The Political Economy of Media: enduring issues, emerging dilemmas, written by Robert McChesney and published in May 2008, is the companion volume to McChesney’s Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media, published in 2007 in hardback and republished in paperback form in December 2008. Together, the books (encompassing over 900 pages) present a cogent theme of how and why the American media can better fulfill its role as an institution of American constitutional democracy, while showing that Americans are now at a “critical juncture” during which we can improve media.

In the introduction to this seminal work, author McChesney defines “the political economy of media” as the sociopolitical history and economics of media and communication, as opposed to research into the effects of media consumption or media technology. According to McChesney, media does not exist in a vacuum, but evolves in response to public policies and processes. Any comprehensive research into media and communication must by necessity also study societal institutions, market structures, technologies, media ownership and government policies, according to McChesney. McChesney’s primary question tying The Political Economy of Media’s 23 chapters together is how media promotes or destabilizes democratic institutions and practices, and through this inquiry, political economy of media research and activism can help make society more democratic by making media better.

McChesney is one of the country’s foremost scholars on media and communications and in both books he makes a powerful argument for Americans to be aware of the risks the corporate conglomeration of media spells for the future. In a different but parallel context, 45 years ago media pioneer Dennis Holt also responded to the need for media reform when he created the world’s first standalone media management business, in direct opposition to the prevailing advertising model in which massive national and international advertising conglomerates had dominated the interaction between their clients and the media, supplying all the media deliverables. Through his new media buying and planning service, Dennis Holt could provide advertising agencies (and their clients) with a volume buyer that could aggregate their money and manage their media planning and buying activities, creating economies of scale that in turn could translate into better deals for them from the media.

The first section of The Political Economy of Media: enduring issues, emerging dilemmas, titled JOURNALISM, examines the history of American newspaper reporting and the movements which have shaped it since the turn of the century, with perceptive looks at important social critics such as Upton Sinclair and defining moments such as the first US invasion and occupation of Iraq one generation after Sinclair’s death. Sinclair became famous for his 1906 novel The Jungle, which addressed the deplorable food preparation practices in the US meat packing industry and caused a public hue and cry that ushered in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906. CRITICAL STUDIES, the second section of the book, reports on American media since the end of WWI, the history of sports coverage in the US and the rising globalization of media and American culture. POLITICS AND MEDIA REFORM, the third and final section of the book, focuses on the business structures of media, the Internet and the social disenchantment with corporate media and efforts to reform and improve media.

Some of McChesney’s strongest arguments relate to the Internet and how, if it is monopolized by business conglomerates, it serves not as a channel of open discourse but as a purveyor of inequality, as suggested by such contemporary social dysfunctions as the “digital divide,” where economically disadvantaged Americans receive reduced access to high-technology and particularly the Internet. McChesney makes a searing argument against the conglomerates who would assume control of the Internet and World Wide Web if given free reign to do so, noting that government is already complicit to such concentration by its licensing policies for certain Internet service providers.

These weighty volumes may be the magnum opus of one of America’s most important media analysts, and are must-reads for anyone serious about the academic study of media and communications in America. McChesney’s mastery of detail and thematic simplification shows, for example, in chapter 14, The Political Economy of International Communications. McChesney takes a potentially enormous and fragmented subject and summarizes it very efficiently, obviously because he knows the subject like the back of his hand but also because his intent is that the book be accessible to the average reader. This chapter alone is worth several re-reads.

It is vital to remember that McChesney is not a left-wing media cynic and The Political Economy of Media: enduring issues, emerging dilemmas is not a polarizing work that secretly screams “trash the whole media system because it is hopelessly corrupt.” Rather, the book is a thoughtful, carefully researched treatise on how to fix media so as to ensure that Americans realize its full potential. These ideals have roots reaching back to the founding of our country, as both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, two of the framers of the Constitution and founders of the United States, worried that America’s embryonic democracy would be threatened with perpetual inequality if the country did not monitor and correct its media systems to ensure an open press and access to unbiased information. Indeed, as political theorists, Jefferson and Madison subscribed to the wisdom that the new republic needed checks and balances to protect individual rights from the tyranny of the majority, oligarchies and government hegemony. As documented by McChesney’s theses in the two books, their concerns are as valid now as they were 200 years ago.

By Darrell Woody

Gazette Staff Writer

References:

McChesney, Robert W. (2008). The Political Economy of Media: enduring issues, emerging dilemmas. New York: Monthly Review Press. ISBN 978-1-58367-162-7 (Hardback).

McChesney, Robert W. (2008). Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media. New York: The New Press. ISBN 978-1595584137 (Paperback).