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The Political Economy of Communication

An Idiosyncratic Presentation of an Emerging Subfield

Robert W. McChesney

What follows is an idiosyncratic presentation of the area of research called the “political economy of communication” or the “political economy of media.” I justify this approach because the subfield is small and has only a loosely recognized canon at this point. My aim is to contribute to the process of developing our understanding of this field of research, its history, the great influences upon its development, and its immense potential and importance going forward.

Political economy of communication has three main components. First, it addresses in a critical manner how the media system interacts with and affects the overall disposition of power in society. Do the media, on balance, serve as a progressive force to draw people into political debate as informed and effective participants, or does the media system as a whole tend to reinforce elite rule and inegalitarian social relations? This is a topic of concern for more than political economists – in fact it drives much of communication research, especially cultural studies – but it is always central to the political economic tradition. It requires a certain command of history and political theory. Simultaneously, and of necessity, this requires looking at how the media and communication systems were integrated into the economy. This requires some facility with economics.

Now what I meant by “in a critical manner” gets to the nub of the matter. There are many different measures one could use, and over time the one I emphasize rests upon the provision of journalism, or, more broadly, the information necessary for self-government and effective freedom. In my view, the media system, with particular emphasis upon journalism, needs to provide several services to meet the communication requirements of a free and self-governing people. The media system needs to keep a ruthless check on people who are in power or who wish to be in power, whether in the public or private sector. The media system has to be a watchdog. It has to be capable of ferreting out truth from lies, so liars cannot prevaricate endlessly, shamelessly, and without consequence. And the media system has to provide a range of informed opinion on the crucial social and political issues of the day, as well as be the advance scout to locate problems on the horizon.

Not all media have to do all of these things, but in combination a healthy media system makes these services available to the great bulk of the citizenry, and does not discriminate against people based on race, class, or gender. If it fulfills these criteria, the media system would be a democratic force in society. Now if one looks at the list closely, these are all classical liberal criteria; when applied to other nations or to history, they are not especially controversial. But when such criteria are applied to the United States, or the US role in the world, without pulling punches, the results are generally unflattering, and the critique is regarded as radical. And it is radical, because the logic of the critique suggests that structural reform of the media system and society is necessary if we are serious about democracy.

In addition, what this first area of the political economy of communication suggests is that the relationship of media to society is not a one-way flow. Not only does democracy require viable media and journalism to prosper; so, too, do media and journalism require healthy democracy and strong popular politics to survive and be effective as progressive institutions. It is a close and symbiotic relationship.

The second area in the political economy of communication tradition is largely its exclusive domain: an evaluation of how market structures, advertising support, labor relations, profit motivation, technologies, and government policies shape media industries, journalistic practices, occupational sociology, and the nature and content of the news and entertainment. This requires a certain mastery of microeconomics, history, journalism, and policy studies at a minimum. While some legal scholars, political scientists, and economists are interested in these questions too, they rarely are interested in the critical implications for society as a whole. They are content to accept the status quo as an unalterable given. And when one accepts the status quo as an unalterable given, it doesn't take long before it starts to seem benevolent. Political economy by definition is a critical enterprise (Gandy, 1992).

The detailed examination of the policymaking process is the third core component of political economy of communication. When one examines the policymaking process, one can see what the real options are and have been, and why a system later regarded as “natural” got put in place as it did. Policymaking is becoming a new area of intense research in communication. The research places particular emphasis upon what I term “critical junctures,” the moments in policymaking history when the range of debate is relatively broad and society can go in any number of directions with its media policies and subsidies. Much of this research has a strong historical component.

The notion of critical junctures explains how social change works; there have been relatively rare and brief periods in which dramatic changes were debated and enacted drawing from a broad palette of options, followed by long periods in which structural or institutional change was slow and difficult (Collier & Collier, 2002). During a critical juncture, which usually lasts no more than one or two decades, the range of options for society is much greater than it is otherwise. The decisions made during such a period establish institutions and rules that likely put us on a course that will be difficult to change in any fundamental sense for decades or generations.

This notion of critical junctures is increasingly accepted in history and the social sciences. It has proven valuable for thinking broadly about society-wide fundamental social change, and also as a way to understand fundamental change within a specific sector, like media and communication. The two types of critical junctures are distinct, yet very closely related. Most of our major institutions in media are the result of such critical junctures, periods when policies could have gone in other directions, and, had they done so, put media and society on a different path.

As a result of my research, I have concluded that critical junctures in media and communication tend to occur when at least two if not all three of the following conditions hold:

• There is a revolutionary new communication technology that undermines the existing system.
• The content of the media system, especially the journalism, is increasingly discredited or seen as illegitimate.
• There is a major political crisis – severe social disequilibrium – in which the existing order is no longer working and there are major movements for social reform.

In the past century, critical junctures in media and communication occurred three times: in the Progressive Era, when journalism was in deep crisis and the overall political system was in turmoil; in the 1930s, when the emergence of radio broadcasting combined with public antipathy to commercialism against the backdrop of the Depression; and in the 1960s and early 1970s, when popular social movements in the United States provoked radical critiques of the media as part of a broader social and political critique.

The result of the critical juncture in the Progressive Era was the emergence of professional journalism. The result of the critical juncture in the 1930s was the model of loosely regulated commercial broadcasting, which provided the model for subsequent electronic media technologies like FM radio, terrestrial television, and cable and satellite television. The result of the 1960s and 1970s critical juncture is less tangible for communication. In many respects the issues raised then were never resolved and they were buried by the neoliberal epoch that followed.

