The Rise and Fall of the Political Economy of Communication
This is McChesney's personal memoir and his coming-of-age. It began as a graduate student at the University of Washington in 1983 when Ronald Reagan was President and the nation veered sharply right. It was a depressing time for those on the left, and as a result, communication research became uncritical, neutral and stuck to the notion that markets should be "free" and the corporate media system was just, fair, and the only alternative. Conflicting notions were unthinkable as neoliberalism took hold and hardened in the 1990s.
McChesney had other views and believed sticking to "uncritical assumptions was a thoroughgoing abrogation of intellectual responsibility." It wasn't the best of times to say that and doing it meant very shaky prospects for a successful academic career in communications or in any academic capacity. Even distinguished scholars like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman were dismissed out of hand in even harsher terms.
At the time of the Cold War, "you were either with us or against us," and the options were a free market commercial media or a government run one. McChesney called it "maddening." He and others like him "wanted a new course, independent of corporate or state control," but it was tough selling that position when dominant thinking went the other way.
McChesney then gives considerable space to reviewing scholars who influenced him most. This review can only touch on them. He notes how Marx had "singular importance" for communications scholars and young radical social scientists back in those days. And by it, he means two Karl Marxes and not the one unfairly demonized in public propaganda. One was the socialist activist and enlightened optimist as Edward Herman described him. The other was an "exceptionally intelligent and learned observer of capitalism" and one of the world's greatest ever thinkers and political philosophers.
McChesney believes his influence on critical communication research "remains considerable." He stressed that capitalism was based on the pursuit of profit, or what's called the capital accumulation process. That distinguishes it from feudalism, and accumulation means finding it everywhere possible. Marx also wrote about it as a practicing journalist, and McChesney calls him one of "the greatest journalists of the nineteenth century."
Consider the commercial media then. Much of its history has been the "colonization of....noncommercial cultural practices," using capital to create new ones, and "turning culture into a commodity." Put another way - in commercial spaces, it's anything for a buck and any way to pay labor the least amount to maximize them. Hence, an inevitable class struggle and having to adapt to the market or be crushed by it. McChesney calls this the "indispensable starting point for cultural analysis." We're blasted with this thinking because we're "awash in commercialism" with all its Marxian "commodity fetishism" - branding, advertising and endless promotion to convince us interchangeable products are different when, in fact, they're pretty much the same except in our minds and how ad wizards influence them.
McChesney then reviews the many scholars who influenced his development beginning with Nicolas Garnham, James Curran, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock in the UK. He also learned about George Gerbner's work as editor of the Journal of Communication. Most important was the work of Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller. They were dominant senior figures associated with the North American communication political economy. Smythe was decades ahead of his time in "recognizing the need to fuse telecommunications with media in communications research."
Schiller became Smythe's colleague at the University of Illinois before moving to the University of California at San Diego in 1970. He also studied communication as an important component of corporate power and wrote how culture and communication were indispensable parts of the US global economic, political and military agenda. In addition, he argued that commercializing culture had anti-democratic implications, and he and Smythe both were instrumental in developing a new generation of communication scholars.
McChesney cites Chomsky and Herman as well for having played "every bit as large a role for (him) and for many others" in their development in communication and political economy studies. Especially important was the "propaganda model" they developed in their seminal 1988 work, Manufacturing Consent. It consisted of five filters - media ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak and anticommunist ideology - to "filter out the news to print, marginalize dissent (and assure) government and dominant private interests" control the message the public gets. The "filters" remove what's to be censored and leaves in "only the cleansed (acceptable) residue fit to print" or broadcast. McChesney calls the "propaganda model" one of the "signal contributions of the political economy of communication" and goes on to review other notable figures in his development as a scholar/activist in the field.
Among them were C. Wright Mills and his classic book, The Power Elite. Also Jurgen Habermas in directing media studies away from the notion that there are only two ways to organize media - private or state-controlled. He then mentions Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Alexander Meiklejohn and others and the important contributions each of them made.
Finally, there's the Monthly Review political economy of Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff that highlighted the "nature and importance of monopoly and corporations in modern capitalism." Monthly Review's tradition doesn't assume the market is neutral or benevolent or that class inequality is natural. It also rejects the notion that markets work best. On the contrary, Baran and Sweezy argued the dominant system "tends toward crisis and depression," and history proves it.
They also explained the role of advertising that's simply marketplace manipulation to make interchangeable products look different (or sows ears look like silk purses) and uses spurious claims to do it. Sweezy and Magdoff further analyzed how global capitalism was shifting to a "financialization" system under which financial speculation and debt accumulation were growing at exponential rates. The result is extraordinary instability that may in the end usher in another Great Depression like in the 1930s with some economists and social observers believing it could be the worst one ever and longest lasting. Predictions are never easy, "especially about the future" as film mogul Louis B. Mayer once told an interviewer who asked how well his newest movie would do at the box office.
McChesney says that scholars (aside from Mr. Mayer) produced his foundational knowledge base on which he built his own research and writings. They're considerable and continue to expand with new books, scores of articles and the most important media reform activism anywhere by the man most qualified to lead it in spirit, scholarship and by example.
He begins by defining the political economy of communication subfield and its two components:
First, it must address "in a critical manner" how the media system interacts with and affects the disposition of power in society. What side is it on - the progressive one for reform or that of the ruling elite. "In a critical manner" is the "nub of the matter" for him. The measure he uses relates to the information necessary (from journalism through the media) for self-government and effective freedom. The media has to be a watchdog to keep a check on those in power or want it. It has to separate truth from lies, provide a wide range of information and opinion on vital issues, and get it to the majority of people to be a truly democratic force in a free society.
I am a 72 year old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.
