ABSTRACT
The economic approach to the sociology of journalism (also known as the political economy model) asserts that the output of journalistic media is principally determined by the economic structure of the organisations concerned. It is founded on the materialist view of society (as opposed to pluralist) elaborated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century. In a capitalist society such as Britain, the media generally take the form of
privately owned business enterprises which, like other forms of capitalist ownership, tend to be concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population. The essence of the economic approach is that the journalism produced by these organisations is inflected in such a way as to serve the interests of that minority – to reproduce their ideas, values and ways of seeing the world as part of the process by which society is able to reproduce itself. It emphasises ‘the centrality of economic ownership … and the strictures and logic of the market’ (Curran, 1990: 139). Ralph Miliband articulated this viewpoint when he wrote that:
Rather obviously, those who own and control the capitalist mass media are most likely to be men whose ideological dispositions run from soundly
conservative to utterly reactionary; and in many instances, most notably in the case of newspapers, the impact of their views and prejudices is immediate and direct, in the straightforward sense that newspaper proprietors have often not only owned their newspapers but closely controlled their editorial and political lines as well, and turned them, by constant and even daily intervention, into vehicles of their personal views.