Today, we are in the midst of a profound critical juncture for communication. All three conditions for a critical juncture are already in place, the first trifecta in at least 80 years in the United States: the digital revolution is overturning all existing media industries and business models; and journalism is at its lowest ebb since the Progressive Era. The third condition – the overall stability of the political and social system – is the most important and the great unknown. Our overall political system is awash in institutionalized corruption and appalling inequality. The economy is mired in the worst stage of secular stagnation since the 1930s and it appears likely that we are entering a period of structural transformation to points unknown. The entire public sector of pensions, education, and healthcare is under sustained and relentless attack. US global military dominance is wobbling with the disaster of the various Asian wars, and the combination of empire and republic is difficult to maintain.¹ In January 2007 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its symbolic doomsday clock to five minutes to midnight. For the first time ever, the editors stressed the role of not just nuclear weapons but of global climate change in the impending catastrophes facing humankind. This is becoming a political and social crisis of major proportions.²

In 2011 the other shoe fell that demonstrates that we are indeed entering mostly uncharted historical waters, at least by recent standards. The battle was joined, first on the snowy streets of Wisconsin and then, by the end of the year, in hundreds of “Occupy” protests across the nation. The system is failing and millions of US citizens stood up to say “We choose to live.” Even more impressive uprisings have occurred across the world, and have overturned governments in the Middle East. Given the structural crisis of capitalism, there is every reason to believe this is the start of something big. It is this precise moment that makes the work of critical scholars in general suddenly relevant and no longer “academic.” It is especially true for those working in the political economy of communication, because media issues are central to the upheavals.

It is worth noting that the study of the political economy of communication first emerged and thrived as a response to critical junctures. It is then that the types of questions political economists of communication ask seem especially pertinent, and connect to social movements off-campus. In quiescent periods, in contrast, political economy of communication tends to stagnate and appear irrelevant to the “real world.”

As just noted, this should be the moment in the sun for political economy of communication at US universities. Indeed, in the not too distant past, that was what seemed to be on the horizon. It certainly had a roaring start coming out of the last critical juncture in the late 1960s and 1970s. “I have no doubt that many communication scholars can hardly believe their luck,” the political economist Nicholas Garnham (1983) wrote in the Journal of Communication. “After years on the margins of intellectual concern and academic power, we suddenly find ourselves center stage, with the spotlight of social relevance full upon us.” Political economy of communication even had a de facto professional organization, the Union for Democratic Communications. Nearly one-third of the articles in the special edition on the future of the field in the George Gerbner-edited Journal of Communication in 1983 grew out of the political economic tradition.

In the early 1980s, the foundations of the political economy of communication, such as they are, were in place. Dallas Smythe and Herbert I. Schiller unquestionably were the dominant senior figures associated with the subfield in North America.³ Smythe was a native of Canada who earned his PhD in economics at Berkeley and went on to become the first chief economist at the US Federal Communications Commission in the 1940s. While at the FCC, Smythe was the primary author of the “Blue Book,” the public interest standard for commercial broadcasters that was arguably the most progressive regulation in US broadcasting history (Meyer, 1962a, 1962b; Pickard, 2006; Socolow, 2002). In 1948, he joined the faculty in the newly formed Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. Smythe immediately launched the first formal classes in the political economy of communication – not only in the United States, but possibly the world – and gave the field a toehold in the United States. Before returning to Canada in the 1960s, where he had considerable influence over Canadian political economy of communication, Smythe established himself as one of the foremost figures in US media studies and plowed a wide path for others to follow behind.

During his 15 years at Illinois, Smythe wrote papers on a broad range of topics, including how commercialism is the defining feature of US television; how US broadcast regulation and policy debates were distorted to serve corporate interests; the commercialization of the electoral process; and the elements of propaganda in the US media system. He wrote reports or testified on policy debates surrounding the development of public broadcasting, pay television, satellite communication, and the telephone monopoly of AT&T (Smythe, 1994).⁴ His landmark work from this era addressed telecommunications economics and policymaking, and here too, Smythe was decades ahead of his time in recognizing the need to fuse telecommunications with media in communication research (Smythe, 1957).

After returning to Canada, Smythe remained highly influential. In the 1970s and 1980s he redefined the study of commercial media, challenging the mainstream perspective that the primary relationship within media was that between media and the audience. Smythe argued that the core relationship, at least for broadcast media, was between the broadcaster and the advertiser. The product of value that was being produced, therefore, was in fact the audience, which was then sold to advertisers. Smythe then argued that the audience was in fact being exploited as it labored on behalf of the media company. His pacesetting work on the “audience commodity” has become central to the political economic tradition and debates in the United States.⁵

Herbert Schiller was a trained economist, too, who became Smythe's colleague at Illinois before moving to the University of California at San Diego in 1970. He is the single person most commonly identified with the political economy of communication, and in his long and storied career his work covered a broad range of issues. (For an excellent overview of Schiller's intellectual history, see Maxwell, 2003.) Like Smythe, Schiller looked at communication as an important component of corporate power. His first book, Mass Communications and American Empire, argued that communication and culture were an indispensable and growing part of the US global economic, political, and military agenda. It became the work that defined the debate on media or cultural imperialism for the next generation. To provide some sense of what a departure this was from thinking at the time, Schiller could find no publisher for the book among university or commercial presses, and had to rely upon a small publishing house that specialized in out-of-print economics classics, and was managed by an old friend (Schiller, 1992).⁶ Schiller wrote several more books in his career. His greatest work, in my opinion, was 1989's Culture, Inc., published just before his 70th birthday, in which Schiller made a compelling argument about the excessive commercialization of culture and everyday life in the United States and its anti-democratic implications. The book includes, among other things, a superb analysis of the commercialization of the First Amendment, one of the best critiques of the “audience has all the power” argument, and a discussion of the privatization and commercialization of information and data services and how this pertains to communication (Schiller, 1989).⁷

Together, Smythe and Schiller made the crucial and original argument that communication was becoming a central component of capitalist accumulation, with significant and striking implications for both communication and capitalism. They viewed communication and information – journalism, entertainment, libraries, museums, telecommunication – as a totality. Smythe and Schiller were making a historically specific argument about contemporary capitalism, one that had strong implications for politics. In many respects, these can be regarded as the founding observations upon which the political economy of communication is based. It was an argument made not just to communication scholars, but to political and social theorists and scholars in general, whom they believed undervalued the importance and role of communication. (The classic piece in this regard is Smythe, 1977.)

