Intro to Political Economy

“Political Economy” can either mean “economic policy” or the connection between politics and
the economy

Neoclassical economics are based on supply/demand curves

❖ Uses the marginalist model of supply and demand
➢ It assumes all markets are constantly in equilibrium, all players are equally
powerful, fully rational (pursue self interest), fully informed
➢ Has bled over into communication studies
■ People assume media are neutral players in a free market of ideas
❖ Alternative to rational choice theories is pluralist theories
➢ Recognizes there is no perfect balance between interest groups, rationality is
limited
➢ Believes equilibrium can still be reached
➢ Represented in communication studies
■ Competing interests are (or should be) represented in a balanced way by
separate media outlets, state should make sure this is the case
➢ State is allowed to correct market failure, provide public service, ...

- Market Theory of Value (Smith): value of a product is determined by how much people are
willing to pay for it
- Labor Theory of Value (Marx): value of a product is determined by how much labor time was
put into creating it

Commodification: the tendency of capitalism to make everything into a commodity to be sold

❖ Content
➢ To produce content for which people are willing to pay
❖ Attention
➢ To produce content that attracts advertisers
❖ Audience
➢ Ratings, customer data, ...
❖ Labor
➢ Users become producers of content (i.e. the Facebook model)

Hegemony (Gramsci): the process by which the dominant ideology becomes accepted by most
people
❖ Capitalist hegemony: media pushing materialist and individualist ideology (as embodied
in consumerism)

Elements commonly found in the political economy of communication…

● Critical epistemology
● Engagement in society (praxis)
 ● Historical method
● Holistic view of society

Intro to Cultural Studies

Cultural studies is literally the study of culture
Cultural images, symbols, and messages are often referred to as cultural texts
Can overestimate our agency and ability to act consciously

Frankfurter Schule:
❖ Focuses on mass communication and mass culture
➢ Details how the media is controlled by groups who use it to further their own
interests
➢ Media are “agents of socialization” and mediators between people and the reality
they live in
➢ Coined the term cultural industry; Adorno and Horkheimer were appalled by the
american consumerization of culture so that’s why they focus on it a lot
➢ Examines how mass culture and media exhibit similar features of mass industrial
production like...
■ Commodification: turn something into a product that can be sold
■ Standardization: use certain standards to mass-produce goods, the goods
look more alike (Fordification)
■ Massification: mass-production requires mass-consumption
❖ Because production of media products is controlled by certain groups, the media itself
carries distinct biases and embedded values from the producers (Marxist stuff)
➢ Producers use their products to maintain social stability
❖ Pessimistic, somewhat economically reductionist
❖ Critique: overestimates how massified and homogeneous media culture is

Ideology serves to legitimize a certain view of society in a way that makes it seem natural,
common sense, like there’s no alternative. Ideology is often invisible and eludes criticism.
- Hegemony: naturalized ideology

French School:
❖ Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord are on this shit
❖ Society is a type of hyper-reality that’s supported by the media
➢ Our understanding of the world is created by media and therefore is never exactly
the same as reality
➢ This means that society itself can be considered a text and can be analyzed thusly
❖ Saussure’s semiology: language is a structure that exists independently of reality (we can
talk about chairs without being in the presence of a chair)
 ➢ We can study society in the same way as language, as something created in our
minds that exists independently of reality. We can analyze society like we animate
movies: to discover the values of the author.
■ Social structures though, unlike linguistic structures, have a material
component
❖ This is the basis of structuralism^^
➢ Post-structuralism is almost the same as constructionism, nobody would really
call themselves a structuralist these days

British School:
❖ Most prominent perspective in today’s cultural studies
❖ Systematically rejects high/low culture distinctions
➢ Takes seriously the artifacts of media culture, “mass” culture
❖ Frames culture around social production and reproduction
➢ Also specifies the ways cultural forms serve to either control people or enable
resistance
➢ The masses are not dumb, but very capable of being critical
❖ Sees society as a hierarchical and antagonistic set of social relations
➢ Employs Gramsci’s model of hegemony
➢ Aims for social change
❖ Constructionist, but not relativistic
❖ Critical of society and capitalism like Frankfurter Schule, but doesn’t see masses as
passive audience and not pessimistic

