Week 3

Question 1

The Media in a Market-Driven Society

Lecture overview

Answer 1

Neoliberalism:

• defining the concept
• history of the concept
• cultural variations of the concept

Influence on media and culture: 
Influence on the way people understand: 
1) Their identity 
2) Their position in society 
3) What the world means

Question 2

NEOLIBERALISM:

Answer 2

“Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

Neoliberalism is an idea:

It’s a political-economic project:

Supports a strong market economic system free from state restriction and the use of the market as a model for other areas of political and social life

The Mont Pelerin Society:

“to facilitate an exchange of ideas between like-minded scholars in the hope of strengthening the principles and practice of a free society and to study the workings,
virtues, and defects of market-oriented economic systems”

A ‘small group of passionate advocates […who] gathered around the renowned Austrian political philosopher Friedrich von Hayek’ (Harvey 2005, 19-20)

Question 3

Friedrich von Hayek

Answer 3

Friedrich Hayek CH, was an Austrian-British economist and philosopher best known for his defence of classical liberalism.

Likes 19th-century classical liberalism
Dislikes early 20th-century liberalism

The Great Society vs The Road to Serfdom
• “Economic Freedom”
• Individualism vs. collectivism
• Free markets
• Small state

Question 4

Neoliberalism as a Practice

OBJECTIVE?

Answer 4

Objective:
• To seize and mobilise the power of the state to create
pro-corporate, market-driven society

• To spread their new ideas across society

Question 5

Neoliberalism as a Practice

US 1960-70s

The Chicago boys

Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006)

Answer 5

• Business sector perceived a threat from federal government legislation
• ‘American business both reinvigorated existing business institutions and developed new ones to protect itself’
• ‘First, it became involved in the production and dissemination of alternative ideas
• Second, business used these new theories to contest existing economic ideas and the institutions they had spawned’
• Business began funding economic institutions / think
  tanks’
  • The Chicago School of Economics
  • ‘The Chicago Boys’
  • Advocated: – Very small government – Tax cuts (especially for the rich) – Privatisation – Deregulation – ‘Free’ markets – Competition

Question 6

The Washington Consensus

Answer 6

1) Fiscal policy discipline – avoiding large fiscal
deficits
2. Redirection of public spending from subsidies toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth,
pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment
3. Tax reform, broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates
4. Interest rates that are market determined and
positive (but moderate) in real terms
5. Ensure competitive exchange rates
6. Trade liberalization
7. Liberalization of inward foreign directinvestment;
8. Privatization of state enterprises
9. Deregulation
10. Legal security for property rights.

Question 7

The UK Case

Neoliberalism

Answer 7

1980s ‘Roll-back neoliberalism’

• ‘the active destruction and discreditation’ of welfare and social-collectivist institutions (Peck and Tickell 2002, 384).
• Emphasis on private individuals in distinction to collective groupings
• ‘minimize the size of government, make
space for competitive forces [and] enlarge the scope and reach of the private sector’ (Tickell and Peck 2003, 173).

Question 8

Commodifying the Media

Answer 8

Previously:
1. telecommunications was ‘understood as a public utility, along the lines of transport or the electricity system; the view that broadcasting was a limited, national resource that governments needed to parcel out

2. and also the belief that broadcasting had a particular social power, which needed controlling’
   (Hesmondhalgh 101)

Question 9

Neoliberalism and The Media

Answer 9

2003 UK Communications Act
• Shift in discourse around media regulation
• Emergence of ‘citizenconsumer’
• Reframing of the public as consumers

Question 10

Summary of lecture:

Answer 10

• Processes of neoliberalism have become dominant across the globe over the last 40 years.
• They manifest in different ways in throughout history and across cultural contexts.
• There is resistance to them
• They structure politics and economics
• They structure other areas of civic life
• Media discourses are often structured to argue that market capitalism is socially beneficial
• The narrative can explain media content and
  omitted narratives