Political Economy

RUSSELL NEWMAN
Emerson College, USA

Roots

Political economy is the interdisciplinary study of the relations that concern the dis-
tribution of resources and the reproduction of systems of production, extending to life
and culture itself. It is a macrolevel analysis that pays close attention to the politics and
policies (explicit and implicit) that undergird market structures and other structures
of power—a view of the totality of social relations and social change—as well as their
historical development. Various streams incorporate elements of sociology, economics,
political science, law, and media and cultural studies in their analyses. Within its own
parameters, political economy sometimes serves both as a field and as a method, one
focused on social transformation; by the same token, what distinguishes approaches
to the field and the strategies of individual analysts tends to fall along the lines of the
importance of historical analysis, the way markets and individuals are theorized, and
the centrality of democratic theory to a variant’s constitution. The field’s importance to
media literacy lies in its interrogation of the logics and incentive structures undergird-
ing the production of media itself. Incentives are themselves reinforced (or stymied)
by policy prerogatives, and media entities are active players in pushing for policies that
benefit them; thus media are, necessarily, political entities in their constitution. A feed-
back loop is established: the media produced interact with broader social life, which
in turn feeds back into the incentive structures of media producers. As media entities
themselves become integral to emergent production chains in new and surprising ways
(for example, by providing information for their consumers, but also data about these
consumers to producers of media, advertising, or other commodities entirely), media
literacy ignores political economy at its peril.
The notion of “political economy” extends back to the thinking of Adam Smith,
David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill through a direct line that goes through Karl Marx’s
critique. Smith has largely been turned into a caricature of his arguments; political
economy, for him, was hardly a venture divorced from the question of ethics itself. The
“invisible hand” argument advanced by contemporary neoclassical economists is ide-
ological rather than rooted in any careful reading of Smith’s work. The critical school
of political economy extends from Marx’s own critique of that which preceded him,
specifically its lack of rootedness in history or interest in systemic, inherent contradic-
tions. For Marx, these absences offered an implicit support to the status quo—that is, to
systems as they stood. By contrast, the objective of a renewed critique of political econ-
omy lay in praxis—that is, in the notion that intellectual theorization, put into practice,
The International Encyclopedia of Media Literacy. Renee Hobbs and Paul Mihailidis (Editors-in-Chief),
Gianna Cappello, Maria Ranieri, and Benjamin Thevenin (Associate Editors).
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118978238.ieml0185
2 P O L I T I CA L E CO N O M Y

represents its own mode of intervention. Thus, for Marx, the object of analysis is the
social totality examined through the dialectical method. In contrast to the theorizations
of neoclassical economists who would emerge in the late 19th century, disequilibrium
was a natural state rather than an oddity to be explained; conflict and contradiction,
with class conflict at the center of analysis, were the motors of history. Marx and later
analysts who followed in his footsteps recognized capitalism as a powerful motor of
innovation in the search for profit, but, given capitalist society’s constant transforma-
tion, a deep respect for history lay at the core of any Marxist analysis. An examination of
those “moments” of contradiction in broader systems of the reproduction of social life
and of the reproduction of capacities for continued accumulation offered new insights.
Capital, in this analysis, does not simply mean the equipment or materials necessary
for production; rather it represents a relationship viewed dialectically in light of the dual
character of the wage relationship—itself constitutive of a social class of capitalists who
possess the means of production and a class of people who lack them and instead pro-
duce surplus value for the former. It is the contentious relationship of each with the
other and of all among themselves, within systemic constraints, that is encapsulated in
the concept (Mosco, 2009; D. Schiller, 2014).

