There is far too much respect for institutions like the BBC shown by media producers from the South. The corporate media were instrumental in the attempted coup to overthrow President Chavez
“The media are a site of political, economic and cultural power – Marxism has the conceptual tools to interrogate this nexus of power and the motivation to do so,” says Mike Wayne.
He teaches at Brunel University, London. He is an expert on areas of film, television and media, with a particular emphasis on Marxist cultural theory. He recently published, as a co-author, the book Television News, Politics and Young People: Generation Disconnected?.
In 2008-09 Mike spent a year in Venezuela where he co-directed a feature length documentary about the Venezuelan revolution, called Listen To Venezuela (see http://www.listentovenezuela.info/).
Some of his other books include Theorising Video Practice, and Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives. Along with Esther Leslie, Mike Wayne edits a new book series Marxism and Culture. Excerpts:
‘Marxism and Media Studies’ is the title of one of your books. It sounds bit odd applying Karl Marx to the glamorous world of media. Does Marx(ism) really offer something viz a viz media studies?
The media are hugely important as industries producing symbolic goods that can be broadly classified into entertainment and news. As entertainment goods, whether reality tv programmes or Hollywood blockbusters, they internalise and comment on broader cultural trends and shifts, often uncritically reproducing the modes of thought, habits, perceptions and desires of a wider capitalist society. Sometimes, they comment and reflect more critically on that society, which is, after all, full of contradictions and conflict. In terms of news, the media play a hugely important role in shaping the context of public debate in which policy agendas are developed and implemented, explaining and rationalizing them and often enough giving little sense that there are alternatives. Given that the media are large scale corporate entities, the challenge is to explain the relationship between their structures and the symbolic goods they produce. The media also wield considerable political power. The age of media moguls is not dead. The private corporate media were instrumental in the attempted coup to overthrow President Chavez in Venezuela in April 2002. Look at Berlusconi in Italy or the influence of Murdoch in the UK where the police have sat on investigations into the phone hacking scandal at the ‘News of The World’, a Murdoch tabloid rag. So the media are a site of political, economic and cultural power – Marxism has the conceptual tools to interrogate this nexus of power and the motivation to do so. Unfortunately, many academics today wallow in an uncritical celebration of popular mass culture and have lost any interest in critically interrogating it.
Chomsky and Herman’s ‘Manufacturing Consent’ is considered a powerful critique of the corporate media. Their study of US media shows that corporate ownership and control of media determines the media content. Critics reject their criticism being determinist. This determinist approach is attributed to Marxism whereby the class in control of economic base also controls the cultural superstructure. Your comments on this Marxian ‘determinism’?
Media professionals who have never thought critically about their social being, their role and their institutional location are always going to give a cool reception to analysis that suggests that the equation between the media and ‘freedom’ is problematic. The language that we use shapes our thinking and we must always be critically reflexive of our linguistic and conceptual tools. This is true of the media professional and it is true of how we analyse media practices. The ‘economic’ cannot be abstracted from the complex social, political, cultural and technological contexts in which it operates. There is no ‘economic determination’ but only a complex structuration of forces shaped by the way productive resources are owned within a given industry, a given nation, a given regulatory regime, a given culture, and so forth. Herman and Chomsky’s analysis usefully talks about ‘filters’ as a way of thinking about the interaction between different contextual factors, such as ownership, advertising, external pressure (flak) etc., I like the model and use it myself. It has been criticized for being a bit static and functionalist – and I think there is something to that, but it can be corrected with dialectics, with a Gramscian appreciation of cultural struggle and other tools. Those who criticize economism or determinism are often really wedded to nothing more sophisticated than a vague liberal pluralism. Cultural studies is more prone to this than economic and institutional analysis (outside straight apologetics for market capitalism) because of the nature of culture as a provisional and relatively indeterminate symbolic system. Nevertheless, that indeterminateness IS relative and it is the business of Marxist analysis to explain the historical conditions of cultural meaning, which always means going deeper than culture itself.
