Political Economy of Communication

Abstract

This chapter presents a specific critical tradition of media analysis, the Political Economy of Communication (PEC). Rooted in a general Marxist framework, this critical approach mainly focuses on the economic analysis of the media structures and their evolution within the wider movements of capitalism. We start by pointing out how the PEC adapts the concept of commodity to the media industries drawing on the Marxian heritage. As contents as well as audiences have been considered as the commodity of communications, the PEC analysis reveals how communications tend to extend the process of commodification to areas that were previously kept out of its realm. We then focus on two core themes of the PEC analysis: first, the question of concentration among media ownership and the resulting matter of content diversity; and second the necessary critique of the “information society theories” prophesizing the advent of reorganized societies through the diffusion of information and communication technologies – theories that sometimes served the dissemination of neoliberal politics. We finally discuss the difficult integration of textual analysis within the PEC traditions that may sometimes appear in contradiction with their intention of analyzing ideologies.