tripleC 10(2): 413-424, 2012 ISSN 1726-670X http://www.triple-c.at Did Somebody Say Neoliberalism?: On the Uses and Limi- tations of a Critical Concept in Media and Communication Studies Christian Garland* and Stephen Harper** * University of Warwick, UK and Fellow of Fellow of the Institut für Kritische Theorie, Freie Universität Berlin
[email protected] ** University of Portsmouth, School of Creative Arts, Film and Media, Portsmouth, UK,
[email protected] Abstract: This paper explores the political-economic basis and ideological effects of talk about neoliberalism with respect to media and communication studies. In response to the supposed ascendancy of the neoliberal order since the 1980s, many media and communication scholars have redirected their critical attentions from capitalism to neoliberalism. This paper tries to clarify the significance of the relatively new emphasis on neoliberalism in the discourse of media and com- munication studies, with particular reference to the 2011 phone hacking scandal at The News of the World. Questioning whether the discursive substitution of ‘neoliberalism’ for ‘capitalism’ offers any advances in critical purchase or explanatory power to critics of capitalist society and its media, the paper proposes that critics substitute a Marxist class analysis in place of the neoliberalism-versus-democracy framework that currently dominates in the field. Keywords: Neoliberalism, Marxism, Critical Theory, Critical Media and Communication Studies, Hackgate The media and communication studies textbooks of the early 1980s constituted an ideological battleground for the struggle between liberal pluralism, on the one hand, and Marxism, on the other (see, for example, Gurevitch et al. 1982). Under the influence of European critical theory and British cultural studies, Marxist communication scholars talked of capitalism and class strug- gle, and accused pluralists of underestimating structures of domination (Hall 1982).