The political economy of communication

Media and means of communication as a whole are crucial elements in the continued
reconstruction of capitalism, particularly of its structural inequalities and relations of
power; there is surely a “special relationship” between economic and cultural power
(Murdock, 1982). The political economy of communication focuses on questions of the
mutual constitution of media and communication systems, as well as on their inter-
play with the development of culture, broadly construed. It pays particular attention
to the systems that surround the production of communication—in matters related
to messages themselves as well as to the conduits that carry them—identifying these
as among the most vital components of capitalist development. The school of thought
most connected to this notion is what would be considered the critical political econ-
omy of communication, one birthed largely in the contexts of North America, Great
Britain, and Europe. The distinction between the critical political economy of commu-
nication and other strands stems from what they take as their core object of analysis,
their approach to history, their approach to their theorization of the function of market-
places and of individual subjectivity in relation to these marketplaces. While the field
has most closely been associated with Marxism, institutional variants with forebears
such as Thorstein Veblen concentrate on ways in which policy, technology, and other
institutional forms themselves shape markets within which actors participate and that
could serve as centers of power themselves. These variants of the field regularly overlap.
While the field’s own lineage continues to be a topic of interest, sociologists of the late
19th and early 20th century shared a number of similar interests with those whom we
would describe as “political economists” of communication, if using different method-
ological approaches (Winseck, 2016); the critical political economy of communication
that emerged can largely be traced to several key instigations. A first can be found
 P O L I T I CA L E CO N O M Y 3

in the thinking of the Frankfurt School, and in particular in Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno’s coinage of the concept of the “culture industry” (Horkheimer &
Adorno, 1945). This notion made explicit connections between the production of cul-
tural commodities and the reproduction of dominant ideologies—a concept that leans
heavily on that of ideology, expressed by Marx in The German Ideology; it extends later to
Althusser’s “ideological state apparatuses” and interpellation of social subjects by ideol-
ogy. A second instigation was in reaction to what emerged as the “dominant paradigm”
of media effects research (Gitlin, 1978). A key feature of such theorization was the con-
cept of multiple-step flows theorized by Paul Lazarsfeld, which led to a “limited effects”
model of media consumption. Political economists were concerned that this resulted in
a wrongheaded complacency about media structures and institutions—and their con-
trol. A third instigation was the “monopoly capital” theorization of Paul Baran and Paul
Sweezy (1966) which modified Marxist theorizations of capitalism to account for the
ascendancy of massive oligopolies and the implications of this phenomenon. One such
implication was that, unlike in a competitive market, large firms now ceased to compete
on price; oligopolists and monopolists drove markets and set market prices themselves.
Of significance to analysts of communication, competition was no longer through price
but through other factors, such as branding; advertising and the “sales effort” (which
included marketing and other efforts to sell what was produced) were now integral to
capitalism’s continued existence. Increased research and development were now based
on what might clear the markets, as opposed to improving the quality of goods. The
complexities of the “distribution of surplus” required a new thinking. A fourth instiga-
tion was found in responding to emergent thinking from the New Left. Finally, further
coloring radical analyses were liberal democratic imperatives, particularly in discus-
sions of journalism informed by theorists of democracy such as Jürgen Habermas, the
Canadian democratic theorist C. B. MacPherson, and, later, the “propaganda model”
presented by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (Herman & Chomsky, 1988).
As a result, the landscape traversed is immense. Mosco (2009) describes the “central
coordinates” of the field as commodification, spatialization, and structuration. Com-
modification (and its cousin, commercialization) are key subjects of inquiry and inves-
tigation. Markets are not found within societies so much as they are the cumulative
trajectory of capital’s logic. Critical political economists track the internally contra-
dictory and uneven process of subjecting increasing areas of existence to the market
relationship; similarly they track the extensive reach of the “sales effort” that comprises
advertising, marketing, research and development, and other arenas put to the task of
clearing markets. Additionally, this entails the expansion of the wage relationship to new
populations. By spatialization, Mosco means interest in the similarly messy process of
the evolution of business enterprises in relation to one another—their diversification or
divestitures, their concentration and conglomeration, their financing—to address the
challenges of spanning space and time, including processes that have come under the
aegis of such terms as globalization (see also Wasko, 2014). Communication, of course,
is a foundational component of such practices, often involving the transformation of
labor under historically specific relations of production. Today this includes automa-
tion, the application of artificial intelligence, and the incorporation of data analytics into
4 P O L I T I CA L E CO N O M Y

production chains. Finally, structuration describes the process of forming hegemonic