Smythe and Schiller were products of the great critical juncture of the 1930s and 1940s. They waded through the dark years of the 1950s and then dove headfirst into the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s. Although Smythe left for Canada in the early 1960s, he had helped lay the groundwork by participating actively in political discussions in Congress and in as many public forums as possible about satellite communication and other policy issues. By the late 1960s, Schiller began to forge contacts with the progressive FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson and with media reformers connected with the civil rights and antiwar movements. Smythe and Schiller's influence can be seen on a whole range of progressive reforms that emerged in that period: policies encouraging minority employment in the telecommunication and broadcasting industries; issues around concentration of ownership and cross-ownership (from blocking the ITT/ABC merger to pushing the “FinSyn” rules that prevented vertical integration in the television industry); and of course extending the earlier tradition of concern with the rights of viewers. Schiller is best known for his active role in publicizing and supporting efforts for a New World Information & Communication Order though UNESCO in the 1970s and 1980s.⁸

Finally, Smythe and Schiller both worked tirelessly to spawn a new generation of communication scholars working in the political economy tradition. Most of the next generation of scholars, which came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, had relationships with one or both of them. I was at the end of that generation and both of them embraced me and my research with open arms. They set the bar very high for those who followed.

Although Smythe and Schiller can be regarded as the founders of the field, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky played every bit as large a role for me and for many others who studied the political economy of communication. Herman was an economist who taught at the Wharton School of Finance at Penn, and he occasionally taught media courses at the university's Annenberg School. He was well aware of the field and close to Schiller. Chomsky was a linguist at MIT. Although I believe that linguistics belongs in the broader domain of communication studies, there wasn't much overlap between Chomsky's revolutionary research in linguistics and his prodigious analysis of media and politics.

Herman has made foundational contributions to the political economy of communication. He employed public good theory and microeconomic analysis to provide the basis for a critical assessment of media markets, one that did not presuppose profit-seeking media as inexorably “giving the people what they want” (Herman, 1993). Herman's work gave me increased respect for how the liberal tradition in mainstream economics could be used to great effect in understanding media industries.

Most important, along with Chomsky, Herman developed the “propaganda model” to explain the pro-elite and anti-democratic bias built into US news media coverage of public affairs. The propaganda model uses five filters – media ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and anti-communist ideology – to explain how very similar stories get radically different press treatment depending on their relationship to US elite interests. Stories that serve elite interests, like the Soviet downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983, receive extensive coverage and the treatment is full of outrage and sympathy for the victims; stories that go against US elite interests, like the US-allied death squads that murdered tens of thousands of civilians in Central America in the 1980s, barely rate a mention. The US role is downplayed, and the victims are regarded with suspicion (Herman & Chomsky, 1988). The system works not through any form of conspiracy; it is a “guided market” system where core values are internalized so that the story selection process seems natural and proper. Herman (1998) updated the propaganda model in the 1990s to account for the collapse of the Soviet Union. The propaganda model remains a useful reference point for critical assessments of the news media, and, as I discuss at the end of this chapter, is one of the signal contributions of the political economy of communication.

Herman earned his PhD in economics at the University of California at Berkeley, which was a locus for critical and institutional approaches to economics during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The most important figure at Berkeley was Robert A. Brady, who in the 1930s conducted pacesetting research on the relationship of business to policymaking. Brady (1937, 1943) compared the situation in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy with the United States, and saw parallels in the use of media, public relations, and advertising to control public opinion. In this sense his work dovetails the outer limits of what communication scholars like Paul Lazarsfeld were broaching at the same time. As Dan Schiller (1999) demonstrates, Brady's work was influential on Smythe and Herbert Schiller.

Noam Chomsky is the scholar who revolutionized the study of linguistics and ranks among the most prominent US intellectuals of the past hundred years. Beginning in the 1960s Chomsky began a parallel career as a social critic and activist, and soon he was arguably the best-known and respected radical critic of US foreign policy in the world. In the course of developing his criticism of international politics, Chomsky began to critique US news media coverage of foreign affairs, which he found highly propagandistic on behalf of elite interests. It was this work that led to his collaboration with Herman and the development of the propaganda model in the late 1980s. Chomsky's contributions to the political economy of communication go beyond his collaboration with Herman. His own writings in the 1980s, most notably 1989's Necessary Illusions, developed a rich media critique that pursued the tension between capitalist and democratic societies. Chomsky, more than any other figure, argued that the United States was far from being a genuine democracy, and that the media system played a major role in cementing inegalitarian class relations. His work drew from a critical reading of mainstream scholarship and a rich understanding of the classical and Anglo-American democratic traditions.

