The Political Economies of Media and the Transformation of the Global Media Industries

Abstract

In this introductory chapter, I want to set the scene for this book and to paint a broad portrait of a certain view of communication and media studies, and the role of different political economies of the media in the fi eld. Communication and media studies often labor under the illusion that political economy comes in one fl avor, but here I suggest that we can identify at least four perspectives that have considerable currency in the fi eld. They are (1) conservative and liberal neoclassical economics; (2) radical media political economy, with two main versions, the monopoly capital and digital capitalism schools; (3) Schumpeterian institutional political economy and two recent offshoots, the creative industries and network political economy schools; and lastly (4) the cultural industries school. Of course, neither all of this volume's authors nor communication and media studies as a fi eld can be placed so neatly in these categories, but other approaches can be thought of as derivatives of them (e.g. cultural economy, neo-Marxian political economy, critical cultural political economy, and economic geography). To begin, we need to clearly specify our "object of analysis." To that end, I focus on the "network media industries," a composite of the 10 largest media and internet industries, ranked by total worldwide revenues: television, internet access, newspapers, books, fi lms, magazines, music, radio, internet advertising, and video games. These industries do not exist all on their own but are surrounded by the "social ecology of information" and fl anked, on one side, by the telecoms industries and, on the other, by the information, communication, and technology (ICT) sector.