practices within the constraints of the capital relationship.
As such, the analysis of ownership structures of media enterprises, of their finance, of
their interlocking boards of directors, and of their transformation has become a feature
of political economic analysis. What is important, however, is not just the description
of the features of these enterprises but the contradictions that are contained therein and
their relation to the broader social totality. For critical political economists, drawing out
such relationships similarly seeks to discern the resultant incentives (and disincentives)
to produce particular forms of media, to provide service to particular segments of the
population, or, at an even more basic level, to reproduce capitalism itself, which devel-
ops unevenly, in fits and starts, and is always on the brink of crises, both large and small,
that must be overcome in some manner. Murdock (1982), for instance, offers a nuanced
analysis of the major theoretical issues undergirding the study of these elements, such
as the growth of institutional investors and how one conceives of “control.” Is it legal or
economic control? Is it control over allocative decisions or over operational concerns?
Perhaps most importantly, Murdock stresses the objective of systemic critiques rather
than that of exclusively instrumental ones. That is, while it may be the case that own-
ers of newspapers desire to push a particular point of view (and this has certainly been
true of many among them), in much greater need of sustained analysis are the ways
in which content and conduit industries alike are constrained by broader systemic log-
ics that play fundamental roles in capitalist development. It is these facets that require
deeper analysis, an analysis that takes the current historical moment into account in a
detailed way.

Variants of the field alongside questions of policy

and resistance

Political economy of communication of all varieties has had an intimate relationship to

the broader question of policy since its inception. While it is challenging to speak of
the origins of the political economy of communication without caricaturing the players
themselves, and any political economist will recognize it is risky (perhaps even wrong-
headed) to define fields and methods by their traditionally held figureheads, several
core figures instigated important directions of inquiry that represent points of return.
In the United States, the chief initial figures are Dallas Smythe and Herbert I. Schiller;
what emerged from their analyses owes much to both institutionalist and Marxian ori-
entations. Dallas Smythe served as the first chief economist of the US Federal Com-
munications Commission. Among his many contributions to the field, he outlined a
theorization of the “audience commodity,” situating the concept dialectically, as the
commodity sold by broadcasters both in exchange for the “free lunch” of content and
as interpreters and producers of meaning themselves; he similarly argued that the audi-
ence itself was exploited, effectively laboring on behalf of advertisers (Smythe, 2014).
This argument has gained renewed interest and relevance in an age in which the Internet
of Things, mobile devices, and ubiquitous data collection have become integral features
(McGuigan & Manzerolle, 2014). Herbert I. Schiller’s contributions were focused on
 P O L I T I CA L E CO N O M Y 5

the United States’ own international dominance in the realm of culture. In a series of
seminal works, he laid out a critique of the “free flow of information” doctrine backed
by the US government (and, importantly, also backed by its military might), a doc-
trine that current scholars have taken up under a different name: the contested term
“Internet freedom” (D. Schiller, 2014). He described the growth of multinational com-
munications corporations, the commodification and commercialization of new areas of
culture, and pushed back against what was referred to as the “dominant paradigm” in
communications research of limited effects models, as well as against an analysis that he
saw as granting audiences too much interpretive power in the face of dominant media
institutions. His work was instrumental to the growth of a new focus on the centrality
of communication to US global agendas (H.I. Schiller, 1976, 1989).
Critical scholars in the United States followed these cues and expanded upon them.
Janet Wasko has traced the organization and finance of the film industry, among her
other many contributions to the field. Eileen Meehan (Meehan, 2005) has expanded
upon Smythe’s work by examining the organization of the ratings industry in relation
to the creation of audiences for sale. An author who has drawn tremendous attention
to questions of ownership and has made explicit ties to the importance of policy is the
historian Robert McChesney (1993, 2007, 2013). McChesney’s historical work examines
the establishment of a commercial broadcasting system in the United States in the late
1920s and early 1930s. His more recent efforts, drawing on this historical study as well
as on the notion of “critical junctures,” call attention to the phenomenon of increased
consolidation and control exercised by a small number of powerful content and conduit
firms with global reach, aided and abetted by deliberate policy choices. He emphasizes
that, quite contrary to any “free market” for media and communication, policy in this
realm effectively establishes a marketplace tilted in favor of certain parties over others:
the “problem of the media” is the political determination of whose interests a media
system will serve. McChesney’s work illustrates connections between radical critique
and the liberal tradition; like Smythe and Schiller before him, McChesney has been
active in advocacy, spearheading with activist Josh Silver the advocacy organization Free
Press in 2002. Such concerns certainly know few borders, as recent media reform efforts
worldwide illustrate (Freedman, Obar, Martens, & McChesney, 2016). Other scholars
who have employed a historical tack to illustrate the contingency of the development
of media systems in the United States and to retrieve the radical potential of reform
movements include Inger Stole (2005) and Victor Pickard (2014).
The British and European variant that bloomed through the 1970s held closer ties to
more traditional modes of Marxian analysis, drawing upon (and responding to) emerg-
ing New Left arguments. While the political economy of communication has always
had a close relationship to broader questions of policy, this stream pushed back against
a liberal “political science model based upon the interplay of political positions within
a free press model” (Garnham, 2014, p. 44). Initial core figures included Nicholas Gar-
nham, James Curran, Peter Golding, and Graham Murdock. Murdock and Golding
(1973) offered a path of analysis of the media as part of “industrial and commercial
organizations which produce and distribute commodities” (p. 206), with an emphasis
on these industries’ intersectoral linkages and on their overarching economic context,
even while considering their role in the dissemination of ideas themselves. Whereas the
6 P O L I T I CA L E CO N O M Y