Chomsky's courage in forcefully critiquing communist countries while refusing to budge from his democratic, egalitarian, and radical principles influenced me a great deal. His commitment to rationalism, to evidence, to clear thinking, and his refusal to hold any sacred cows was intoxicating. Chomsky also, for the power and the principled nature of his critique, was remarkably open-minded and pragmatic about the process of making social change. His work with Herman became the prism through which my critique of news media, and much else, would be developed.

I also began to devour the work of Brits like Garnham (Garnham, 1979, 1985, 1983; Garnham & Bakewell, 1978; Garnham, Collins, & Locksley, 1988;), James Curran (Curran, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1986; Curran, Smith, & Wingate, 1987'), Peter Golding (Golding, 1974a, 1974b; Golding & Elliott, 1979; Golding & Middleton, 1982; Golding & Murdock, 1978; Golding, Murdock, & Schlesinger, 1986; Sills, Taylor & Golding, 1988), and Graham Murdock (Halloran, Elliott, & Murdock, 1970; Murdock, 1978, 1989a, 1989b; Murdock & Golding, 1989; Murdock & Janus, 1984; Murdock & Phelps, 1973; Schlesinger, Murdock, & Elliott, 1983). This was the gold standard; the four of them and their British cohort staked out the parameters for political economic analysis of communication. Golding and Murdock often wrote together, and their seminal 1973 essay in the Socialist Review effectively introduced the notion of the political economy of communication to the world at large (Murdock & Golding, 1974). I examined the emerging US tradition, too, reading the younger generation of scholars like Vinny Mosco, Dan Schiller, Oscar Gandy, Eileen Meehan, Manjunath Pendakur, Stuart Ewen, Eileen Mahoney, Sut Jhally, and Janet Wasko.⁹ One of the truly important works of the political economy tradition was a path-breaking and underrecognized collection called The Political Economy of Information edited by Mosco and Wasko (1988).

As impressive as this tradition was, even in its most dynamic phase there were only a relatively small number of scholars working in the area, and many important areas were unaddressed. The political economy of communication seemed like a great idea, but it was an idea still crystallizing. Therefore, I read widely in a number of other disciplines. In time, by the early 1990s, I cobbled together my own vision of what the political economy of communication entailed. When I read Vinny Mosco's admirable The Political Economy of Communication upon its publication in 1996 – arguably the first systematic effort to define the subfield – I realized there really was no consensus about the core issues and readings; everyone was cobbling just like I was.

In addition to the work being done inside the subfield, my understanding of the political economy of communication drew from a handful of intellectual traditions, only a little of which was found within the field of communication. In just about everything I taught, and in the formation of all my arguments in all of my research, these traditions have played a foundational role. They include:

1. The Monthly Review political economy of Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff.
2. The political sociology of C. Wright Mills and Jürgen Habermas.
3. The work on technology and communication of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Neil Postman.

In each of these traditions there were a number of scholars who influenced me, but I will mention the signature figures herein.

First, there was the Monthly Review political economy of Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, which highlighted the nature and importance of monopoly and corporations in modern capitalism. Sweezy, arguably the most original and brilliant US Marxist economist of the twentieth century, expanded upon Thorstein Veblen s work, and also drew from Marx and the left Keynesian tradition to produce the definitive treatment of modern corporate or “monopoly” capitalism.¹⁰ He also studied under Harold Laski and Joseph Schumpeter. This school of work is called the Monthly Review tradition after the magazine Sweezy founded in 1949 with Leo Huberman, and later co-edited with Harry Magdoff.¹¹

The centerpiece of the Monthly Review tradition has been its critique of contemporary capitalism, or what Baran and Sweezy term monopoly capitalism, because it is dominated by large corporations working in oligopolistic markets. This historically specific understanding of modern capitalism provided me with a framework to understand the broad pressure behind the critical junctures of the Progressive Era and the 1930s and 1940s. The Monthly Review tradition never tried to show how existing capitalism conforms to predictions made by Marx in 1867 or Lenin in 1914. Rather, the object is to understand how contemporary capitalism works based on its actual behavior using tools provided by Marx, Veblen, Keynes, Steindl (e.g., 1976), Kalecki, and Hansen, among others. Unlike too many mainstream economists, the Monthly Review tradition does not assume that the market is neutral or benevolent, that class inequality is natural, and that capitalism is ahistorical. And unlike too much of both Marxist and mainstream economics, the Monthly Review analysis includes a refreshing integration of the actual real-world capitalism of finance and corporate behavior into its theory. It is an empirically driven analysis, which I found complemented much of my neoclassical education in economics.

Baran and Sweezy's core argument is that monopoly capitalism has a strong tendency toward economic stagnation. Unlike neoclassical theory, which argues that the system tends toward full employment if the market is left to its own devices, Baran and Sweezy argue that the system tends toward crisis and depression. They laid this out in a book titled Monopoly Capital (Baran & Sweezy, 1966). In fact, while there is a good deal of debate over the merits of the Monthly Review position, their fundamental argument has proven valuable and provides a superior context for understanding economic policymaking in our times.

The second tradition that influenced me was the work of C. Wright Mills and Jürgen Habermas, which I found closely related. Mills's work drew attention to the importance of the public sphere and provided a searing critique of the problem of depoliticization in the United States. (For a superb recent overview of Mills, see Aronowitz, 2003.) When I entered graduate school in 1983, I considered this the single most important issue for social scientists to address in the United States; it remains almost as important to me today. Like Mills, I found the fingerprints of the media all over the deplorable state of our political culture. I found Mills's The Power Elite (1956) to be one of the most extraordinary books I had ever read. Although written in the 1950s, its critique resonated with what I saw in the United States of the 1980s, and what I see today.

