ABSTRACT
Mapping approaches and themes Media cultures, media economics, media problems Critical political economy (CPE) explores problems of the media. CPE is associated most of all with a critique of marketisation. The pursuit of marketisation worldwide over recent decades has involved a concerted institutional and ideological attack on the established organization of public culture. There are classical arguments in defence of market provision of media, but also contemporary perspectives that refute the diagnosis as well as the proposed treatments that CPE advocates. New liberalism, neoliberalism, marks a reassertion of individualism animated by a modern notion of consumer sovereignty. It is a political philosophy rooted in a claim that the market is more rational than the state in the redistribution of public resources. State intervention, which is anathema to the libertarian wing of economic liberalism, finds justification in social market approaches developed in the twentieth century. For Maynard Keynes and later advocates of social market policies, market failure necessitates state intervention.
