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MDIA 1091 WEEK FOUR
Political Economy of the Media:
'What happened to the Internet?'
Today’s to do:
PART ONE
• To explore the Political Economy of the Media
• To examine how data capitalism and surveillance capitalism operate
• To situate this in relation to questions of media ownership/platformisation
• Explore how journalistic principles and business models have been affected.
PART TWO - workshop
• Reviewing the four lenses and your 2nd assessment.
Questions from P.E.M
• How are commercial interests driving and shaping our mediated
experiences?
• What does this tell us about power in capitalist structures?
Political Economy of the Media
• Ownership of media
• Competition between businesses
• Relationship between government and businesses
• Monetization of media processes
• How does this effect the social and political interactions of our daily
lives? News media as a case study.
Competition
For Attention
Competing Business Models
New Technologies
Government/Business
Relations
Ideals
(the Internet and
Journalism)
Business Models
Market Competition
(Advertising)
What happens to 'democracy' and citizens' agency/participation?
What happens to the media content and the form it takes?
The ideals of the internet
• A “marketplace of ideas”
• 1990s - Early cheerleaders of the internet idealised a democratising space.
Communal. A site of creative expression. Empowerment through the removal of
intermediaries
• Adam Thierer and Grant Eskelsen (2008) of the US Progress and Freedom Foundation
exclaim, “to the extent there was ever a ‘golden age’ of media in America, we are
living in it today” …
The Ideals of Journalism
• A servant to the people
• 1. A watchdog role over the
state.
• 2. The provision of information.
• 3. The facilitation of the civic
discourse on socio-political
information
The Fourth Estate
• Derived from the old English idea that there are three estates, or
broad orders of society: the clergy, the nobility, and commoners.
• Based on the perspective that the media is unbiased, diverse and
works to serve to public interest by seeking out truth and exposing
abuses of power.
Liberal values
• Stemming from politics and philosophies of the Enlightenment
(Europe, 17th and 18th centuries).
• Individuals as rational beings with rights to freedom (including
freedom of expression/information).
• Society made up of these rational beings = a space for rational
discourse on socio-political issues
To serve the public
sphere
• German sociologist Jürgen
Habermas popularized the term
in his book The Structural
Transformation of the Public
Sphere (1962).
• Note: a western construct.
Theory of communicative rationality
• A democratic notion
• The ideal of creating a public space
• All people can enter freely and equally into discussion
• Consensus through dialogue about the rules and laws (both moral
and political) that should govern conduct in the world.
Participatory culture
• The hopes for the internet in its early emergence
• “..participatory culture was the buzzword that connoted the Web’s
potential to nurture connections, build communities, and advance
democracy.” (Van Dijck, 2013)
• Henry Jenkins (2006)
• What about the paradoxes revealed in our Week Two reading (O'Boyle,N
2022)?
The Fifth Estate?
• A popular idea that the Internet is an
emerging fifth estate, built on the
activities of networked individuals
sourcing and distributing their own
information.
Theory of communicative rationality
• A democratic notion
• The ideal of creating a public space
• All people can enter freely and equally into discussion
• Consensus through dialogue about the rules and laws (both moral
and political) that should govern conduct in the world.
The Produser – a complex power dynamic
‘Participation’ .... the meaning of the word is not always clear. For
example, does ‘liking’ a Facebook post or ‘rating’ a Netflix movie count
as participation? (Jenkins et al. 2016)….
Nico Carpentier insists that while access and interaction are necessary
conditions for participation, the key difference is that participation in its
most meaningful sense requires some degree of power sharing—that is,
direct involvement in decision-making (O'Boyle, N 2022, p.166).
Commercial imperatives
• Advertising soon became the bread and butter of journalism (17 th C
onwards)
• Cost to produce must be lower than the price received from
consumption.
• Selling readers to advertisers
• Remember Dallas Smythe (1977)? The audience commodity.
The internet as a
commercial space
• Google in 2001 – seeking a financial
model – digital information left in the
wake of everyone’s activities (‘digital
exhaust’) a resource, rather than detritus
• What is monitored now?
• Prosthetic devices, gestures, apps, GPS,
cookies, your network of ‘friends’ – an
endless list.
Data as the New Oil
“Simply put, we should consider data to be the raw material that
must be extracted, and the activities of users to be the natural
source of this raw material. Just like oil, data are a material to be
extracted, refined, and used in a variety of ways. The more data
one has, the more uses one can make of them.” (Srnicek, 2017)
Platformisation
'Globally operating platform businesses, from Facebook to Uber, and
from Amazon to Coursera, are becoming increasingly central to public
and private life, transforming key economic sectors and spheres of life,
including journalism, transportation, entertainment, education,
finance, and health care. This transformation can be understood as a
process of ‘platformisation’' (Poell T et al 2019, p. 1)
If this is the
economy…
What exactly is being sold, to
whom, and to what benefit?
What happened to journalism?
Nicolas Carr (2008) “The Great Unbundling”: the breakdown of the
audience-content-advertising configuration. In this process, control
over how news content is recommended, distributed, and monetized
shifts from news organizations to platforms (Nielsen and Ganter 2018).
What are the impacts?
• Loss of jobs - tracked layoffs in 2023 recorded twenty-six hundred and
eighty-one in broadcast, print, and digital news media.
• The need for new business models (Format/genre changes? Lifestyle
brand? Subscripton models? Other?)