In some ways Mills pointed to the issues that Habermas would later trigger with the translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and I consider Habermas to be making a similar argument. Habermas paralleled Mills's critique of modern Western liberal democracies. His argument made communication a central component of democracy, the structural/institutional basis for communication of paramount importance, and regarded both business and government domination of media as problematic for democracy (Habermas, 1991). A central problem in the political economy of communication had been the matter of determining a more democratic media system than that provided by the market. The problem has been that much more vexing because the “really existing alternative” to capitalism and commercial media for much of the twentieth century – the communist systems in Eastern Europe and Asia – were singularly unattractive from a democratic perspective (Sparks, 1997, 2001; Zhao, 1998). Habermas's notion of the public sphere, a place where citizens interact that is controlled by neither business nor the state, has provided an operating principle for democratic media. Following this logic, the policy trajectory of much political economic research in communication, certainly my own, has been to establish a well-funded non-profit, non-commercial, heterogeneous communication sector that is decentralized and controlled in a democratic fashion. Habermas's formulation was absolutely crucial in moving the debate in media studies away from the dominant notion that there were two – and only two – ways to organize media: the free, private media of democracy or the state-controlled media of authoritarian societies.¹²

Third, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Neil Postman each provided provocative critiques of society oriented around media technology.¹³ The Canadian economist Innis (1946, 1950, 1951) wrote long studies on the importance of communication systems and technologies in the course of human history. His approach was historical and sociological, locating communication in relation to social and political development. Innis argued that communication technologies were of paramount importance in understanding human development, and that they had profound biases. His work went far beyond traditional political economy and was influential most notably on James Carey, one of the founders of US cultural studies. (For a terrific interview with Carey where he discusses his intellectual antecedents, see Packer and Robertson, 2006.) Marshall McLuhan was also an acolyte of Innis, though this Canadian English professor altered Innis's arguments and disseminated them widely. He is best known for his notion that the “medium is the message,” that media are changing the very way we think and that human societies operate (McLuhan, 1962, 1999; McLuhan & Fiore, 1967; McLuhan & Zingrone, 1995). His work was very influential on innumerable thinkers, including Postman. Innis and McLuhan both, perhaps due to their nation of origin, did not share the embrace of US mainstream academic satisfaction with the commercial media status quo, and they were more than willing to greet the imperial claims of US scholars with skepticism. Their work opened the door for far more critical takes on communication, technology, and society. Postman's work, especially Amusing Ourselves to Death (1986), had the same effect (see also Postman, 1971, 1976, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, 2000; Postman & Powers, 1992; Postman & Weingartner, 1969). It created space for critical work.

Since media and communication sectors were generally defined by a specific technology – e.g., press, telegraph, film, radio, TV cable, and so on – I found that this work provided an important entrée to the issues that concerned me, like depoliticization. I was immediately hostile to anything that smacked of technological determinism, but I was also convinced that media technologies did have significant impact, what Marxists liked to call “relative autonomy.” Fundamental media technologies, which often emerged in a critical juncture, tended to be “path dependent,” meaning that once society opted for them, it was very difficult to switch to a different technology, even if that new technology was superior. Media technologies had unintended consequences. Today, it strikes me as quite plausible that the electronic media avalanche that people, especially children, are experiencing is having considerable effects upon them, arguably for worse.¹⁴ These effects are so closely intertwined with the commercialism that drives media in the United States that it is not always possible to disentangle the technological effect, but that does not mean there isn't one. A great deal more research is needed.

The inability of the political economy of communication to gain traction, to command the respect of its adversaries, during the critical juncture of the late 1960s and early 1970s put it in a precarious position by the 1980s. Political economists of communication saw our work as part of a broader intellectual and political movement for social justice and peace. When social activism outside the academy was strong, it energized the research and gave it meaning. The politics in society as a whole provoked important and pressing research questions. There was an implicit understanding that the research could contribute to social change. There was always a legitimate concern that research could turn into cheerleading, but healthy debate, rigorous standards, and the actual events taking place on the ground would serve to keep the research credible, original, and focused.

The problem for the political economy of communication (and critical work more broadly) came in the 1980s, when it was clear that the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had collapsed. Instead of having an army of supporters off-campus, critical scholars were all alone and very lonely. Political economists of communication appeared to unsympathetic observers as absurdly out of touch with reality, and the research was increasingly stigmatized as more of an ideological exercise than a branch of scholarship. The dynamism in the official culture was all on the right, and anyone on a college campus in the mid' 1980s could not help but be aware of the changes. The prospects for progressive social change could not have been much bleaker, and all hands were on deck simply trying to maintain the status quo from further right-wing attacks. In this context all critical work, especially political economy of communication research, began to lose its moorings. If social change for the better was unlikely or impossible, what exactly were we trying to accomplish with our work? The work then turned to providing a critique of the status quo with a vague goal of eventually down the road contributing to an enlightening of students and citizens who will rise up in rage against the machine. Even the most brilliant work of the late 1980s, say Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, allowed little hope that changing the media system or the society as a whole was a plausible goal. We were simply learning how the system worked for intellectual self' defense. We were speaking truth to power, but we had no illusions that we were in any position to contest that power.

At any rate, political economy had lost its “mojo,” and the dynamism that marked the field into the 1980s was a thing of the past. When Gerbner's Journal of Communication published its follow-up special edition on the state of the field in 1993, a mere three of the 20 essays were by political economists, and only a couple more by critical scholars sympathetic to political economy. And the JOC was edited by George Gerbner, who had been the mentor and benefactor of scholars working in the political economic tradition. A mainstream journal edited by any other prominent member of the field might have excised political economy altogether.

