Media studies scholars underweighted the influence of ownership and capitalism

Evidence

Robert McChesney once decried the “sad state of political economy” in U.S. media studies, and claimed that scholars had made a “molehill out of a mountain.” We’d taken the mountainous problem of media ownership and capitalist culture and dismissed it as inessential, or insurmountable, in a digital world full of subversive texts, active fans, resistant practices, and global circulation. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 30

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth verifying whether McChesney’s critique of U.S. media studies’ political economy strand was warranted, and how the field has responded since.