Te nology and Economy

“Domestication” is the process by which a technology becomes a normal part of most people’s
lives, it’s a form of appropriation (taking something for yourself)

Innovation (Freeman-Perez)
Radical innovation
- Discontinuous event as outcome of research & development
- Creates a new kind of economic activity

Technological revolution
- New technological paradigm
- Permeates entire society

Kondratief waves (“long wave theory”)

- Ups and downs over a long period (50 years or so) in the economy
- Down happens when demand drops cuz everyone has what they need
- Up happens when capitalists figure out what the new thing to sell is
- Usually a new technology
Social Media
Cultural studies perspective:
❖ Participatory culture (Jenkins): ‘a culture in which fans and other consumers actively
create and circulate news content”
➢ Active audiences (resisting dominant powers, shaping media flows, spreading
content)
➢ Low barrier to entry
➢ Strong support for creating and sharing creations
➢ Informal mentorship (people teach each other how to use socials)
➢ Members feel some degree of social connection
❖ Mistakenly assumes connections between fandom and politics
➢ Fans are lumped in with activists
❖ Mistakenly assumes communities are always politically progressive
❖ Ignores ownership of platforms, social inequality

Kaun & Uldam Model:

- Takes into account 4 dimensions
- Power relations (who owns what)
- Social media platforms tend to increase ownership concentration
- Affordances (potential offered by the technology)
- The positives it offers as well as limitations or downsides
- Practices (what people do with media)
- Political participation
- But also surveillance, propaganda, etc.
- Discourses (perspective on social reality)

Political economy perspective:

❖ Social media as an industry (Fuchs): information as a commodity
➢ Refers to Marx’s theory of labor value
➢ Targeted advertising based on information sold, extensive market monitoring
➢ Users (consumers) become, at least in part, the producers of their own
consumption, but the value of their labor time is appropriated by the owners
➢ Both exploits user labor and spreads capitalist ideology through promoting
consumerist behavior
❖ Garnham’s Critique
➢ Labor theory of value (which Fuchs refers to repeatedly) is generally considered
to be lacking, so it’s shaky to base analysis solely on it
➢ “Play labor” (labor in free time) is not the same as coerced labor (labor as part of
an economic institution)
➢ Basically, he says Fuchs is being economically reductionist
Public Sphere
Habermas’ public sphere
❖ Public sphere fills the gap between private sphere and government
❖ Four characteristics
➢ Site for debate to take place
➢ Accessible to all members of society
➢ Rational debate
➢ Recognized as legitimate by the public authorities

Many theorists today agree: strong democracy requires a properly functioning public sphere
❖ Mass communications are often seen as a supporter of such a sphere, but (Dahlgren)
says they’ve failed in this role
➢ The internet opens up many possibilities, but there are issues including
inequalities of access and participation, fragmentation/tribalism, censorship,
unreflexive communication
❖ This issue is exacerbated by platformization of access, monitoring of customer behavior,
and targeting of content

Pamphlets brought about the earliest public sphere, which Habermas based his ideas on it off of.
❖ They were initially illegal but repression was unsuccessful
❖ They were also used as propaganda and later institutionalized with the advent of
parliamentary democracy

Journalism:

Two types of journalism

❖ Quality journalism
➢ Informative, neutral (implied), rational
➢ Appeals mostly to the more educated, wealthier parts of society
➢ Focuses on hard news, economic news, etc.
❖ Popular journalism
➢ Less rational, informative
➢ Appeals more to wide audiences
➢ Focuses on more personal, emotional news

Two perspectives on media and censorship

❖ Media as public educators
➢ Media set the agenda
➢ Media enhances democratic culture
■ Debate, deliberation, etc.
➢ Generates public debate, making society more cohesive
❖ Media as “instances of governmentality”
 ➢ Media should(?) focus on differences of identity

Theorist: (Mauffe)^v

She says it should be possible to discuss personal and emotional topics and still consider them
as news. Everyday life is very relevant to democracy.