Starved of resources, with precious little institutional support, and in a hostile political environment, the political economy of communication produced a surprising amount of important and high; quality research. Although Smythe died at the beginning of the 1990s and Schiller left us at the beginning of the next decade, Mattelart (Mattelart, 1994, 2000, 2003; Mattelart & Mattelart, 1992, 1998) and the four Brits – Garnham (1990, 2000), Curran (Curran, 1995, 2000, 2002; Curran & Couldry, 2003; Curran, Eccleston, Oakley, & Richardson, 1986; Curran, Gaber, & Petley, 2005; Curran & Gurevitch, 2000, 2005; Curran & Morley, 2005; Curran & Seaton, 2003), Golding (Bondebjerg & Golding, 2004; Deacon & Golding, 1994; Ferguson & Golding, 1997; Golding & Harris, 1997; Golding & Murdock, 1997; McQuail, Golding, & Bens, 2005;, and Murdock (Wieten, Murdock, & Dahlgren, 2000) – have remained productive, and the situation in Britain was arguably no better for political economy of communication by then than in the United States. The second generation of US scholars who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s proved highly productive and have done original work in a broad range of areas.¹⁵ The real crisis facing the field is that because of the enormous constraints it did not spawn a significant “third generation” of self-identified political economists of communication who were pushing the project forward and breaking substantial new ground.

Fortunately, that has all changed dramatically in the past decade.

By the early 2000s, signs of the beginning stages of a critical juncture were all around us. Of the three criteria that set the stage for a critical juncture, one was clearly in place, another looked to be in place, and the third factor loomed distinctly on the horizon (McChesney, 2003). The digital revolution was undermining much of the existing media industries' business models, journalism was in freefall collapse, and the broader political economy ended the decade mired in crisis. To top it off, a media reform movement emerged under the guidance of Free Press that mobilized millions of US citizens around issues that had once been the private preserve of industry lobbyists.

In this context the political economy of communication has returned with a vengeance. Journals are publishing the research; universities are hiring in the area; and, most important, there is a large interest in the work among the general public. I will close this chapter by outlining what I regard as the key areas of research going forward. I count at least eight areas of “basic research” that require extensive work:¹⁶

1. A study of the policymaking process, with an emphasis upon history.
2. A detailed examination of the relationship of communication and information to the evolving global system of capitalism.
3. A critique of the market per se and a critique of media markets specifically.
4. A critique and study of advertising and the relationship of communication to marketing.
5. An integration of media and communication into democratic theory, with a rigorous study of journalism in this light.
6. A political economy of the Internet – looking at a myriad of issues that will determine the control and structure of the digital communication system, in particular telecommunications, spectrum, copyright, and privacy.
7. A study of different institutional structures for media enterprises and policies that have promoted different types of structures.
8. A study of global communication that takes up all these issues in a comparative and transnational sense, and that examines issues unique to the global communication system.

First, we need a much richer understanding of the policymaking process. We need a detailed empirical and possibly ethnographic examination of the policymaking process today. We have to better understand contemporary practices. We need to develop theoretical understanding of policymaking, and we need hard empirical analysis of how people influence policymaking. We also need historical case studies; as Susan Douglas argues, we need to convey the truth about our history to undermine the argument that what exists today is “inevitable.”

Second, it is often stated that capitalism is undergoing a dramatic transformation – most significantly, “globalization” – and that these fundamental structural changes owe in large part to developments with communication and information technologies. Often there are elaborate claims about increasing competition and innovation, with considerable effects upon productivity and economic growth. But we get far more pieties than we do hard research on these claims, and we lack detailed examinations on how the “new economy” works compared to the old one, and what the precise role of communication may be. In view of the centrality of communication to the economy, it is a travesty that scholars and policymakers are working with an understanding of the global transformation of capitalism that is based more on clichés than research. What is happening to the economy, in the final analysis, may be at the epicenter of the critical juncture. Communication scholars have an important role to play, alongside economists, in generating this research.

Third, the application of the simplistic notion of the “free market” to media needs a rigorous examination, even by political economists of communication (for a provocative discussion of this, see Perelman, 2006). If the second point addressed capitalism as a “macro” system, here I turn to microeconomics, or market and firm structure. Too often the “free market” has been accepted uncritically as the ideal structure for media industries, with little evidence to support the assumption. We increasingly understand that the conventional model of free market economics has severe limitations in its applicability to any real-world economic situations. Some of the most important breakthroughs in economics in the past decade – e.g., the Nobel Prize-winning research of Joseph Stiglitz – have called into question the basic assumptions of the legitimacy of “free markets” as necessarily rational, efficient, and just regulators of human activity (Stiglitz, 1986, 1988, 1989; Stiglitz & Greenwald, 2003; see also Camerer & Fehr, 2006).¹⁷ There is important work along these lines in the work termed the “new Keynesian economics,” which has questioned the assumptions and claims of neoliberalism (Akerlof & Yellen, 1985; Gordon, 1990; Greenwald & Stiglitz, 1993; Mankiw, 1990, 1992; Summers, 1988; Tobin, 1993; Yellen, 1984).

That concern is doubly true for media markets, which tend to be much closer to non-rivalrous public goods, rather than traditional markets where the price tends to gravitate toward the marginal cost of the product. Some excellent economic analysis of media markets has been done, but nowhere near enough (Anderson & Coate, 2005; George & Waldfogel, 2006; Hamilton, 2004; Shapiro & Varian, 1998; Waldfogel, 2003). We also need a much harder examination of how media corporations actually operate, rather than assume that these complex bureaucracies follow the same pattern as the owner–operator small firm of the Adam Smith era. And we need a thorough examination of the notion that media firms, due to market pressures, “give the people what they want” (Meehan, 2005; McChesney, 2004, discusses this point at some length). This canard has been left unchallenged all too long, even by critical scholars. It is ironic that intellectuals have accepted this premise while the “masses,” in repeated public hearings over the past four years, have suggested that they do not feel the existing market accurately reflects their values or preferences.