• Who (citizen journalists/journalists) or what (AI?) is making the news?
• What happens to the quality?
• Who pays? If not the advertiser, the consumer...
Commercial demands, civic relationships
In the absence of major changes in governance, these companies (the
big five) will deepen their power, including their control over digital
information and the algorithms that govern how information is turned
into decision-making. Traditional journalism will find niches, but the
capacity to shape the public conversation will remain in the hands of
social media outlets with no incentive to pursue journalistic integrity”
(Mosco 2019, p. 183)
Re-organisation of business structure
'How journalists make news depends on their working environment.
Their working environment is shaped by economic, social, political and
technological factors, all of which form a dense inter-meshing of
commercial, ethical, regulatory and cultural components (Fenton 2009,
p. 12).'
Regulation?
• Platforms Inquiry – 2017-2019
• News Media Bargaining Code – 2021
• 2024 – Meta won't renew commercial deals with
Australian news media companies (worth millions)
'Facebook said its users were not coming to its platform for news and political
content and that it would invest its money elsewhere.
The 'pro-am' and the journalist
• ‘pro-am’ (Leadbeater and Miller 2004)
• Journalist trained in select skills – redacting, editing, gatekeeping,
framing etc.
the very terminology we use to describe both sides creates the
impression that professionals are not also citizens, and that citizen
journalists are incapable of having professional skills and knowledges;
in reality, of course, the lines between them are much less clear'
(Bruns, A 2011).'
A resource or a threat?
• Access to data is swift.
• The need to keep up with the live.
• ‘Speed it up but spread it thin’?
• The networked crowd does the reporting
• Sometimes the networked crowd is a resource
• Sometimes they are the reasoning for job cuts
• “There will be quite a bit of
something called ‘news’ in the
coming years, but there will not be
very much of what we once called
journalism.” (Robert McChesney,
2013)
From Data Capitalism to Surveillance Capitalism
A Prediction Market
Beyond advertising
• Family life
• Politics
• Civic roles
• Access to services (insurance
etc).
• News consumption
• Government influence
Where data capitalism focuses more on what information we create,
surveillance capitalism makes a bolder claim – not just our data, but
our lives and bodies are the resources for this networked economy.
Limitations of PEM
“many have charged that PEM overall is primarily focused on
the economic or the production side of the communication process,
neglecting texts, discourse, audiences and consumption. In addition, a
simplistic notion of ideology is ascribed to political economists, with
little room allowed for resistance or subversion by audience members”
(Wasko 2014).
Why do PEM?
We can see the power dynamics between media companies, produsers
and texts via the commercial forces which inform their
interdependencies.
Week Four Lecture, Part Two:
Support for you,
The four media studies lenses
&
Workshopping of Conceptual Tools
Support Services
• Book with Academic Skills for their one-on-one service. Book early! Available online and
in person.
• ACE (Academic Confidence Essentials)
• Special Consideration – we can endorse your application with the team. For short term
needs.
• Equity Learning Services – long term needs, ranging from family carer, health (mental-
physical), neurodivergence.
• Mental Health Connect – confidential, not connected to your student record. Support
for academic stressors and/or personal stressors.
How are you finding the readings?
• Never underestimate the value of what you personally take from the
readings. You don’t need to understand 100%. You can come back in
years to come.
• Ask questions as you read, take notes. Think critically – do you agree? A
‘negotiated’ response?
• Remember: how you read from our subject resources is directly related to
how you produce your assessments for the course.
MEDIUM THEORY AUDIENCE STUDIES
Behaviour and Form Responses to the ideologies decoded
Perception/Social Rituals Lifeworld/demographics
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE MEDIA
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
Commercial/Business structures
Encoding shared cultural symbols Ownership/
Different emphasis on how power operates
• Power as the capacity to affect change/influence over or with other
actors (human and technological).
• How do we frame the ways power emerges, moves, changes, takes
shape, is disrupted?
• Different media studies approaches prioritize different actors and/or
processes over others.
Interactive Quiz & The Sandpit
Lecture Appendix
MEDIUM THEORY
• Critiqued when used for arguments that suggest technological
determinism.
• Form over content (so no discussion of representation)
• No discussion of demographics or users’ lifeworld contexts.
Power emergent from…
Medium’s Material Form + Physical/Neurological + Social Behaviour
…in a Media Ecology
AUDIENCE STUDIES
• Concentrates on decoding practices but acknowledges encoding (a
cousin to textual analysis)
• Acknowledges socio-economic background of audience members, but
doesn’t look at the business structures of media
• Responses revolve around perceived ideological messages/values
(rather than the media form itself)
Power emergent from…
Ideology Decoded + Lifeworld/Demographics + Literacy in Media
….in active space of social meaning making
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
• Critiqued for not acknowledging socio-economic or material forces
• Pays some attention to the fluidity of meaning, but doesn’t have a
strong emphasis on audience agency
• Doesn’t consider form in the same way as medium theory – the form
of textual (content based) communication (i.e. genre).
Power emergent from…
Ideology Encoded + Literacy in Media + Discursive Norms
….in space of shared cultural symbols
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE MEDIA
• Critiqued for a lack of emphasis on symbolic and representational
codes
• Critiqued for suggesting a lack of agency in audience responses.
Power emergent from…
Institutional Structures + Economic Power + Monetization via Relationships
….in a business arena
