ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, many dimensions of social life that once remained at least partly outside the structure of the market have now been incorporated substantially into it. The mass media are among the most important of those social institutions which have been subject to ‘enclosure’ by the logic of the market in the Age of Neoliberalism. It is common today to build the story of recent social change, and in particular to discuss change in media institutions over the past generation, in terms of the shift to neoliberalism. All too often, however, this way of telling the story of media and social change rests content with vague and simplistic formulations which, I will argue, are far from adequate to understand the changes that have taken place in media and in social systems over this period. Take for example David Harvey’s generally very useful little book A Brief History of Neoliberalism. This book says curiously little about the media, though it could be argued that changes in the media system are actually rather central to the rise of neoliberalism. This is because market-based media have often displaced non-market forms of social organisation – as political marketing, for example, displaces older forms of political organisation – and because contemporary media are among the ‘new apparatuses that integrate subjects into a moral nexus of identifications’ (Rose 1996: 57-8) that are crucial to the ‘government at a distance’ that constitutes what Rose calls ‘advanced liberalism’. What Harvey does say is the following (p. 80): ‘a few media magnates control most of the flow of news, much of which then becomes pure propaganda’. This analysis is consistent with Harvey’s general interpretation of neoliberalism as above all a restoration of the social and political power of economic elites. Many accounts within media studies characterise the shift to neoliberalism in the media sphere rather differently, as a process of depoliticisation, in which media lose their function as institutions of the public sphere and are absorbed into the world of commerce and consumption as mere vehicles for advertising and for a commodified entertainment industry. There are ways in which these two formulations might be reconciled, but they are different enough on the surface to suggest the need for a fairly careful analysis about just what the significance of the shift toward more market-driven media actually is.