Fourth, we need a systematic and comprehensive examination of the crucial role advertising plays, as it is the thread that connects communication to capitalism. Advertising is a fundamental aspect of commercial media markets, and has significant influence over media content, yet the amount of research examining it is paltry by almost any standard. All indications are that this commercial carpet bombing has a considerable effect upon our culture, and one is hard pressed to locate much on the positive side of the ledger.¹⁸ Inger Stole's (2004) research indicates that advertising is evolving with the times, merging with public relations, and is even becoming a presence in the world of philanthropy, with dubious social implications. Even if we go to a digital communication system, there is no reason to believe that advertising and marketing will go away. Quite the contrary. We need to conduct hard research on the role, nature, and effects of commercialism in the digital media world. If the communication revolution, in the final analysis, merely provides a way for Madison Avenue to get into the DNA of our social nervous system, we may rue the day the computer was invented.¹⁹ In particular, the commercial indoctrination of children, as documented by Juliet Schor (2004), is largely unexamined and, as far as I can see, indefensible. Jeff Chester (2007), too, has done yeoman's work to uncover what marketers are up to online.

Fifth, there is an enormous disconnect between political theory and communication studies, particularly journalism. Both suffer as a result. We need to integrate the two and make strong arguments about the role of communication in a self-governing society, and the sorts of institutions and values that must guide them. This theoretical inquiry must be informed by history and empirical research. There are many good reasons for this avenue of research to be pursued, but let me provide you with the most pressing one. Invariably what occurs in a critical juncture will be reviewed by the Supreme Court, and its constitutionality will be measured. What the First Amendment means for freedom of the press is likely to be determined in the coming generation, and scholars need to start preparing for it now. There has been tremendous pressure to make the First Amendment into a piece of protective legislation for media corporations and commercial values, although the courts have not gone all the way in that direction.

Specifically, Supreme Court rulings have defended the principle that the First Amendment belongs to the public, and not media owners, on the basis that spectrum scarcity permits the government to intervene on behalf of the citizenry. This is a very thin reed to hang such an important principle on, and it is unlikely to empirically survive the digital era. Our challenge is to answer this call, working with what has been left to us by Jefferson, Madison, Black, and Stewart to generate a democratic vision of freedom of the press as a necessity for all citizens and for self-governance – not just a privilege for investors and companies that happen to have holdings in the media sector. As cases work their way through the system in the coming generation, we need to have hard empirical research as well as thoughtful treatises on the relationship of a free press to self-governance and what this means for the First Amendment. It is still to be determined. The important point is that this is not a legalistic matter to be left to the lawyers; it is the most fundamental of policies that requires the active participation of communication scholars and engaged citizens. The simplistic interpretation of the First Amendment proffered by many communication scholars at present is insufficient to the task at hand.

The next two areas of “basic” research are somewhat more substantial and require greater explanation. Sixth, we have to think broadly about the Internet and what type of digital communication world we wish to build. What we need is a political economy of the Internet. The best work along these lines by far has been done by a handful of legal scholars (Benkler, 2006; Goldsmith & Wu, 2006; Lessig, 1999, 2001, 2004). Such a political economy entails a multitude of issues. On the one hand, it requires some big-picture analysis of the relationship of the Internet to global capitalism and to democratic institutions. On the other hand, it includes a handful of specific areas that all boil down to crucial policy debates that loom on the horizon. This means that telecommunication research must be more closely integrated into media studies. Convergence is obliterating the distinction.²⁰

A number of other research and policy issues surround the Internet. Digital communication is radically overturning most media industries. Music is already on the chopping block (for a good review of trends in the music industry, see Parks, 2007); terrestrial broadcasting, daily newspapers and film are in the on-deck circle. All the other media industries are in line behind them, waiting their turn. We need to rethink copyright and intellectual property laws so that creative workers can receive just compensation for their labor without letting corporations put up barbed wire all over cyberspace, destroying the public domain and handcuffing creativity. Some new and pathbreaking communication research has developed the social and political implications of copyright (Bettig, 1996; Bettig & Hall, 2003; McLeod, 2005; Perelman, 2002; Vaidhyanathan, 2003, 2004). In many respects, the commercial media system as it has developed is a very bad fit for digital technology. Copyright has become, to some extent, a policy to protect out-of-date industries from change that would benefit everyone else, rather than a progressive policy and subsidy to promote creativity and culture. Similarly, we need to conduct research on privacy, surveillance, and data mining. How can we best protect privacy from governments and commercial interests? We need much more sustained research that leads to coherent policy proposals.

Seventh, even if we have a ubiquitous and affordable Internet, Net Neutrality, strict privacy protection, less restrictive copyright laws, and appropriate curbs on commercialism, all will not be settled in the digital media universe. Every bit as important, we have to use our intellects, imaginations, and research skills to develop alternative models for media organizations. Perhaps the most important lesson we have learned in the past decade has been that doing good media, even in the digital era, requires resources and institutional support. The Internet does many things, but it does not wave a magic wand over media bank accounts.

To do great media requires resources and compensated labor, and as a society we are going to have to generate policies, not unlike those created by the Founders, to spawn a vibrant media in the digital era. This is true across the board, but the crisis is most striking in the case of journalism, where the Internet not only doesn't fatten the bankroll, it doesn't offer protection when powerful government or business figures come after you. And good journalism will invariably antagonize someone in power. We need research that examines the institutional structures most conducive to vibrant journalism, as well as research that clarifies what factors produce the most negative effects. If one thing is clear, simply mixing the profit motive with digital technologies does not solve the problem.