American strain tended to focus more on institutional currents with concerns regarding
increased concentration, the European and British current emphasized the systematic
complexity at the core of analysis, although such concerns in present-day analysis have
bled across many borders. These authors explored the central, integrated character of
media and communication in capitalist economies, with an emphasis on resistance
to the privatization of media and communication institutions, on liberalization, and
on commercialization at large. (Along these lines, Dan Schiller, who is based in the
United States, has traced the close relationship between capitalism and global infor-
mation and communication technology development.) Across the water in mainland
Europe, Armand Mattelart drew upon streams of dependency theory and Marxist the-
ory to address issues of cultural imperialism, similarly exploring communication as a
chief avenue of resistance.

Contemporary moves

All this is to speak too glibly about any particular “founders” of this field. Marxist
and neo-Marxist approaches that have developed over the last few decades are hardly
uniform. Numerous commentators as well refer to Harold Innis’s efforts for inspiring
complementary lines of inquiry (Innis, 1951). Canadian universities proved fertile
ground for critical work as well; significant political economists who have emerged
from there include Robert Babe, Robert Hackett, and Dwayne Winseck (among
numerous others). Feminist political economy moved patriarchy closer to the center
of economic analysis. Mosco (2009) notes how third-world research challenged
developmentalist and technologically determinist frameworks, which often left the
core notion of inter- and intracontinental class relations out of analysis. Interest in the
commercialization of public sector activities and in broader liberalization continues
to be at the forefront of research. China increasingly looms large (Zhao, 2008), partic-
ularly as the United States features less as the growth center of new communications
conduits (D. Schiller, 2014; Winseck, 2016).
As critical political economy of communication developed, the notion of “domi-
nant ideologies” and of media’s support for them has given way to a more nuanced
analysis, which recognizes complex outcomes as opposed to more instrumental ones.
Garnham (2014) argues that a critical Marxist conception, as opposed to earlier Frank-
furt School-style arguments, recognizes in capitalism a dynamism in creating diver-
sity of product, even if dominant ideologies remain embedded in logics of produc-
tion. European scholars in particular pushed back against both conservative critiques
of media as vulgar or “debased” and a more left-oriented perspective on it as an “ide-
ological process of circuses and opiates” (Garnham, 2014, p. 44). Political economic
research has sought to understand the reproductive forces of capitalism itself, and main-
tenance of consumer-citizens is of pivotal importance in their varying forms; by the
same token, the field and method seeks a materialist understanding of how specific
ideological formations are maintained and reproduced. That is, while “messages” trans-
mitted by media entities remain of concern, questions of interest include: What is the
commodity produced by media and communications enterprises? Additionally, how
do interrelations between various sectors of capital need to be thought and theorized?
 P O L I T I CA L E CO N O M Y 7

