U.S. media studies has neglected political economy of media ownership

Evidence

The political economy of media approach is my primary influence, as it concerns itself with the relationship between media and the broader social structure of society. How does the capitalist system, driven as it is now by the appetites of financial capital, shape the media system as a whole? This is a question rarely asked directly within media studies. 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. “It strikes me as highly questionable,” McChesney suggested, “not to have a working knowledge of political economy, of how capitalism works, of how democracy functions in a materialist and institutional sense.” — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 30

Categorization

• XREF: McChesney’s account of a US media-studies blind spot parallels the Frankfurt School chapters on the Institute’s own uneasy relationship to empirical media research.