in an economic sense.

Like much of the ideology of free culture, however, the emancipatory potential of remix is sometimes overstated.

Cognitive capitalism has re-qualified and recomposed labour in such a way that the activities associated with remix culture, far from operating in some constitutive outside are now central to the information economy. Forms of human attention, creativity and bottom-up circulation are the main sources of value for software companies, advertising agencies and crowdsourcing marketplaces. We can see this clearly where media conglomerates profit from advertising revenue on hosting sites through to the less obvious but more ubiquitous situations where acts of human creativity and distribution produce value through ranking algorithms and social network analysis. Furthermore, the figure of the ‘remixer’ as an artist, fan or playful individual engaged in the fullest exercise of self-expression is the ideal labouring subject of cognitive capitalism. This is a worker that does not recognise subjugation in their labour, but instead associates their activity with freedom, play and the hedonistic exercise of creativity, even as these activities produce economic value for others.

Proceeding from this dialectic, this essay will attempt to rethink the labour of remix and explore the politics of various networked tools and platforms in the enclosure of remix cultures.

"Il volume, grazie a un apparato documentario finora inedito, analizza le prime fasi di sviluppo del telefono in Italia tra l’ultimo ventennio dell’Ottocento e la prima guerra mondiale. Come venne accolto, interpretato e “metabolizzato” il nuovo mezzo di comunicazione nella società dell’epoca? Quali gruppi sociali compresero le sue potenzialità e quali, invece, lo trascurarono o addirittura ne ostacolarono la diffusione? Chi furono i primi abbonati al telefono, come lo utilizzarono e cosa significò per loro? Si possono individuare delle caratteristiche peculiari nello sviluppo del telefono nel nostro paese tali da delineare una sorta di “via italiana alle telecomunicazioni”? Le origini del telefono in Italia mira a rispondere a queste e ad altre domande, analizzando una fase della storia della comunicazione italiana fino a oggi poco considerata ma fondamentale per comprendere appieno l’evoluzione delle telecomunicazioni, un settore sempre più al centro della vita politica, economica e culturale della società contemporanea.

This book aims at identifying the turning points in the early history of Italian telephone (1877–1915) considering at the same level political, economical, technical, and social dimensions and trying to reconstruct conflicts and connivances among relevant social
groups. The early history of the Italian telephone can be subdivided into four periods: the urban networks building during the 1880s; the nationalization attempt, concentration process and failed building of the long-distance network during the 1890s; the nationalization process between 1903 and 1907; and the failure of public management and return to private operation between 1907 and the First World War. This analysis helps identify some characteristics of Italian telephone history that
configure a kind of Italian style in telecommunications: the relevance of old media (electric telegraph in particular) for the new one, political uncertainties, foreign investments, difficulties in interconnecting different systems, a lively and overlooked demand."

The Fairness Doctrine, one of the most famous and controversial media policies ever enacted, suffered a final deathblow in August 2011 when the Federal Communications Commission permanently struck it from the books. However, the Doctrine continues to be invoked by proponents and detractors alike. This study historically contextualizes the Fairness Doctrine while drawing attention to how it figures within contemporary regulatory debates. By tracing over time the shifting ideologies and discourses surrounding the Fairness Doctrine, we can see how political conflict shapes the normative foundations of core media policies, especially those involving positive freedoms.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field, autonomy, homology, cultural capital, habitus, doxa, reflexivity, and symbolic violence provide powerful tools for communication theorizing. In works such as Distinction, The Rules of Art, and Language and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu offers new insights on the production of culture, audience reception, media change, and research epistemology and methodology.

The Public Broadcasting Act’s 50th anniversary provides an opportune
moment to reassess justifications for creating a noncommercial media system. This commemorative occasion coincides with a particularly precarious moment for public radio and television’s future, adding some urgency to revisiting and reasserting its normative foundations. With this in mind, it is instructive to look back at public broadcasting’s long history to recover some of the original arguments for establishing an alternative to commercial news media. These earlier visions suggest a social democratic ideal for broadcast media, one clearly recognizing that a market-driven system cannot provide for all of democratic society’s communication needs.

This introductory chapter sets the broader context by drawing attention to core pathologies in American news and information systems. In particular, it draws attention to the run-amok commercialism that lies at the heart of these structural problems. Using President Donald Trump’s election as a departure point, it covers a wide array of symptoms, ranging from low-quality information, sensationalism, and other problems in mainstream news media to misinformation proliferating through social media. The chapter gives an overview of the entire book and lays out the major arguments. It also describes the political economic theoretical framework that guides the book’s analysis.

New sociotechnical systems are emerging from the convergence of communications and money networks. This is particularly significant in mobile media, where services such as near field communication (NFC) and QR code payments, mobile wallets, mobile banking and mobile remittance are becoming commonplace. These services position mobile network operators and service providers as emerging financial institutions - de facto banks of a kind. In some cases they also see financial institutions acquiring mobile service operating licenses and moving into telecommunications. What are the implications of this convergence for the culture, political economy and governance of future payment systems, when agencies that control the flow of information now also control the flow of value? The infrastructural base  of these enclosures are significant when we come to examine the convergence of financial and communications, because money now rides the heavily contested ‘rails’ of mobile network infrastructure.  How will the political economy of mobile network infrastructure - from handsets through to core and radio access infrastructure - shape the geography of access in the mobile payments space and, in turn, the future of money?

Fake news should be a serious topic in the political economy of communication because it brings into sharp relief a critical analysis of the news industry and of journalism from a Marxist perspective. I am not, at this point, offering a cure, though others have attempted to do so, notably within a normative framework that privileges the liberal democratic notion of the Fourth Estate (McNair, 2018). No doubt, there is need of an antidote to the spread of anti-democratic false narratives in journalism, but the Fourth Estate paradigm does not hold the answers. Rather, I assert here that the ideological paradigm in which the Fourth Estate operates makes it part of the problem and complicit – even if unwittingly – in the growth and spread of fake news.
Many PhDs will be written examining the explosion of public and scholarly interest in the topic of ‘fake news’, but at the end of 2017 the academic literature is still relatively thin.
The Collins Dictionary has declared fake news to be its word of the year for 2017, noting that it has become “ubiquitous” in political discourse after being popularised by Donald Trump (Flood, 2017). Studies are also now broaching the topic, with varying amounts of clarity and success. This commentary is not a definitive review of the current literature, it is an exploratory foray into how and why the political economy of communication lens should be brought to bear on the topic.
While the phenomenon is not new, interest in fake news has certainly spiked since the election of Donald J Trump as 45th President of the United States. Prior to Trump’s election the category of fake news was limited to explorations of landmark incidents such as the so-called WMD dossier that precipitated the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and to our understanding of satirical publications like The Onion, or to the work of comedic broadcasters such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (Hirst, 2011). These perspectives on fake news are no longer adequate, though they form an important backdrop to current debates.