“Ruling elites” hardly share selfsame ideologies; control of institutions is more tenuous
than was once theorized; and present-day capitalists are less interested in restricting
messages than in producing whatever messages will sell—even as restricting messages
remains an important potential strategy in their playbook, particularly with notions of
“network neutrality” under contention globally. Additionally, even if capitalist media
production does produce a range of messages, this range is generally quite narrow across
a number of dimensions. Commercial media produce messages only if it is assumed
that these messages will be profitable to produce, which itself significantly desiccates
the range of views represented. In the present environment, capitalists have hardly lost
their grip on a willing labor force that can contribute to continued accumulation, but
this maintenance is complex in ways both organic and forced—ways that require deeper
examination. The notion of ideology thus remains a notion under contest.
The ability of independent and challenging media to be produced and distributed
continues to be at the forefront of concerns of critical political economists. Debates
over core issues of basic Internet access, network neutrality, or “open Internet” policies
have proliferated (see also Downing, Ford, Gil, & Stein, 2001). Large conduits do
continue to make moves to combine in ways both horizontal (that is, with similar
businesses) and vertical (with business interests at different steps of the production
chain). Interrelationships between capital interests have grown quite complicated, as
temporary arrangements based around projects have increased in number. Increased
“subscriber-fee” driven media require analysis alongside the continued growth of the
sales effort via avenues beyond advertising (for a classic treatment, see Gandy, 1993;
Turow, 2011). Debates continue among critical political economists regarding the
overarching analysis of totalities versus levels of granular detail. As Garnham (2014,
p. 60) argues, “[w]e have to accept, I think, that the processes of development of
capitalist modernity are complex and their outcomes always uncertain. As the current
conjuncture shows, no one is in control. It therefore befits political economists to be
equally open and to accept that there is no totalizing explanation of where we have
come from or where we are going.”

Related fields

Related to the critical school are several other fields and methods. An additional
and powerful strain of political economy, rooted in neoclassical economics and
law—particularly of a Chicago School variety—has grown in the course of the
20th century. Key figures in this branch’s own history include Ronald Coase, Ithiel
de Sola Pool, and—in the way his theorization of “creative destruction” has been
utilized—Joseph Schumpeter. In contrast to the critical school, this branch examines,
as a predominant feature, the actions of individuals in market situations. Notions
of economic efficiency are the core concern. Whereas critical political economists
are skeptical of concentrated market structures, Schumpeter’s notion of “creative
destruction” gave great fuel to arguments that even monopolies would find themselves
under pressure from potential upstarts, thus providing a particular form of “discipline”
for these firms. Such arguments have extended to present policy debates; in fact this
viewpoint is largely hegemonic at present. As McChesney (2007, p. 80) notes, those
8 P O L I T I CA L E CO N O M Y

subscribing to these perspectives saw emergent technologies quite differently from

the critical set: as opposed to the latter, neoclassicals saw them not as part of the
reproduction of capitalist relations but, rather more directly, as reasons to “call into
question the existing regulatory system, especially in telecommunication.” Markets
and profit motives are seen as sufficient regulators; as opposed to critical theorists
who drew connections to journalism and the need to bend market relations to these
objectives, the neoclassicals instead tended to fold all notions of communication into
economic frames that emptied them of theoretical concepts of democracy and culture,
replacing them with Pareto efficiency, an ur-concept that could be applied to virtually
any setting. C. Edwin Baker’s (2002) work draws these differences into relief. Antitrust
policies were thus seen as sufficient for governing communications-oriented industries;
the question simply lay in how to draw the boundaries of markets under contention.
Except for such venues as the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference,
generally the critical and neoclassical variants of political economy occupied what
McChesney (2007, p. 80) has termed “parallel universes,” which largely spoke past
each other. In numerous ways, the neoclassical view is closer in categorization to the
field of media economics than to political economy.
Media policy studies shares interests with political economy of communication, but
places the state and regulation at the center of analysis—rather than capitalism itself. It
tends to speak more in the language and vein of neoclassical media economics; notions
of class and the contradictions inherent to capitalism generally do not appear. These
tend to be replaced with notions of socioeconomic status, an entirely different range of
heuristics used to describe populations that are absolute, rather than relative, in nature.
Views of atomistic individuals in a dehistoricized setting provide the main perspective,
although policy histories certainly appear. While the social effects of particular policies
may be explored, the undergirding methodology and operating assumptions are quite
different from those of critical political economy. Nonetheless, this field has experienced
terrific amounts of crossover and dialogue with those approaching these topics from a
political economy perspective. A “law and economics” subset that on occasion shares
the concerns of the critical school but speaks in the language of the media economics
strain of thought has emerged; scholars such as Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, Susan
Crawford, and Tim Wu might fall loosely into this class, although they may well bristle
at the loose categorization.
Cultural studies is a close relative of political economy that was birthed in the environ-
ment of the New Left. Cultural studies tends to focus on the construction of meaning,
the structuration of ideologies, and the constitution of hegemonic social forms. It com-
mences from Raymond Williams’s notion of culture as ordinary—that is, rather than
seeing culture as “the arts” or “the best of all that is thought and said,” it considers it as
being pervasive. Culture and subjectivity are mutually constitutive, and the processes by
which culture is produced, performed, practiced, and endowed with meaning form cul-
tural studies’ seedbed. Practices of consumption, and meanings articulated with same,
also become significant objects of analysis; discourses that provide hegemonic under-
standings of power relations are explored. Popular culture and ordinary settings were
sites of study that cultural studies rendered strange again, as taken-for-granted assump-
tions regarding overall “structures of feeling” (as Raymond Williams expressed it) were
 P O L I T I CA L E CO N O M Y 9