Finally, we need to expand all of the above research to a global basis and internationalize our research. If the premises for US communication are disintegrating in a critical juncture, so must the assumptions of US scholars as we look at the world. We must work sympathetically with scholars and citizens in other lands facing situations similar to our own; they probably have more to teach us than we have to teach them (Morris & Waisbord, 2001; Price, 2002). This means doing hard comparative analysis of communication policies and systems in other nations. And we need to be more critical – in the intellectual sense of the term – toward the US government and commercial activities abroad; if we learn nothing else from the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is that the assumption that the United States is a benevolent force for good in the world needs to be established with evidence. A good starting point would be to regard the intentions and motives of the US government and corporations with the same skepticism – i.e., demand the same evidence for claims – we use in assessing the motives of other governments, especially those not on friendly terms with the US government. The double standard has never been defensible, but in a critical juncture it becomes pure propaganda.

Most important, while crucial policy decisions guiding the communication revolution are significantly national – and that is what I have emphasized herein – the global arena is growing in importance, and in an increasing number of cases it will override national policymaking. Moreover, these issues are closely tied to how the global political economy will develop, and how nations might improve the conditions for the mass of impoverished peoples. Already the question of whether media policies should be connected to global trade agreements has emerged; if they are so subsumed, that would override national policies (Geradin & Luff, 2004; Grant & Wood, 2004). Currently there are major debates globally over intellectual property and control and regulation of the Internet (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002). There are serious questions concerning advertising and the disposition of the spectrum. There are also important questions about global economic development using the new communication technologies.

In sum, the political economy of communication provides a basis for research that goes to the heart of social and intellectual concerns today. The subfield cannot alone come close to providing comprehensive answers to all the great questions before us, but it can make a necessary and valuable contribution to all research on these matters.

NOTES

1 This was an obsession of James Madison, and likewise explains his obsession with having a viable independent press that would keep the government from becoming an empire. One scholar who has drawn the connection between US empire and domestic crisis that resonate well with a critical juncture analysis is Chalmers Johnson (2007).

2 http://www.thebulletin.org/

3 Profiles of Smythe and Schiller can be found in Lent (1995).

4 This includes much of his most important work.

5 Political economy of communication was anything but a monolithic enterprise in this period. Smythe's arguments provoked considerable and spirited debate. See, for example, Murdock (1978).

6 After initial success, Beacon Press bought the rights to the book, and a second edition was published in 1992 by Westview.

7 Schiller's final book was a fine restatement of his core positions and showed that he was keenly aware of global developments. See Schiller (1996).

8 I want to thank Dan Schiller specifically for much of the material in this paragraph.

9 Some of the work from the political economy tradition that caught my attention (and not mentioned elsewhere in this chapter) in the 1980s included: Ewen (1977); Gandy (1982); Jhally (1990); Leiss, Kline, and Jhally (1986); Mosco (1979, 1989); Schiller (1982); Turow (1984, 1989); Wasko (1982).

10 Sweezy (1970) also wrote arguably the finest introduction to Marxist political economy in the English language.

11 I had the privilege of co-editing Monthly Review with John Bellamy Foster, Harry Magdoff, and Paul Sweezy from 2000 to 2004. I left MR when my work with Free Press took off, although I continue on its board of directors.

12 The classic statement of this position ironically located four theories, but really came down to “us versus them.” See Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm (1956).

13 Several people whom I respect followed the technological path to Jacques Ellul. That was never my trajectory but for those interested, see Ellul (1965, 1980, 1990).

14 I am not close-minded on this issue. See Shaffer (2006). For a provocative discussion about how our romanticization of the benefits of a print-dominated culture may obscure our ability to understand the benefits of the coming digital communications era, see Stephens (1998).

15 This is some of the more impressive research generated by the political economy of communication tradition since the 1990s through to today that is not mentioned elsewhere in the chapter: Gandy (1993, 1998); Hagen and Wasko (2000); Jhally and Lewis; 1992); Mosco (2004); Pendakur (2003); Reese, Gandy, and Grant (2001); Splichal and Wasko (1993); Sussman (1991, 1997, 2005); Sussman and Lent (1998); Turow (1992, 1997); Turow and Kavanaugh (2003); Wasko (1992, 1994, 2001, 2003, 2005); Wasko and Mosco (1992); Wasko, Phillips, and Meehan (2001).

16 Interestingly, these are areas that get far more attention as a rule in communication departments outside the United States. As ICA president Sonia Livingstone, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, wrote to me upon reading this section of my manuscript: “I am less sure about ongoing US research, but I am clear that this is, exactly, the research agenda for many of us in Europe. Indeed, it reads like a run down of what's going on in my department right now.” Sonia Livingstone email to the author, February 23, 2007.

17 There are classic texts that make these points as well, and they are well worth reading: Bator (1960); Kapp (1950); Mishan (1968, 1971, 1973a, 1973b, 1973c, 1982, 1986); Scitovsky (1971).

18 See, for example, Associated Press (2007, p. A5). I take up this point below in my discussion of the Internet.

19 I am reminded of the comments of New Republic editor Bruce Bliven in the 1930s. He found broadcast advertising so “obnoxious” that he wished “the radio had never been invented” (cited in McChesney, 1994, p. 105).

20 One very important scholar of telecommunications who has addressed the Internet directly is Milton Mueller (1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2004).

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