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Free Market:
By Thomas Streeter
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Gestures towards a simple, reified sense of the economic The focus of this study is managerial culture. It approaches the question of markets, neither in terms of
seem to be a regular feature of talk concerning commercial broadcasting. Broadcasting industry executives, it
broadcast managers' personal beliefs nor in terms of
has been remarked, Justify major decisions to themselves impersonal industrial structures, but in terms of the
and others by pointing to the self-evident exigencies of
point of interaction of beliefs and structures. A promian abstracted market/'so predictably, so confidently,
nent feature of the culture of the businesses of commerthey sound like vulgar Marxists-"2 The social and
cial broadcasting is that it is at once institutionally
political legitimacy of commercial broadcasting itself
corporate and politically liberal. Corporations are
rests largely on an assumption that private ownership of
impersonal bureaucracies whose legitimacy rests on the
broadcast stations by definition constitutes a "free
terms of market Individualism. The career managers
market." The dominant forms of criticism of commercial that operate commercial broadcasting on a day-to-day
broadcasting, moreover, typically argue that the ecobasis, therefore, are in a peculiar position: they are
nomic market's driving mechanism of self-interest comes dedicated bureaucrats given an administrative command
into conflict with the
to behave like freepublic interest, without
wheeling entrepreever pausing to
neurs.
question the applicability of the notion of
In this peculiar context,
"market" in the first
at the same time that
their economic function
place. Even critical
media scholars who
has declined, markets
preface their studies of
have taken on a
ritualistic role in the
television with fashionable references to
culture of the broadcast
"corporate capitalism"
industry. The result is
seem to studiously
what I will call "bureauavoid probing the
cratic market simulameaning of that term
tion." Broadcast
better to be brief and vague, it seems, than to be taken for managers are driven to create situations that simulate
a vulgar, economic reductionistand thereby leave the
market relations when portrayed in the bureaucratic
reified monolith of the "economic" intact, waiting in the
language of flow charts, statistics, and administrative
wings. In sum, industry champions and critics, insiders
hierarchies. Much of the high drama of commercial
and outsiders, all tend to take for granted the belief that
televisionthe ratings race, the rise and fall of series,
commercial broadcasting operates first and foremost
rocketing and plummeting careers, and so forththus
according to the iron laws of the economic marketplace.
might be understood not as actual market behavior, but
as a set of rituals that represent market behaviors using
the codes of administrative logic, as bureacratic simulaDrawing on several major strands of contemporary
economic theory, this essay casts doubt on the belief that tions of markets.
commercial broadcasting is market-driven. Commercial
broadcasting is better understood as a scries of elaborate,, The New Contours of American Political
interlocking bureaucratic systems than as isolated units
Economy
competing in an open marketplace. It is driven more by
the exigencies of regularity, predictability, and selfFormer FCC chair Mark Fowler once decribed his agency
maintenance than by the forces of classical market
as a. "New Deal Dinosaur." Calling it a dinosaur might
competition.
have been controversial, but describing it as a product of
investment. Pat Weaver, the man who led NBC into the
television era, once said,
The growth of our economy has reached the point where
production becomes less of a problem than consumption. It is
no trick today, as it was earlier in this century, to make great
quantities of goods. Instead, the trick is to sell them to people
who can afford to pay for them.10
Several years later, he elaborated on the same argument:
Automation in factories [has] made it more difficult for
manufacturers to cut back production when demand
slackened... Thus the automated business needs a constant,
dependable, unfluctuating
demand for its output. This
and other solutions to steady
demand mean a new kind of
sellinga complete change
in emphasiseducational
'.
era. . ."
Commercial broadcasting, in
other words, is constructed more
as a means to circumvent Hie
"natural" market than as an
extension of the market into the
sphere of culjure.
