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f new concepts and theoretical tools.Critical Political EconomyCritical political economy has for at least three decades provided the mostinfluential framework through which developments in global media are understood
and interpreted. Its origins lay in a critique of mass communications
theory as it had developed in the 1950s and 1960s, arguing that these
approaches failed to give suitable weight to the significance of questions of !power and ideology, particularly how econon~ic,p olitical and symbolic powerSupplied by The British Library - "The world's knowledge"
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Theories of Global Media 3
interacted in the sphere of culture. It was argued that there exist economicstructures of dominance in the media and communications industries that setlimits to the diversity of ideas and opinions in circulation through the media,and that this in turn promotes the circulation of a hegemonic set of ideas, or a
'dominant ideology', among the wider population. This critique of mass
comnlunications theory was connected to a rediscovery of the Marxist critiqueof capitalism, which linked this critique of media in liberal-democratic societiesto a wider concepti~al understanding of the bases of social order in classdivided
societies. Marxism also provided a means by which the fragmentation
of knowledge arising from unconnected, discipline-based approaches to
academic research could instead be reformulated as more integrated, interdisciplinaryforms of research and scholarship (see for example, Blackburn,
1972). Political econorilists place a particular primacy upon the structure of
economic relations under capitalism, because structures of domination based
upon class relations have been seen as the core element of what both defines a
capitalist economy and gen'erates its dynamics, including those of class conflict.
Garnham (1995, p. 70) argues that 'political economy sees class - namely, thestructure of access to the means of production and the structure of the distributionof the economic surplus - as the key to the structure of domination'.The critical political economy approach to media and communicationshas developed four principal practices, or 'pillars', that inform research andacademic practice in the field (Mosco, 1996; Golding and Murdock, 2000).
First, there is the insistence that media research refer to the social totality, orthe interconnection between systems of economic, political, coercive andsymbolic power as they are related to the media sphere. This points to theneed for interdisciplinary research and scholarship, and developingconnectionsbetween media and communications research and a wider set of forces,determinants and social relations. Second, there is the need for a I)istoricalpcrspcctiue, or what Golding and Murdock (2000, p. 74) refer to as the"'slow but perceptible rhythms'' that characterize the gradually unfoldinghistory of economic formations and systems of rule'. Golding and Murdock(2000, pp. 74-7) identify four historical processes as being central to a political
economy of media: the growth of the media as both an economic sector
and a site of cultural influence; the exteksion of corporate control over themedia; the growing commodification of media forms; and the changing nature
of government intervention in media