The Political Economy of Film and Television

Week 2.

In this week’s lecture the focus was on the political economy of film and television. The lecture suggests that political economy means that media texts are considered cultural commodities. This relates to the idea of different forms of media trading and exchanging media goods and services in order to gain capital and publicity. Long P and Wall T’s book discusses political economy and its connections with the media. The authors indicate that ‘all such aims must be subordinated to the over-riding profit-maximising profit’ (Long, Wall, 2012). This conveys that media objectives other than the profit making and financial stability of the political economy are of less importance.

Like Long P and Wall T’s book, Ang’s book on ‘Audience-as-market and audience-as-public’, concerns the relationship between political economy and the media, it also concentrates on the operation of television institution in commercial terms. Ang suggests that a way in which the media services trade and benefit from each other is through the ‘advertisers whose products are offered for sale in the commercials pay broadcasters in exchange for the air time they acquire to disseminate the messages’ (1991). This highlights that broadcasters benefit financially from advertisers who want to gain publicity for their new service or product, however this means that advertisers require to spend huge amounts of money as part of their marketing in hope that audiences buy and take interest in what they’re selling. The author goes on to display that ‘the system operates according to the laws of the capitalist market economy, so that advertising time in the most popular programmes is generally the most expensive’ (Ang, 1991). Broadcasters are expected to air popular and successful television shows in order to make advertisers want to promote their products during the specific broadcaster’s commercial time.

My found reading on the political economy of television directly focuses on the political economy of sports TV right. From the reading I discovered that ‘the political economy approach to understanding the media is concerned with how the way that media organisations behave (and the content they provide) is shaped by the economic and political context in which they operate’ (Evens, Iosifidis, Smith, 2013).  The political economy in relation to the media aims to organise the media and the relationship different forms of media have from television, to film to advertising, and how the profit making and target audiences are related.

A topic that could be studied is research into who is profiting from the sales of media texts, specifically films in terms of the distribution and production of them and how audiences have been defined in relation to this.

References

Chapter 2 ("Audience-as-market and audience-as-public") in Ang, Ien (1991) Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge.

Long, P and Wall, T (2012) ‘Political Economy of the Media’ IN Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context (2^nd Edition), London: Pearson. pp. 172-185

Evens, Iosifidis, Smith (2013). ‘The Political Economy Of Television Sports Rights’ Palgrave Macmillan. Available through: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DlkhAQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+political+economy+of+TV+article&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn1eOrseDSAhUBVRQKHZcNAiwQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=the%20political%20economy%20of%20TV%20article&f=false [Accessed 7^th March]