Broadcasting and
Corporate
Structure
>;''''
If the displacement of
the market is the
most overlooked trail
of the American
economy in the
twentieth-century,
the rise of the giant
corporation is the
most noticed; and it is exactly this kind of multi-unit,
vertically integrated oligopolistic corporate enterprise
that sits center stage in the drama of broadcast industry
behavior and development. Large size, however, is only
the most obvious characteristic of the modem corporation. Understanding the patterns of behavior that have
taken the place of the market in bro.adcasting requires a
look at the structure of the corporate behemoths like
RCA, General Electric, Westinghouse, and their relatively
smaller cousins like CBS, ABC, and Warner Communications.
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An alternative approach
might be to think of
bureaucracies as systems of
signification or representation, as a
means of simulating aggregate
goals or purposes.
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While skeptical, this approach does not rest its arguments on some hypothetical, invisible force, such as
autonomous technology or the capital-labor contradiction. While ingenious and elaborate attempts have been
made to fit the facts of broadcasting into one or another
classical economic theorymost notably the public
goods approach of neo-liberal economics and the
commodity audience theories of Marxist media scholarsfew would argue that either of these approaches
have completely resolved the issue satisfactorily, as yet.
Acknowledgments
Thus, while the notion of bureaucratic market simulation
certainly does not eliminate the possibility that studying I would like to thank Michael Curtin, Bob McChesney, Randy
and Lynn Spigelfor their helpful comments on this essay, and
broadcasting through the lenses of classical economic
Stevenson for her research assistance.
theories can yield important insights, it does shed some
light on industry behavior without resorting to hypothetical invisible mechanisms. It rests its account on the
circumstance, beliefs, and habits of real people: the career
managers who do most of the decision-making in the
industry.
The implications of this picture of broadcast industry
behavior for the understanding and politics and broadcast structure are many. Certainly, in broadcasting as in
many other industries, the entrepreneurial, unfettered
autonomy of modern corporationschampioned by the
right and dreaded by the leftis largely mythical.
Corporations are massive bureaucracies, controlled by
career managers who spend their time and efforts
struggling to maintain and enhance the "system" and
their place in it. The truly competitive, entrepreneurial
heroes of free market narratives have been pushed to the
fringes of the economy, to small, usually risky or labor-
Vogt
Nancy
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Notes
'Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life,
Trans, E.F.N. Jephcott. New York: Verso, 1978, p. 23.
JTodd
p. 25.
'Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. The Visible Hand; The Managerial
Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1977, p. 455.
4Outside
[classical economists], and for Marx most of all, competition was an elemental force, comparable to the force of gravity,
which keeps the parts of the system in place and interacting
with each other in intelligible ways." Paul M. Sweezy, Four
Lectures on Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981),
p. 57.
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"Chandler, 1977, p. 1.
^Classical markets still exist here and there. By most accounts,
the generally volatile and freewheeling market for advertising
"Joseph Turow. Media Industries: The Production of News and
time more closely conforms to the free, open, and unfettered
Entertainment. (New York: Longman, 1984; Gitlin, 1985).
marketplace of Adam Smith's ideal than the relatively limited
and oligopolistic conditions that tend to dominate in areas like
"Bernard Miege, 'The Logics at work in the new cultural
program supply, internetwork competition, and the consumer
industries." Media, Culture, and Society, Vol. 9 (1987), p. 276.
product industry (VVillard G. Manning and Bruce M. Owen,
"Television Rivalry and Network Power," Publk Policy, Vol. 24,
"Chandler's "managerial capitalism" is currently the most
No. 1 (Winter 1976), p. 36). But, occasional pockets of classical
prominent of the various theories that have been constructed
market activity don't make a market economy. The point is
simply that what we call commercial broadcasting is a complex . around the fact that the rise of the corporations fostered and
interwoven mix of bureaucratic and economic relations existing was fostered by a new social strata of managers, engineers, and
other specialists who have risen to importance as a determinant
in a contradictory political context, and that describing this
of industrial behavior. Many others have contributed to the
Thomas Streeter is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin
Madison. He has recently published work on cultural
studies and broadcast policy in CSMC, Rowland and
Watkins' Interpretating Television and Media, Culture and
Society.
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