Mass Media & Political Economy

It is interesting to note how the analysis of media's influence on the community at large moved away from the Frankfurt school of the early twentieth century to Lazarsfeld's reassessment then back to a re-examination of some of the underlying theories of the Frankfurt school, albeit with some profound alterations, at the end of the twentieth century (Rothenberg, 1997). Today, the message of the media is often to encourage the individuals to act in a collective manner. There is a contradiction in the advertising of consumer goods, for example, that promote individuality, but that target millions of viewers.

Anecdotally, there is much evidence that mass media do affect behavior, or at least language. Catch-phrases, such as "yada yada yada" from Seinfeld enter the American language as millions of viewers watch the same television program week after week. News media are increasingly owned by a small number of corporations who seek symbiotic relationships between their news and entertainment groups. Never at any time in human history--prior to the end of the twentieth century--have individuals around the globe been able to witness a single event through television and the Internet simultaneously.

This topic could be used as the basis for a research paper in order to examine the various approaches to studying mass media that have been explored over the twentieth century. The movement away from the idea that media controls the audience, and the movement back to that idea c

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in much of Western culture, and particularly in the United States. The question is whether that hegemony exists because of false consciousness, as Marx suggested, due to state-enforced hegemony, or whether there is some sort of negotiation between those who dictate culture and those who consume it. This latter approach is an interesting idea in light of attempts by business to shape not only the culture that exists today, but also the collective recollection of key cultural events of the past. One of cable television's most popular programs is the I Love the a series, which include I Love the 70s and I Love the 80s ("I Love," 2003. Whether VH-1 intended to shape the cultural landscape is beside the point; viewers might well consider the events and people that they included in these programs culturally significant simply by their inclusion. Similarly, viewers might dismiss events and people not included in the content. Cultural hegemony in the 1960s and 1970s could form the basis for a research project by comparing the three approaches to hegemony (Marx, Althusser and Gramsci) and using real-world examples for each. These approaches could then be evaluated as to which is the more descriptive of the cultural landscape in the

Category: Economics - M