POLITICAL ECONOMY THEORY

The Political Economy Theory provides focus on how media are structured and controlled. It offers empirical investigation of media finances, and finally seeks for links between media content production and media finances.

The Political Economy Theorists study elite control of economic institutions such as banks and stock markets and then try to show how this control affects many other social institutions, including the mass media. In certain respects, they accept the classic Marxist assumption that the base (the media industry) dominates the superstructure (the culture of a society).

They investigate the means of production by looking at economic institutions, then expect to find that these institutions will shape media to suit their interests and purposes. They have examined how economic constraints limit or bias the forms of mass culture that are produced and distributed through the media.

With their macroscopic focus on economic institutions and their assumptions that economic dominance leads to or perpetuates cultural dominance, political economists were slow to acknowledge that cultural changes can affect economic institutions. Nor do they recognize the diversity of popular culture or the variety of ways in which people make sense of cultural content.

The Political Economy Theorist have remained centrally concerned with the larger social order and elites’ ownership of media. They criticize the growing privatization of media in Europe and the increasing centralization of media ownership around the world.