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Theories of Global Media 35
facilitate' (Golding and Murdock, 2000, p. 74). The first is the power relationship
between nation-states and corporations, as understood through
public and private ownership and the issue of privatization of state-owned
assets, as well as changes in the nature and forms of 'pubic interest' regulation
of commercial media (cf. Curran and Park, 2000). Second, they argue that
dominant economic interests strongly influence, if not necessarily determine,
the range and diversity of textual forms available to audiences for interpretation,
and that there are structural as well as rhetorical limits to the polysemy
of media texts (cf. Condit, 1989; Budd et al., 1990). Third, they draw attention
to the extent to which income-based barriers to access to cultural and
conlmunications goods and services constitute a reiteration of class divides (cf.
Murdock, 2000). This is not only a matter of who can access what - as seen
in literature of the 'digital divide' in relation to new media - but is also a question
about the range and relevance of 'value-added' media and conlmunication
resources to those who are not a part of higher-income demographics
(Gandy, 2002). In relation to new media, Dan Schiller (1999) has argued that
the rapid expansion of ICT networks worldwide in the 1990s was both cause
and consequence of 'a powerful pan-corporate attempt to subject worldwide
telecomnlunications policy to United States-originated, neo-liberal regulatory
norms' (Schiller, 1999, p. 40). Readings of the rise of new media in terms of
its en~ancipatoryc apacity lose sight of the extent to which the development of
this 'digital capitalism' in fact reinforces pro-capitalist norms, values and policies
on a global scale and - from the perspective of critical political economy
- the resultant reinforcement of socio-economic and political inequalities,
tendencies towards commercialization, and governance of a wider range of
social spheres - ranging from telecommunications to education - under a promarket,
neo-liberal ideology (cf. McChesney and Schiller, 2003).
It is also important to note that some critical political economists argue that
the current phase of capitalist development is one where the economic and
n~edia/culturasl pheres increasingly overlap. A key theorist in this respect has
been Nicholas Garnham, although elements of this approach can be identified
in the later work of Raymond \Villiams (1977, 1980), who argued that:
The major modern communications systems /are now so evidently key institutions in
advanced capitalist societies that they require the same kind of attention ... that is
given to the institutions of industrial production and distribution ... these analyses
force theoretical revision of the formula of base and superstructure and of the definition
of productive forces, in a social area in which large scale capitalist activity
and cultural production are now inseparable. (\Villiams, 1977, p. 136)
Garnham (1990) argued at a theoretical level that the base/superstructure
model and its variants misund