Political economy and media production: a reply to Dwyer
journal contribution
posted on 2016-08-05, 10:15 authored by Graham Murdock, Peter Golding© The Author(s) 2016.This is a response to an article by Paul Dwyer in this Journal which makes several claims about the nature and impact of the political economy approach to the analysis of media and communications. We argue that Dwyer’s article misunderstands or is unaware of the history of this approach, and quite fundamentally misconstrues its central tenets. Our response explains how, in capitalist societies, media organisations are integrated into general processes of accumulation, how they exercise power, and how their strategies shape the communications landscape. We explain how the critical political economy approach actually works and illustrate how it has been deployed for concrete analysis in ways that Dwyer seems unaware of. Analysis of shifts in the organisation of capitalism and of their consequences for the structure of cultural production is essential alongside detailed research into how shifting webs of pressure and opportunity impinge on the everyday business of crafting cultural goods in specific cultural industries. We argue that, contra Dwyer, contemporary analysis has a rich legacy of work in both areas on which to build.
History
School
- Loughborough University London
Published in
Media, Culture and SocietyVolume
38Issue
5Pages
763 - 769Citation
MURDOCH, G. and GOLDING, P., 2016. Political economy and media production: a reply to Dwyer. Media, Culture and Society, 38(5), pp. 763-769.Publisher
© The Authors. Published by Sage.Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2016Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Media, Culture and Society and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443716655094ISSN
0163-4437eISSN
1460-3675Publisher version
Language
- en
Administrator link
Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedLicence
Exports
RefWorksRefWorks
BibTeXBibTeX
Ref. managerRef. manager
EndnoteEndnote
DataCiteDataCite
NLMNLM
DCDC