Navigating the Depth of Political Economy in Communication

When you scroll through your news feed, watch a streaming show, or listen to a podcast, you’re not just consuming content – you’re engaging with a product shaped by ownership structures, advertising pressures, and corporate interests. The political economy approach to media and communication is the academic framework that pulls back the curtain on all of this. Rather than asking what a media text means, it asks who made it, who paid for it, and whose interests it serves. It is a critical lens that connects economics, power, and culture in ways that most mainstream media analysis ignores.

What is the political economy approach? 🔗

Political economy of communications (PEC) is an analytical framework that examines how political and economic factors shape the production, distribution, and consumption of media, particularly within capitalist societies. The term itself signals something important: politics and economics are not separate domains. As media scholars point out, the two are functionally inseparable – understanding how any society and culture works requires understanding how they are entangled with each other.

This approach traces its roots to Marxist critical theory, with early modern contributions from Harold Innis in his influential work Empire and Communications, and was later shaped by scholars like Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller in the 1950s and 60s. By the 1970s, Graham Murdock, Peter Golding, and Nicholas Garnham had established that mass media are, first and foremost, industrial and commercial organizations that produce and distribute commodities. That insight remains foundational to the entire approach.

Canadian scholar Vincent Mosco, in his landmark 1996 book The Political Economy of Communication (revised in 2009), offered one of its most widely cited definitions: the study of social relations – especially power relations – that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources. Mosco further identified four distinct characteristics that define this approach, which are worth unpacking carefully.

The four defining characteristics 🔗

History and social change 🔗

The political economy approach insists on historical context. Analyzing the history of a subject and comparing it to the present day is essential to understanding who or what is responsible for social change, and to identifying patterns that guide future transformations. This means that media institutions are never studied in isolation from their past. The consolidation of newspapers in the 20th century, the rise of broadcasting monopolies, and today’s dominance of platform giants like Meta and Google are not separate phenomena – they are part of a continuous historical process driven by capital accumulation and market expansion. Without this historical grounding, the approach argues, you only see the surface of things.

Social totality 🔗

This characteristic asks researchers to see the “big picture.” Rather than studying a single media text or platform in isolation, political economy demands that you examine how economic, social, cultural, and political forces interact as a whole. As Douglas Kellner and Meenakshi Gigi Durham argue, a political economy approach works to highlight how capitalist societies are organized according to a dominant mode of production that structures institutions and practices according to a logic of commodification and capital accumulation. In practical terms, this means you cannot fully understand a Netflix algorithm without also understanding advertising economics, internet infrastructure policy, and the global labor markets that produce content cheaply.

Moral philosophy 🔗

PEC’s moral philosophy often criticizes capitalism for its effects on media and democracy, drawing from the critical theory tradition of Karl Marx. This is what separates political economy from mainstream media economics, which tends to be descriptive and neutral. Political economy is explicitly normative – it takes a position. It is concerned not just with how media systems work, but with whether they are just, equitable, and democratic. This ethical commitment means the approach frequently highlights how media structures can perpetuate inequality, marginalize minority voices, and serve the interests of economic elites over the public good.

Praxis 🔗

Praxis refers to the commitment to translate critical analysis into action. The political economy approach does not stop at describing problems – it encourages media reform and, where appropriate, government intervention in the marketplace. Researchers and scholars working within this tradition often engage with policy advocacy, support for public media, labor rights for media workers, and movements for media democratization. This is the characteristic that gives the approach its activist edge.

Three core analytical processes: Mosco’s framework 🔗

Beyond the four defining characteristics, Mosco developed three analytical “entry points” that serve as the practical machinery of the approach: commodification, spatialization, and structuration. Together, they provide a comprehensive toolkit for analyzing media systems.

Commodification 🔗

Commodification refers to taking goods or services valued for their use and transforming them into commodities valued for what they can bring in exchange. In media, this plays out in multiple ways. News is produced not primarily as a public good but as a marketable product. Audiences themselves become commodities: your attention, your demographic data, and your “eyeballs” are packaged and sold to advertisers. This dual-product market – where media companies sell content to audiences and audiences to advertisers simultaneously – often means that content decisions are shaped more by what attracts the “right” advertising demographic than by what serves the public interest.

Commodification processes have also crept into areas once considered outside the commercial realm. Libraries and schools, under government cutbacks, have struck deals with corporations to allow marketing on their premises, and public spaces are increasingly colonized by advertising. The digital environment has accelerated this further, making it easier than ever to measure, package, and repackage communication products for profit.

Spatialization 🔗

Spatialization refers to the process of overcoming the constraints of space and time in social life, particularly through communication and information technologies. This concept captures how media corporations expand across national borders, how global conglomerates consolidate ownership across continents, and how digital platforms collapse geographic barriers to both content distribution and labor sourcing. Political economists document how media firms have developed into transnational conglomerates that now rival, in size and power, firms in any other industry, and how this global scale creates new forms of power asymmetry between the Global North and Global South.

