[...] selling audiences to advertisers is not the primary raison d'être of these media. Rather, they are in the business of selling explanations of social order and structured inequality and packaging hope and aspiration in legitimate bundles. In short, they work with and through ideology--selling the system.

[...] 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 which these relations rest and they relay the ideologies which legitimate them. This second function is not reducible to the first. [...]

[...] 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 all in the yawning gap between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, between the colonisers and the colonized. Moreover, these conflicts appeared primarily as political and cultural struggles for self determination, political liberation and cultural autonomy. To many observers on the left it seemed that culture was not just one important site of struggle among others, but perhaps the most important. This misreading of history reached its height during 1967-1968, when for a brief moment it seemed that the construction of a radical counter culture coupled with the control of key institutions of transmission would bring about a bloodless transformation of capitalism.

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 hegemonic ideology. In other words, it explains why in a broadcasting system lacking direct State censorship or control, themes, ideas, claims, values, visions and notions supportive of the capitalist system are promoted via news and entertainment programming, while others critical of the system are reconstructed and re-interpreted in such a way as to co-opt their critical content. Still others are simply excluded [...]

[...] 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 exist" abstracted from the processes of history and the imperative of capitalist economics.

[...] 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 measure was needed to demonstrate that the right product was being produced that the audience for which advertisers expressed a demand was in fact being delivered by broadcasters. Only after agreeing on a basic method for producing measures of productivity and quality could broadcasters and advertisers move to the real business at hand--the buying and selling of audiences according to a rational price structure.

Inherent in the situation, then, is both continuity and discontinuity in the interests of the advertising and broadcasting industries. While continuity rests in the need for an official description of the audience, discontinuity arises from the connection between that description and pricing. [...] neither industry could trust the other to measure productivity and quality, yet both needed some measure in order to transact sales. In this way, despite unified demand for measures of productivity and quality, the situation presented contradictory interests and thereby the possibility for independence for any ratings producer that could successfully manipulate those differences. [...]

Let's begin with the advertising-supported commercial media as part of the whole economy. How do they make a profit? A short answer would be that the media speed up the selling of commodities, their circulation from production to consumption. Hence, they speed the realization of value (the conversion of value into a money form) embodied in commodities produced everywhere in the economy. Through advertising, the rapid consumption of commodities cuts down on circulation and storage costs for industrial capital. Media capital (e.g., broadcasters) receives a portion of surplus value (profits) of industrial capital as a kind of rent paid for access to audiences. The differences between this rent and its costs of production (e.g., wages paid to media industry workers) constitute its profit.

[...] there is much wasted watching by irrelevant viewers. Specification and fractionation of the audience leads to a form of concentrated viewing by the audience in which there is (from the point of view of advertisers) little wasted watching. Because that advertising time can be sold at a higher ate by the media, we can say that the audience organized in this manner watches harder and with more intensity and efficiency. In fact, because the value of the time goes up, necessary watching-time decreases, and surplus watching-time increases, thus leading to relative surplus value.

The other major way in which relative surplus value operates in the media is through the division of time. [...]

[...] Watching is a real extension of the logic of industrial labor, even if it is not the same as industrial labor. However, as metaphor, it illuminates the obscure workings of the economy in general. As Ricoeur writes, "metaphor is the rhetorical process by which discourse unleashes the power that certain fictions have to redescribe reality" (1977, 7).

[...] the early history of industrial capitalism is tied up with attempts by capital to extend the time of the working day in an absolute sense, thus manipulating the ratio between necessary time and surplus time. [...]

However, as Marx realized, this absolute extension of the working day cannot go on indefinitely. Unions and collective bargaining limited the length of the working day, forcing capital to increase the intensity of labor. The concept of relative surplus value initially meant the cheapening of consumer goods that reproduce labor-power, so that the amount of necessary time would be decreased. [...]