Activity

[...] instrumental problems that required solutions in order to facilitate transactions between advertisers and broadcasters. The most obvious was to demonstrate the existence of an audience. In economic terms, this meant some measure of productivity. But besides adequate numbers of listeners, a me…

[...] the ratings industry per se and the more specific form of producing ratings for national television are open and competitive--and just happen to have a single more important firm. This lends the status quo within the ratings industry an aura of naturalness; the industry appears to "simply exi…

In broadcasting studies, the situation has been somewhat different with industry organization taking precedence over textual analysis. notions of internal production constraints, external commercial constraints, and of professionalism form the basis for explaining why cultural products reproduce he…

[...] The expansion of consumerism was accompanied by a dampening down of industrial conflict and class struggle. The contradictions between Capital and Labour receded from the centre of attention and its place was taken by conflicts grounded in age, in gender, in nationality, in race, and above al…

[...] Materialist analysis needs to begin by realising that although integrated into the economic base, mass communications systems are also part of the superstructure, and therefore they play a double role in reproducing capitalist relations of production. They complete the economic circuit on whi…