Critical Crossroads or Parallel Routes?: Political Economy and New Approaches to Studying Media Industries and Cultural Products

The study of media industries may be relatively new to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), but focus on this area has a long history and, in the United States, has included research on the interconnected industries of telephony, radio, film, journalism, and television. Much of this work can be divided into two perspectives: the first celebrates the individuals, working cohorts, companies, and markets constituting the entertainment-information sector of the US economy; the second contextualizes those individuals, working cohorts, companies, and markets within the ongoing development of capitalism. The celebratory approach has often been called media economics, whereas the contextual approach is generally called political economy of the media.

As supporters of the contextual approach, we are accustomed to being denounced, accused, and misrepresented: denounced as economic reductionists; accused of ignoring media workers, artifacts, and audiences; and misrepresented as latter-day members of the Frankfurt School who blame “evil capitalists” for the media’s content and operations.¹ In this commentary, we respond to the recent round of misrepresentations of political economy with illustrations of research within a contextual tradition.

“New” Approaches to Studying Media Industries.

During the 1990s, a number of approaches emerged in Media Studies building on the work of a few film scholars while asking questions similar to those explored by political economists.² These “new” approaches have fallen under various rubrics, including creative industries, convergence culture, production culture, production studies, cultural economy, and media industry studies.³ These developments are well represented by the growth of Media Industry Studies and the founding of the SCMS Media Industries Studies Scholarly Interest Group, which has continued to rapidly increase in popularity.

The explications of these “new” approaches have often included a rejection of political economy as a viable framework for studying the media. Certainly, the choice of a theoretical framework is up to the researcher. However, these discussions have also presented a number of misrepresentations of a political economic approach that we feel compelled to discuss. We note here that we do not necessarily speak for other researchers who may embrace a political economic perspective, sometimes as only one of the lenses they use to understand media.

We focus in the following pages on the discussions of a Media Industry Studies approach. For instance, in their edited collection devoted to Media Industry Studies, Holt and Perren state that they intend to provide a framework for the “new field”: “While the world does not necessarily need another field of study, one has indeed emerged.”⁴ Although that may have some validity in terms of SCMS, it ignores celebratory research on media industries published in journals such as those supported by the Broadcast Education Association, the International Communication Association, and the National Communication Association (previously the Speech Communication Association). Holt and Perren’s collection covers a range of perspectives, including calls for an integrative approach,⁵ as well as those who argue that the study of political economy—specifically, the North American version—is problematic.

In another example, Havens, Lotz, and Tinic have outlined an approach called Critical Media Industries Studies. They argue that this was part of Cultural Studies from its very beginning but was eclipsed by textual analysis and reception studies. Consequently, scholars have used various phrases to describe middle-range studies of the managerial and production employees working in media operations. They seek to unify these various scholars under the umbrella of Critical Media Industries.

We appreciate the increased attention to institutional and economic dimensions of the media. We also note that these “new” approaches claim to draw on existing theoretical frameworks, such as cultural studies and political economy. However, most often, the theories, methods, and findings of political economy are ultimately rejected. Some of the accusations have to do with the level of analysis and which media are studied: “Critical political economy approaches, which predominantly and consistently focus on the larger level operations of media institutions—and, with few exceptions, emphasize news production—have been a favored paradigm among many media scholars...