There is also a school of media academics that thinks Marxist stress on media ownership is over-stated as audiences do not buy whatever media tell them. The audiences offer resistance. Also, we got directors like Oliver Roy in Hollywood or journalists like John Pilger. How would you reconcile the Marxists’ stress on media ownership and the progressive role played by certain elements of mainstream media?Well, it’s more than ownership as I have suggested. It is ownership plus a lot of other things that contribute to the formation of cultural meaning. Those other things are not discrete and separate from the question of ownership. We are talking here about a mode of production, a totality of interconnected relationships. In terms of progressive journalists – of course the system is not closed, there are contradictions within it that can be used by the savvy media worker to get stuff through that goes against the grain. But the fact is, it is against the grain. So we have to account for why the grain is as it is and what the implications of that are. Audiences are also a determinate influence on what gets produced insofar as producers make estimations as to what would appeal to different audiences within the constraints the producers themselves are operating under. And of course audiences do shape what they make of the products that are offered to them. But audience power still has to work with the specific products that are offered – so in general, very often, outside very specific situations and audiences, and assuming a very broadly shared culture between producers and audience, what audiences make of these texts isn’t a million miles from what producers intended in the first place or what is already presupposed by the dominant culture more generally. That is because audiences and producers share a broad cultural background. Where they don’t (for example Hollywood films in Vietnam or Iraq) more interesting things can happen but that situation raises a host of other issues.
In the 1970s the media imperialism thesis was fashionable. But it seems now it is no more in vogue. Is this thesis not valid any more?A basic definition of media imperialism would see it as unequal cultural/media exchange between nations and regions, so that some regions and nations dominate others in terms of their media output and exports. When I switch on multichannel TV I see that it is dominated by output coming from America, and this in a country which has a strong television production base. I see very little in the way of European programming on my TV and virtually nothing from the world beyond. So yes media imperialism is still relevant, I would say that it is increasingly relevant for discussing the condition of the British film and television industry vis-à-vis North American cultural producers. When I was in Venezuela a couple of years ago, the cinema was dominated by Hollywood product as was cable tv. You would be hard pressed to find a Venezuelan film showing in Los Angeles and hard pressed to avoid an American film in Caracas. If that isn’t media imperialism in one particular medium, I don’t know what is. Many Latin American filmmakers in the 60s saw a link between such media imperialism and broader cultural patterns of domination that in turn facilitated the domination of political and economic models devised in the West. There are quite a few links in the chain there, from media, to culture to politics and economics, and it’s easy to end up making sweeping generalizations. But certainly I would say that for the middle class Venezuelans visiting the expensive shopping malls where the cinemas are located, watching American movies is part of an identity that is orientated towards North America and western consumer capitalism, and that did facilitate their support for neo-liberal models that decimated the country before the election of President Chavez.
Critics of media imperialism thesis say: ‘The world has changed and so must our language and theoretical frames’. They cite the rise of Southern actors like Al Jazeera, Globo, Zee TV etc to claim that media imperialism has been challenged. People watch local channels instead of CNN, BBC. Also, critics say it was a shaky thesis even in the 1970s as the majority in Third World did not even have TV sets. Your comments.Television is an interesting case where some of the geo-cultural and media product exchanges that have been very unequal in the past, have been shifted. People can now access a greater range of programming from outside their nation-state borders, a development facilitated by new technologies of distribution. That’s great but it hardly means that the global asymmetries in cultural flows are about to disappear. I think the role that new technologies such as the internet and mobile phones are playing in the growth of social movements and alternative sources of information such as Wikileaks, is clearly playing a hugely significant role – as the great German Marxist, Hans Magnus Enzensberger predicted they would back in the 1970s, when all he had to go on was CB radio and Xerox copying machines. I’d recommend people to go and read Ensenzberger’s ‘Constituents of a theory of the media’ to see that there is no contradiction between a Marxist analysis and contemporary media trends that intensify contradictions.
Media schools in Third World have their courses designed by media experts from the West. Journalists from South come to West for education/training in a bid to improve their career options. Don’t you think this is a kind of educational imperialism that contributes to media imperialism?Yes I think there is far too much respect for institutions like the BBC shown by media producers from the South. That isn’t to say that they shouldn’t learn from established media institutions – but learn critically and be ready to adapt and change what you learn to the needs and circumstances of your own situation. Maybe the BBC is better than they are used to, but for us, in the UK the BBC news output leaves a lot to be desired.
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Farooq Sulehria is working with Stockholm-based Weekly Internationalen (www.internationalen.se). Before joining Internationalen, he worked for one year,2006-07 at daily The News, Rawalpindi. Also, in Pakistan, he has worked with Lahore-based dailies, The Nation, The Frontier Post and Pakistan. He has MA in Mass Communication from Punjab University, Lahore. He also contributes for Znet and various left publications in Europe and Australia. |
