Abstract
Thomas Klikauer's Media Capitalism provides an extensive and essential appraisal of the role media play in advancing and underwriting global capitalism. Klikauer's book is not only thoroughly well-documented, but it also provides insights and critiques vital for understanding how transnational capitalism has created its parallel in global media consolidation and function. He identifies four essential spheres of contemporary media ideological influence: Education, advertising-consumption, managerial regimes, and democracy. Within his clear critique of media functions, however, it seems at the beginning Klikauer occasionally overstates media effects. He posits that media capitalism has eliminated progressive social revolt and revolutions have ended. In explaining that media decide what we see, what we hear, what we believe in, and what attitudes we have about society, politicians, and capitalism, Klikauer questions humanity's ability to reflect on our own experiences of inequality, violence, and political duplicity.
While it is empirically viable to note that media have a significant ideological impact shaping human behavior and action, we have not seen diminishing levels of physical brutality, nor have coercion and violence been left in the past. One needs only recall that 500,000 children were starved in the US war on Iraq, the continuing killing of black citizens in the US, and the ongoing overt and covert interventions by the US, France, UK, and other global military actions to understand that while ‘consumerism pacifies workers’ (p. 66), capitalist powers and their national states continue to respond with violence, intervention, and occupation around the world. Ideology has become an economic necessity as schools, higher education, and consumerism help control labor. At the same time, threats and coercion of workforces remain in every capitalist nation from US and UK to India, China, and Brazil. Likewise, proletarians—workers—have not been replaced. In fact, in 2022 there were more than 3.3 billion workers, a 50% increase since 1990. Media ideological power cannot overcome the material reality of working conditions and the continued exploitation of labor. Moreover, as Klikauer points out, media have not eliminated anti-capitalist ideas. In a 2018 US Gallup poll, 51% of Gen Z (ages under 26) supported socialism. In 2019, 70% of millennials (ages 27–42) said they’d vote for socialism.
Despite these few overstatements, this monumental work uncovers key issues in media's role expanding contemporary global capitalism. The media system is an essential ideological linchpin of the globalized market economy. Klikauer insightfully identifies how media sustain four key domains for capital, labor, and profit: education, consumerism, worker management, and democracy—meaning electoral politics. He explains how feudal ‘bread and circuses’ that distracted artisans and peasants from inequality, has been replaced with more sophisticated mass entertainment using film, television, and social media to create a central hegemonic system of practices and meanings saturating mass consciousness. He also demonstrates that by the mid-twentieth century, critiques of capitalism were largely contained within electoral politics as individual politicians offered modest reforms to recruit and distract populations from independent organizing. Importantly, Media Capitalism explains how global capitalism ideologically disguises and reduces democracy to electoral politics.
Organized in ten convincing chapters, Klikauer introduces media capitalism in Chapter 1 as ‘manipulation with a noble higher goal stabilizing capitalism’ as propaganda becomes public relations. Chapter 2 offers a history of media capitalism by noting that cooperation has been a prime means for human survival and development from feudalism to modernity and finally to twentieth century capitalism that relies on consumerism, mass consent, and coercion. These introductory chapters are followed by six chapters illustrating how media capitalism has become embedded in public discourse, schools and universities, social and cultural practices, everyday human behavior, and working-class life. Chapter 9 tackles how media capitalism's framing of democracy, political parties, and ‘leaders’ has distorted our understanding and practice of democracy. Under neoliberalism, technology, and managerial behaviorism, large media corporations now ideologically dominate the construction of meaning and ‘colonized the free public sphere,’ because ‘manipulation and governing of people is the result of a capital-media symbiosis.’ In short, Klikauer posits that media capitalism ‘has transformed democracy into a mere appendix to mass media.’ Chapter 10 provides a summary of media capitalism which reflects how capitalism per se depends on corporate media, which has created a ‘web of interests’ among capitalist producers, advertisers, politicians, and private media—all of which depend on the ‘ideological linchpin,’ provided by a global commercial media system. Kilkauer closes with some thoughts on public access media based on socially-organized production and distribution which would dramatically reorganize social relations and the functioning of education, work, and democracy.
Perhaps most importantly, this book fulfills its goal of explaining media capitalism as it unpacks how media entertainment uses spectacle to limit time for thought and reflection, by media advertising promoting consumerism and capitalist ideologies, through education, by promoting jobs as commodities and reinforcing management prerogatives, and through electoral politics which enhance the ideology of elite competition. Klikauer also identifies how public relations employs psychological and behavioral theories to promote and normalize capitalist ideologies of individual competition and consumerism. This book effectively reveals how ideology camouflages contradictions, cements domination, and works to prevent emancipation.
Anyone interested in how media function as capitalist industries while promoting capitalist ideology and winning citizen consent should read Media Capitalism. The research is solid, the references are extensive, and most observations are convincing. He warns that media will use new social science to become even more manipulative—absent public control. Klikauer's closing call for a renewed ideal speech norm based on ethics, trust, truth, and competency also has great merit.
A stronger political economy of media frame could provide an even more hopeful conclusion by recognizing that media capitalism has not and cannot remove resistance. Alternatives led by workers and allies—as demonstrated in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Cuba—provide several human-centered and truly democratic choices. Those existing examples also contain suggestions for transforming media capitalism into public access and public-controlled media for the benefit of humanity.