You give an excellent critique of the danger of any totalising explanatory framework and I agree with the thrust of your argument that issues around gender, race, sexual orientation, and colonialism, for example, have been enriched by fresh perspectives since the 1980s. My main point is that class-based analysis of the media of the kind common in the 70s and 80s seems to be ‘out of fashion’ at a time when class divisions in Britain have widened to quite stunning levels. The idea that we can just ditch Marxist perspectives as outdated or plain ‘wrong’ is to me equivalent to reaffirming belief in a flat earth. It is a denial of the reality of a ruling class controlling the vast bulk of our media and using for their own class interests.

Hugh says I simplify between ‘good’ public service broadcasting media and ‘bad’ commercial media. In broadcasting I think that PSB has simply created a space that is far less constrained by the profit motive. I would argue that is why the BBC is still regarded as the best broadcasting institution in the world. It is the envy of other nations and having lived abroad for ten years I appreciate it more than most, although by no means uncritically. We also see this in legislative terms in the PSB requirements that fostered Channel 4 – at its best when in its first decade it was relatively free to cater to minority interests. Current affairs programming suffered dramatic cuts as soon as PSB commitment to screen in prime time were dropped. TV shorn of PSB ideals would be catastophic and the British public realise this. Even after the Hutton whitewash trust in the BBC remained fairly firm while trust in Tony Blair’s government declined dramatically.

Finally I would like to stand by John Pilger and Michael Moore. Was Pilger ‘wrong’ to report on the appalling nature of the war in Vietnam? Few other journalists were exposing the reality on the ground. Is Moore ‘wrong’ to show how disastrous gun culture is in the US, or how the Iraq invasion and war on terror were built on so many deceptions, or wrong to expose the ruinous state of private health care in America. When journalists take a highly critical look at powerful institutions or challenge private poiwer they are always accused of being biased, unbalanced, selective in their use of evidence, polemical. Yet mainstream journalism commits the same faults on a daily basis and do not receive the same ‘flak’. That is a double standard that media academics need to expose.

Thank you for this important and thought-provoking article. I’d like to respond to some of the issues you raise, to offer a few speculations on the legacy of Marx(ism) in media studies.

Could one argue that the critical thrust of Marx in media studies has been dampened rather than forgotten, and that in subterranean or oblique ways it continues to make its presence felt productively? Following Foucault, I am inclined to see the Marx of media studies as a founder of discursivity, enabling a space for certain kinds of questions to be asked and to be treated as legitimate. These questions– about modes of production, political economy, ideology, material and historical conditions of media production and analysis– one could argue, continue to animate debates in media studies.

At the same time, I wonder if one might see the field of media studies enriched by the emergence and intervention of other paradigms (whether related to Marxism or not) such as postcolonial theory and poststructuralism. The Marxist paradigm is justifiably open to external critique for its own omissions, assumptions, and forms of symbolic violence. I think it is a fair argument to make that discussions of gender, race, sexual orientation, or colonialism, as they apply to questions of media or more generally, cannot be subsumed under Marxist frameworks without at the same time profoundly destabilizing those frameworks and calling some of their universalist or hegemonic aspects into question.

French cultural theory shares the Marxist critique of neoliberalism. I think, here, of Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the journalistic field and his essays in Acts of Resistance. Poststructuralism itself can be situated, in one respect, as a response to Marxism after 1968 (sidebar: an interesting website on the ‘political in postmarxist theory can be seen at http://www.after1968.org/), and as such, a conversation with Marxism even as it offers an important critique of the totalizing claims of some Marxist paradigms.

Corporate ‘interestedness,’ if one may call it that, in academic production is immensely problematic, of course, pointing to the urgent need for preserving the autonomy of the academy and freeing the conditions under which research and scholarship is produced from corporate influence.

But does Marxism or Marxist orthodoxy in specific disciplines, say, not run the same risk of compromising or stilfing academic freedom and autonomy? (I should clarify that I am not echoing here the reductive argument about the academy as a bastion teeming with Leftists).

I recall an interview with Foucault where he speaks of how his work was initially met with much hostility by the French Left. Edward Said’s Orientalism, was similarly critiqued by Marxist scholars. The Italian author, Lampedusa, was also criticized by the Italian Left, because his magisterial work, The Leopard, dealt with the aristocracy and not with the proletariat– a simplistic reading of literary value if there ever was one!

In the Indian context, Marxist scholarship as much as liberal or neoliberal paradigms of research– not necessarily only in media studies but in other humanities and social science disciplines— has been guilty of excluding other academic perspectives or condemning them as illegitimate forms of inquiry. My point is not that Marxism is obligated to abstain from critiquing other paradigms, but simply that its claims to foundational theoretical status are not self-evident.

A final point about the politics of praxis and Marxism. While careful to distinguish between the theoretical legacies of Marxism and Marxist frames of political commitment, the radical potential of Marxism is, arguably, grounded in that relationship between theory and praxis. But the nature of that relationship cannot be taken for granted and is itself contingent on numerous factors. Quite simply, then, an internal or reflexive awareness within Marxism of its possible complicities with acts of violence will not suffice. An example should make this clearer.

You may have seen the recent news coverage of the Chinese state cracking down on Tibetan protestors. To put it in somewhat understated terms, the Indian Left has not quite responded with the same gusto that they reserve for, say, human rights violations committed by the US.

The hypocrisy of the Indian political Left– and its convenient invocation of either nationalism or transnational Marxist solidarity– is well known. Its silence is not suprising. What is more surprising– or perhaps not– is the silence of Indian Left intellectuals on the reaction of the Indian political Left. There are no critiques in the Indian Left-oriented publications of inconsistencies on the part of Left-leaning theorists, activists, or authors. There are no Marxist analyses of the political economy of the production of discourses on China, no Chomskyian readings of the silencing of Tibetan voices in mainstream Indian media discourse. The actions of China, today, like the actions of the USSR in the past do not provoke the same outrage from the Left nor provide them with the same inspiration for critique that the imaginary of the West, especially the US, does.

I am not suggesting that such silences necessarily imply the lack of value of Marx for media studies. But only that perspectives external to Marx are needed as well.

A final thought: does capital invariably and completely corrupt? Or are forms of negotiations with capital possible that do not compromise autonomy?

Once again, thank you for raising these critically important issues for discussion,

Regards
Rohit Chopra
Editor, Interjunction