Ain’t Nothing But a Free Lunch, Baby! Dallas Smythe Came to radical p-e slowly – life experiences (Depression, work at US Dept. of Labor-tracking media industry, labor, trade unions) Became first economist at FCC 1948-Inst. Of Communication Research at Univ Illinois (first PhD program in Comm).

Smythe’s early academic research Need for public broadcasting Political economy of the electronic media Audience commodity With McCarthyism in US, Smythe returned to native CA and set up program in comm. At U Regina 1974 SFU>worked with Melody, pub’d Dependency Road, died in 1992

Smythe contrasted admin vs critical comm. research Criticizes administrative research in US context: Research emanating from government propaganda activities in WWI and II Rise of market research Asks: why don’t they consider critique of advertising?

Smythe is concerned with audience commodity Consciousness Industry Free lunch The process by which we become consumers How are audiences constructed by the mass media?

Smythe challenges communication scholars Asks why haven’t western Marxist analyses considered mass communication a valuable object of critique? We need to ask: what economic function for capital do mass media serve? A look at capitalist modes of production and of ideology

Blindspot… In Marxist studies: mass media of communication and PR, marketing, public opinion, and advertising industries Rich stuff to tackle: consumer consciousness, leisure, commodity fetishism, work, alienation He said this in Do you think this is still the case?

Smythe contends that… Audiences comprise the commodity form of mass-produced, advertiser-supported communications under monopoly capitalism Calls for a Marxist theory of advertising and of branded commodities

And there’s a huge industry here: The media companies themselves The advertisers that are attracted to the specific media The groups that track the impact of the advertising on the media-watchers

Babe Looks at p-e of communication in light of a critique of mainstream economics Neoclassical economics origins – from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman Human relations subsumed as commodity exchange relations, marketplace as pure competition Citizen vs. consumer debates, E-commerce vs. e-commons debates

Administrative Communication Research Dewey-Schramm-Lasswell Shannon & Weaver Lazerfeld-Hovland (see Everett Rogers’ History of Communication Studies for an overview)…

Admin research… Positivist, empirical, individualistic Surveys, polling Quantitative methodology Focus on attitudinal and behavioral change Making advertising more effective Media effects

Theorizing political economy, a la Babe Distinguish neoclassical economists from political economists PE are dissidents from neoclassical regimes, concerned with power, change and inequities They seek to address the “impact of laws, regulation, political influence, and governmental processes on economic activity, and conversely the manner and degree whereby economic activity & financial matters impinge upon legislation & legislative processes”

Looking at the economy as a system of power What are some examples of this? Consider current Canadian communication policy… Neoliberalism Harris cutbacks in education….

Clement and Williams definition “Study of processes whereby social change is located in the historical interaction of the economic, political, cultural, and ideological moments of social life, with the dynamic rooted in socio- economic conflict” (my emphasis) How does this compare with Mosco’s entry points?

Liberal political economy (Babe) Neoclassical Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations Concern with self-love- Interested in self- interested & materialistic motives Wealth of nations accumulated with greed and self-interest of individuals in a competitive marketplace (for a contemporary criticism see Linda McQuaig’s All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism)

Marxist political economy (Babe) Critique of market system Concern with worker alienation and exploitation Critique of neoclassical position for not addressing social change Paul Baran & Paul Sweezy – concern with class analysis – Monthly Review

Institutional PE (Babe) Veblen, Innis, John Kenneth Galbraith Concern with organizational structure of society Economies evolve – they look at technical infrastructure – military-industrial complex and corporate technostructure

Mythologies (Babe) Market as mythology Technology – machine as mythology Evolution or march of time as mythology These Three M’s exemplify contemporary neoconservatism