COMS 361 - Lesson 3, Political Economy and Hegemony

Political Economy and Hegemony

The Political Economy of Media

The propaganda model by Herman and Chomsky is part of the study of the political economy of the media.
Involves critical theory focusing on power relationships in media.
Analyzes media industries, ownership, and their connection to politics.
Media is viewed as an industry that functions within the corporate world.
Media acts as a broker of power and its analysis must consider interconnections with political, social, industrial, and cultural structures.

Advertising and Funding in Media

The prevalence and dependence of ads are a primary funding source for media:

Advertising is viewed as prioritized content that makes the media function.
Programming (type, length, content) is oriented around ads and their placements and not the other way around.

Ads and the sources they originate from have the power to drive the media agenda, control programming, and impact decisions made by media makers.

Audiences, Commodities, and Work

The Shift in Understanding Audience Value

Media theorist Dallas Smythe (1981) redefined the media's output focus.
Emphasizes that the audience is the key product of media.
Audiences are bought and sold to industry on a continual basis.
The audience is a commodity that works through its views and participation in the media.
- Example: Super Bowl ad costing $5.2 million is based on an audience of over 90 million.
- Audiences are captured and commoditized for advertisers.

Hegemony and its Implications

Understanding Hegemony

When thinking of the political economy of the media, one must ask how it works:
- Why would audiences allow media industries to manipulate them in such a manner?
- Why would audiences willingly allow media industries to buy and sell them?
Hegemony: a tool in explaining the audience-media-industry relationship, or to rule via persuasion and consent.

Antonio Gramsci's Contributions

Hegemony originates from Gramsci's writings during his imprisonment, in Italy, during which he wrote he ‘Prison Notebooks’. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is fairly complex, and he discussed many concepts in depth:

Class rule
Class dominance
Popular consent
Power and culture
Moral authority basis

He connects these related powers to their functioning within democratic as well as authoritarian systems of social governance.

Power Dynamics and Media Hegemony

Gramsci's Perspective on Power Operations

Gramsci noted that dominant classes, the bourgeoisie, ruled with the consent of subordinate masses.

Protected some interest of the subordinate classes in order to gain their support in a shared sense of social interests
Hegemony in this context refers to the cultural, moral, and ideological leadership of a group over allied and subaltern groups.

Consent and Its Role in Hegemony

Groups accept authority and become complicit in their own subordination through the consent to be governed

Hegemony can be viewed as a form of power that is negotiated and tacitly agreed upon.
Hegemony is not fixed

Application of Hegemony to Media

Applied to the media, hegemony can be referred to as media hegemony or as the dominance of aspects of life by the media.

Seen as an important form of consented dominance given to the media by the masses in order for it to function.
The mass media thereby functions through the power of hegemony by offering dominant views that penetrate society.
Media hegemony shapes society through powerful values, culture, and ideology that is circulated in the media (Altheide, 1984).

Resistance to Hegemony

Critiques and Theories on Hegemony

Many theorists have offered critiques to this version of hegemony, including Gramsci himself.

Gramsci believed that agitation from the ground up could eventually lead to challenging hegemonic power.

Media theorists (such as David Altheide) warn against uncritical views of media hegemony as a homogeneous paradigm in viewing television news.