Admittedly, I am getting a late start on this week’s blog post, primarily due to the fact that to understand Garnham’s “Political Economy of Mass Communication,” I needed some serious contextualization. My undergraduate business education provided very little background on political economy (at least, not from a purely Marxist standpoint), and certainly nothing on the idealists of the bourgeois cultural society.
But the extra time allowed me to comment on what Garnham (or Uricchio, or Chakravartty) might think about a few of the announcements made in the “media” industry this morning. Specifically, the “non-merger merger” (a term paraphrased from The New York Times’ Brian Stelter) of Yahoo! and ABC News is indicative of the media landscape roll-up that has been occurring over the past few decades.
This consolidation of news outlets is a direct result of Garnham’s “industrialization of culture,” part of a concentration of capital and the commoditizing of culture. I realize it’s important to distinguish between news reporting media and entertainment based media, but as we can see from Stelter’s piece, the line between the two continues to blur. In the announcement of the deal, Stelter writes of “brand-name stars like Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric” and that Yahoo will be running a new site, GoodMorningAmerica.com, a site based on the TV show of the same name whose genre can, at the very least, be seen straddling the lines between news and entertainment.
Further, the article highlights the theoretical numbers of unique visitors which the new joint venture will garner (100 million), a metric about which The Huffington Post (itself, part of media conglomerate Aol) is bragging about this morning as well. These announcements speak to Garnham’s assertion that the political economy of mass communication will, among other things, create, package and sell not informational goods direct to consumers, but audiences to advertisers. Of course, it’s worth noting that we are seeing recent evidence of the former as news outlets such as The Economist, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe erect “pay-walls,” requiring consumers to pay directly.
Recently, we’ve also seen evidence of consolidation leading to a small piece of a media organization causing massive public relations incidents. When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp went under public scrutiny for its News of the World property’s role in the “hacking scandal” this summer, he himself had to answer to the UK government. As the blog Newsonomics points out, the parent company has been forced to separate itself from the UK dealings and could look to do so by becoming “more American.” One wonders what William Uricchio would say about this, especially in relation to his assertion that “when popular culture crosses borders, it seems to generate suspicion and hostility.”