Structuration 🔗

Structuration, as Mosco uses the term, refers to the process by which structures are constituted out of human agency, even as they provide the medium of that constitution. Drawing partly from sociologist Anthony Giddens, this entry point examines how social categories – class, gender, race, and social movements – shape and are shaped by media systems. It acknowledges that people are not passive victims of economic structures; they resist, organize, and create alternatives. But it also insists that this agency always operates within structural constraints. A journalist, for instance, may personally wish to pursue a story that challenges a powerful advertiser, but institutional pressures – economic dependence on that advertiser, editorial hierarchies – may make that practically impossible.

Media ownership and power: the central concern 🔗

One of the most practically visible applications of the political economy approach is its analysis of media ownership concentration. As media is concentrated under fewer owners, there are fewer voices and less diversity of expression, and when diversity of opinion is lacking, public opinion and democracy can be undermined. This is not merely a theoretical concern. Research has shown that ownership concentration has measurable effects on news content. A 2017 study on the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns stations reaching nearly 40 percent of the US population, found a notable rightward political shift in language after it acquired 14 new local stations – a concrete example of how corporate ownership can alter editorial tone and political framing.

Communication scholars have long argued that ownership concentration can have a negative impact on political pluralism, since media owners are positioned to exert influence on political processes. The political economy approach examines not just who owns media, but how that ownership determines what gets produced, how it gets distributed, and who ultimately profits from it.

The advertiser-audience dynamic 🔗

Political economy also draws critical attention to how the advertiser-audience relationship distorts media content. Media channels create content according to their own agendas, which in turn shape the knowledge, perceptions, and values of their audiences – and those agendas are rarely neutral. When advertising revenue is the primary income source for a media outlet, the economic imperative is to deliver a large, predictable, and “desirable” audience to advertisers. Content that is challenging, politically inconvenient, or appeals to low-income demographics may be deprioritized – not because it lacks journalistic value, but because it isn’t commercially efficient. This structural bias is subtle but pervasive, and it is exactly the kind of dynamic the political economy approach is designed to expose.

Political economy vs. cultural studies: a useful tension 🔗

A frequent critique of the political economy approach comes from cultural studies scholars, who argue that it overemphasizes economic determinism and undervalues the role of audiences in creating meaning. Political economists, critics say, can be overly focused on ownership structures while neglecting how people actively interpret and resist media messages. This tension has been a productive debate in the field, and the best contemporary political economy work acknowledges both dimensions: structures constrain, but they do not fully determine. Mosco himself, through his concept of structuration, builds in a role for human agency and resistance – recognizing that media workers, audiences, and social movements all have the capacity to push back against dominant economic logics.

Why this approach matters today 🔗

The political economy approach was developed largely in the context of traditional broadcast and print media. But its relevance has only grown in the digital era. New mechanisms of power have emerged from the shift to online platforms – where search algorithms, aggregation tools, and digital distribution infrastructures can skew or shape the availability of information in ways that are often opaque to the public. The concentration of platform power in companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon raises exactly the kinds of questions that political economy has always asked: Who controls the infrastructure of communication? In whose interests does it operate? What are the social consequences of that control?

The approach also remains essential for understanding global media flows, the political use of state-controlled media, and the erosion of public media systems under neoliberal economic pressures. As Mosco has emphasized, commodification, spatialization, and structuration are more central than ever to understanding mass media, new media, and information technology – precisely because digital capitalism has made information itself into a highly profitable, endlessly repackageable commodity.

What do you think? If media content is shaped as much by ownership structures and advertiser interests as by journalistic values, can audiences ever truly receive unbiased information – or is that an ideal worth pursuing at a structural and policy level? And in a world where a handful of tech platforms control the distribution of nearly all public information, does the political economy approach need to evolve its framework to fully account for algorithmic power?

References

1. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/communication-and-mass-media/political-economy-communications
2. https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/chapter/political-economies/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_economy_of_communications
4. https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2016/FAVBPa13/um/62860353/janet_wasko_the_study_of_the_political_economy_of_the_media.pdf
5. https://cjc.utppublishing.com/doi/10.22230/cjc.2000v25n2a1159
6. https://uw.pressbooks.pub/mediacriticalapproaches/chapter/3-1/
7. https://www.globalmediajournal.com/open-access/the-political-economy-of-communication-power-andresistancean-interview-with-vincent-mosco.php?aid=35297
8. https://homepages.web.net/~robrien/papers/political%20economy%20of%20communications%20paper.html
9. https://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-assets/26775_book_item_26775.pdf
10. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339201224_Concentration_of_Media_Ownership
11. https://berkeleyhighjacket.com/2021/entertainment/the-dangers-of-the-concentration-of-media-ownership
12. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612231178254
13. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312408018_Studying_the_political_economy_of_media_and_information