THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS COMMUNICATION

1
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS COMMUNICATION

• Some Preliminary Comments

2
What is this course about?

• Media
• Plus Politics
• Plus Economics
• AND THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THESE THREE
  THINGS

3
Media

• Newspapers
• Books and Magazines
• Radio
• Broadcast Television
• Cable and Satellite Television
• Telecommunications
• Broadband Communications
• The Internet
• ETC. ETC

4
Politics

• Politics - the processes of government,
  government agencies. regulatory agencies that
  report to governments, non-governmental
  associations or organizations that seek to
  influence government, political parties etc.

5
Economics

• Economics - the factors that bear upon the costs
  of media operations, and the revenues earned by
  media operations, the business models that
  underline their operations, as well as the
  economic system of which they are a part, and
  about which they report.

6
Media as Businesses

• Thinking about the media as businesses this
  will be of benefit to those of you are interested
  in media, or plan careers in the media. It will
  also interest those of you who are interested in
  business and economics in general. Some of you
  may be interested in alternative media

7
Media as more than businesses

• Thinking about media as more than just businesses
  as institutions that play a crucial part of our
  political life, and of our cultural life.

8
Bringing the two together

• Thinking about how these two features (media as
  business media as more than business) of the
  media are reconciled - to varying and
  controversial extent - by regulatory structures
  of one kind or another, and some of the
  implications of this.

9
Implications

• We cannot think through the implications without
  a fuller understanding of the broader contexts
  within media operate, including their historical
  context, their cultural context, their
  international context.
• One big factor that we will be considering is the
  extent to which the economics and the politics of
  media determine media content, and what the
  implications of this are for consciousness