Mauffe wants a focus on dialogue, a relational concept of individuality, and a recognition of the
significance of emotions. “Journalism of everyday life”. In this model, experts are one source
among many.

Critiques:
❖ Ignores moral standards and people’s varying moral tolerance
❖ Ignores quality of information
❖ Commodification of emotions?

Journalism
Political economy of journalism
Objectivity & pluralism

3 functions of media revisited:

❖ Watchdog function
➢ Call out authority for doing bad shit
❖ Information function
➢ Inform consumers
❖ Representation function
➢ Voice interests from society

Angles of objectivity:
❖ As a criterion
➢ People didn’t care as much about journalistic objectivity when journalism was
newer because it wasn’t seen as its function
❖ As a commercial strategy
➢ Outlets will peg themselves as objective in an effort to increase sales
➢ Arose out of concentration tendencies* in the press industry
■ *the tendency for industries to concentrate under the ownership of a few
■ In the press, this means the news reflects the views of that few
❖ As a journalistic ethic
➢ Also arose out of commercial need, but now is ingrained into the professional
code of the press
➢ Always implicitly acts in service of the hegemon
The problem of objectivity

Three biases:
❖ Selectivity of sources
➢ There’s usually a small selection of sources that are considered the most
legitimate
■ These sources often draw from the establishment (see concentration
tendencies) and therefore implicitly push views favorable to the hegemon
■ Also applies to experts, to some extent, because they themselves are
generally a part of the establishment
❖ Lack of contextualization
➢ Press tends to avoid context so they can frame the news exactly how they want
➢ Stories are formulated in a specific recipe that saves time and money for the
journalist that can be copy-pasted
❖ Implicit commercialization (commodification)
➢ Society’s rationalization (the need to reduce costs) cheapens journalism over time
➢ Digitalization furthers rationalization significantly
■ Journalists often become multitaskers (writer, photographer, etc.)

Politicization & depoliticization

Depoliticization:
❖ Journalism smuggles in values that reflect the commercial aims of media owners
➢ Journalists censor themselves to serve the advertiser’s interests
➢ Journalists become celebrities
Not sure what politicization is

How to solve the dilemma

Diversity of thought
Being responsive to users (in substance and form. Not the same as being commercial.)
Critical journalism (journalism that always asks questions)

Cultural studies of journalism

Ways the constructed nature of news influences substance:

❖ Variation across media products (different forms)
➢ Not that it’s truly plural, the views are relatively consistent
➢ There are consistent discourses and ideological threads that run through different
versions of the news
❖ Regulations
➢ Different rules apply to different media
❖ Not everyone has the same news experience
❖ It’s a selective construction in the shape of the real world, not even a reconstruction
➢ What’s left in is as important as what’s left out
News value: (what has news value and what doesn’t)
❖ Preference for negative news is ideological because…
➢ It defines what is unacceptable behavior
➢ Defines which groups are to be seen as unacceptable social groups
➢ Defines beliefs that are unacceptable to the dominant ideology
❖ Manufactured definers of news value
➢ When something is put in the news because of its supposed ‘news value’, it
acquires more news value just from being in the news
➢ Cultural proximity
➢ Elitism (what the elites have to say is more important than ordinary people)
➢ Personification
➢ Spectacle
➢ Size
➢ Unexpectedness
➢ Conflict

Hard vs. soft news

Examples of hard news:

❖ Politics
❖ Economy
❖ Foreign affairs
❖ Domestic stories (as long as they are relevant to a lot of people, public interest)
❖ One-off items (of public interest)
➢ Natural disasters, etc.
❖ Sports
Hard news is prioritized in the media in terms of which news is ‘newsworthy’
It’s a way for the press to make a judgement of what is ‘good news’
❖ Culturally (in the west) if you don’t consume enough hard news you aren’t a good citizen
❖ It’s also defined by content AS WELL AS style of reporting