dissected and retheorized. Similarly, if political economy was seen to pay close attention
to production, examination of media audiences and reception gained prominence in
cultural studies. Where critical political economy and cultural studies may part ways
is principally in relation to questions of resistance. Cultural studies places subjectivity
and the (deadly serious) play of the creation of meaning closer to the center of anal-
ysis, as opposed to social totalities. Cultural studies generally evinced a more hopeful
view of consumption practices as themselves offering resistance to dominant structures
of power; that is, at times it lent a significant amount of power to the act of interpre-
tation of media artifacts that seemingly negated critical political economy’s concerns
about increased consolidation and the power of large media interests, both offline and
online. If viewers or users have oppositional stances to the meanings intended by capi-
talist enterprises, might the consolidation of media outlets be of less concern? Political
economists found such leanings problematic; these were arguments that powerful play-
ers might happily use to make their case in a quest for a regulatory approval of the next
big merger. The equivalent stance today might place too much hope on the ability to
“express oneself ” or to foment protest via social media technologies without examining
(or just downplaying) their material constitution or logics. In turn, cultural studies’ the-
oretical breakthroughs on class, race, gender, and other modes of power relations and
performativities, as well as their numerous intersections and interactions, sometimes
led partisans to lob the charge that political economy offered a reductionist understand-
ing of such challenging terms or of social totality itself. While arguments through the
1990s persisted as to whether or not a “reconciliation” could take place in the “debate”
between political economy and cultural studies, more recently, as opposed to contin-
ued strained relations, interdisciplinary cross-pollination has been closer to the order
of the day. Production studies, which draws upon cultural studies’ insights, offers ethno-
graphic, fieldwork-based understandings of media production processes that have also
experienced crossover with practitioners of political economy.

SEE ALSO: Access; Active Audiences; Civic Activism; Community Media; Critical
Information Literacy; Digital Divide; Emancipatory Communication; Media Access
and Activism; Media Activism and Action-Oriented Learning; Media Literacy for
the 21st Century Teacher; Mediatization; Network Neutrality; Participatory Politics
and the Civic Dimensions of Media Literacy; Privacy and Surveillance, In and Out of
School; Representation

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land: Rowman & Littlefield.

Further Reading

Chakravartty, P., & Zhao, Y. (2008). Global communications: Toward a transcultural political econ-
omy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
 P O L I T I CA L E CO N O M Y 11

Fuchs, C. (2015). Culture and economy in the age of social media. New York, NY: Routledge.
Noam, E.M. (Ed.). (2016). Who owns the world’s media? Media concentration and ownership
around the world. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Pool, I.d.S. (1983). Technologies of freedom: On free speech in a digital age. Cambridge, MA: Belk-
nap Press of Harvard University Press.
Wasko, J., Murdock, G., & Sousa, H. (Eds.). (2014). The handbook of political economy of commu-
nications. Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Winseck, D.R. Communication and empire: Media, markets and globalization, 1860–1930.
Durham: Duke University Press.

Russell Newman is assistant professor at Emerson College’s Institute for Liberal Arts
and Interdisciplinary Studies. Newman’s work explores the intersections of the political
economy of communications, neoliberalism, the epistemological foundations of media
policymaking, and activism. He is currently writing a book on the network neutrality
debates in the United States for MIT Press and has published in the International Jour-
nal of Communication. Previously he served as research and campaign director for the
national nonprofit advocacy group Free Press. With Robert McChesney and Ben Scott,
he coedited The Future of Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century (2005).