Soft news is news that is made for its commercial value (tabloids, entertainment, spectacle...)
❖ Seen as a dumbing-down of journalism
❖ News has always had this side, though, even as far back as the first 17th century news
pamphlets having greatly exaggerated news
❖ Still secures hegemonic consent as much as hard news
➢ Parrots the ideas of the elites

Democracy
Rational choice theory is implicit in most critical theories, but it’s lowkey unrealistic
(citizens are well-informed, able to make independent rational political choices)
Watchdog function (Curran)
❖ Role of the media is to act as a check on the state
❖ Liberal model
➢ Media must be anchored to the free market to ensure its independence
➢ Dates back to the 17th century, but is still pretty legit (at least for the first part)
➢ Public media is pressured by the state nonetheless through licenses, censorship
sometimes, etc.
➢ Critiques:
■ Still a bit out of date because when it was created, media had little
financial interest in their work
■ Market suppression by large institutions and collusion by corporate
owners does happen
❖ Checks and balances (safeguards) for proper watchdog functioning:
➢ Constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression
➢ Formal rules requiring broadcasting impartiality
➢ All-party (or civic society) representation on broadcasting regulatory agencies
➢ Funding by license fee rather than direct government grant
➢ Competition between broadcasters
➢ Diversity of broadcasting organizational structures
➢ Devolution of authority within broadcasting organizations

Information function (Curran)

❖ Media should help voters make informed choices, act as a forum of debate
❖ Liberal model again
➢ Free market will achieve this efficiently
➢ Critiques:
■ High cost of entry to publishing
■ The free market favors human interest at the expense of information
■ Free market undermines intelligent/rational debate
● The market tends towards simplified, personalized,
de-contextualized, stereotyped content

Representation function (Curran)

❖ Representing people to authority
❖ Liberal model again again
➢ Guess what: free market does it best
➢ Critiques:
■ Free market tends to concentrate media ownership
■ High entry costs still problematic
■ Economies of scale ruin diversity

How to avoid problems with free market:

- Market regulation
- Safeguards to access
 - Regulate pricing, social tariffs, etc.
- Stimulation
- Licensing public broadcasters
- Requiring places to, for example, play only local bands for a certain amount of
time
- Subsidies for investigative journalism, civil society initiatives, etc.
- Public media for information and representation (internally diverse: different channels
within organization), and small media organizations for watchdog and representation
(externally diverse: voice opinions from society)
- Public media at arm’s length of government
- Newsroom independency (lowkey doesn’t work because people are influenced informally
or outside of the newsroom)
- Educate audiences in media literacy

Celebrity politics as a bad thing:

- Celebrities becoming pseudo-politicians (((may))) lead to celebrities (((running))) for
office
- “Celebrity politician” refers to someone whose background is in entertainment,
and uses that to get elected OR
- Politician who uses forms and associations with celebrity to further themselves or
their ideas OR
- Entertainer who engages in politics
- Issues with this…
- Trivializes politics with superficial gestures and appearances
- The “world of entertainment” is not representative of society

Celebrity politics is good actually:

- Celebrity politics is not new
- Cults of personality have been common for as long as democracy has been around
- Representatives sell themselves to the market
- Unanswered question: Does the involvement of pop-culture undermine or strengthen
representative government?
- John Street argues that celebrity politician is perfectly characteristic of political
representation generally
- He also says that appealing to the voter base through pop-culture too much is still
bad, but that the celebrity politicians themselves aren’t a problem (representation
shouldn’t become deception)

Building Bridges: Theory

(The goal is to build bridges between political economy and cultural studies perspectives as well
as to understand the relationship between agency and structure, conflict and consensus)
AGENCY VS STRUCTURE (Giddens)

Structure…
➢ Social systems structure the way resources are produced, distributed, used in society
○ They provide rules that constrain human action and access to resources
○ They enable our actions to produce resources
■ Economic resources, social resources, symbolic resources
➢ “Structuration”: structure is created unconsciously by the repetition of acts of individual
agents that reproduce the structure
○ This angle avoids some of the problems with structural / economic determinism
Agency…
➢ The actual stuff of human action; expression of power
○ The ability for humans to exert influence on a situation (people or thing)
➢ Agency and structure cannot be separated, they are two sides of the same coin
○ Structure is more important overall than agency though because we can only
express our agency under the conditions that society’s structure allows

Giddens talks about people having “practical consciousness”, which means that social actors
know things about their actions in relation to their social situation but can’t always express it.
Basically, it means that people have mostly tacit, practical knowledge about their lives as
opposed to Marx’ class consciousness.

Field Theory (Bourdieu)

➢ (Recall Bourdieu’s social space with total capital on the y axis and relative
cultural/economic capital on the x axis)
➢ Habitus: Mental schemes that shape people’s perceptions and attitudes
○ These schemes are created by…
■ Structured structures: mental structures are shaped by social structures
■ Structuring structures: mental structures structure our day-to-day
behavior

*Giddens is more of an action theorist than Bourdieu; habitus is much more structurally
determined and embedded deeper than practical consciousness

Schemata theory…
➢ Schemata: concepts and the relations between them (banana and yellow, monkeys, ...)
○ One concept leads to another which leads to another, etc., etc.
■ Big web vibes
○ Created by learned, accumulated experience during life
■ So everyone has their own schemes since we have different lives lol
■ We use them to assess new situations and predict behavior***
● Predicting behavior: using pre-existing schemes to predict
unknown areas in a new scheme
 ● Also how stereotypes are created^
➢ Resonance: information that resonates more is more likely to be recognized,
remembered than information that resonates less
○ (a.k.a. size of node on the web)
○ Whole schemes can resonate with each other if they share a lot of concepts

Stuart Hall
➢ Culture has a material existence!
○ In artifacts, social practices, memories, architecture...
○ Only effective in the mind tho
■ Represented by material things, but only affects our minds, essentially
➢ Culture is the outcome of structuration in which our schemes recursively shape each
other, GET IT?

➢ Above is Hall’s model of media and communication, includes political economy (how the
media chooses the information to share) and cultural studies (how culture influences
people’s interpretations)
○ Role of media in this model: DOMINANT, both intentionally and unintentionally
contributes to reproducing the social structure (hegemony)

Culture -> Habitus (schemes) -> Behavior -> Culture -> … (big circle)

How is structuration represented in communication?

- Institutional information: highly structured (reflects power relations in society)
- Interpersonal information: sorta structured
 - Situational information (our random encounters with people, things throughout the
day): more random of course but still structured

Building Bridges: Cases

Selective exposure: media diversity…
❖ Three theses...
➢ Homogenization thesis
■ Commodification
■ Mainstreaming
➢ Fragmentation thesis
■ Technology driven
■ Filter bubbles
➢ Segmentation thesis
■ Both homogenization and fragmentation forces are at play
■ Users can be regrouped on the basis of common behavior
❖ Approaches…
➢ Substantial approach
■ Topics, actors, viewpoints, location
■ More deductive
➢ Formal approach
■ Time spent (on a title, channel, …)
■ More inductive
➢ Stirling approach
■ 3 criteria…
● Variety: the number of distinguishable categories
◆ “How many categories?”
● Disparity: the degree to which they can be distinguished
◆ “How different are they?”
● Balance: the distribution of elements across categories
◆ “How many of each?”
● Watch Mon Nov 23 @ 3:33 PM for example

Selective exposure: media quality…

❖ Quality media: internally diverse, contributes to citizens making better informed choices
❖ Theses…
➢ Polarization thesis
■ Ideological division
➢ Dualization thesis
■ Social division
❖ Distinction between high- and low-brow media (previously covered)
➢ Liberals have a higher preference for high-brow news sources in comparison to
conservatives
 ➢ People with an active interest in politics are inclined to consume a higher volume
of hard news, regardless of political preference
➢ Those on the right tend to consume less quality information (dualization
potentially facilitating polarization, assuming less quality information contributes
to political polarization)

Selective perception…
❖ Surveys about photos...
➢ “Cluster”: concepts that are frequently mentioned together in a survey
➢ People tend to project information onto the pictures, such as location a picture
was taken