Abstract
“Bad for business”
CEO of Fox News, Suzanne Scott, in an email telling staff that fact-checking “has to stop” (Levine, 2021).
The internal communication from Fox obtained through the voting equipment company Dominion in its defamation lawsuit against the media company confirmed what was an open secret: Fox News deliberately misleads the audience for profit. The email from Fox News CEO to staff asking them to stop fact-checking is just one of many documents detailing how Fox executives and hosts privately derided the stolen-election claims even as the network aired them anyway (Blake, 2023). While it is not surprising that a media organization is trying to appeal to and keep its audience, the bluntness of the business decision clearly shows that media is just another business.
The vast majority of news outlets in contemporary western capitalist democracies are for-profit corporations following the mantra of profit maximization. Even so, there is still some lingering naivety about media corporations in the field of organization studies. This takes the expression in form of treating media as a public sphere—a realm where public opinion is formed (Habermas et al., 1974). The media is seen as an arena within which politics is played out (see e.g. Gaim et al., 2021; Joutsenvirta and Vaara, 2015; McDonnell and King, 2013), with corporations promoting their ideas by marketing their corporate social responsibility or using forms of corporate political activities in competition with other interest groups. While the media’s political affiliation or tendency (e.g. left/right, progressive/conservative) is commonly reflected upon in the analysis, how their ownership model influences the discourse is rarely mentioned. Media analyses of the politics often fail to take the media’s obvious capitalist position into account. The analyses are treating media as a marketplace of ideas, rather than as an intrinsic part of capitalism (Nyberg, 2021).
The major achievement of Klikauer’s (2021) book Media Capitalism is to explain the workings of media as a political actor in shaping society. The book convincingly dispels any myth of media as an open public sphere. It shows in historical detail the development of media capitalism and how this form of capitalism turns “human beings into hyper-consumers” (p. 9). Media is a business selling a commodity (news and entertainment) and, as such, media supports the commodification of all other spheres (education, healthcare and politics). In the book’s 500 pages divided into 10 chapters, Klikauer shows how media capitalism influences education (chapter 4), universities (chapter 5), human behaviour (chapter 7), work (chapter 8) and democracy (chapter 9). The book is packed with interesting details and descriptions of how media capitalism works in these different areas.
The main thesis of the book is that media capitalism is a new stage of capitalism within which human relations and organizations is to be understood. It replaces previous stages and modalities of capitalism (e.g. Fordism, consumer capitalism), and it is upheld through the global media industry, the corporate PR industry and commercial marketing. This thesis successfully explains the dominance and expansion of capitalism, with freedom restricted to consumerism in choosing school, work and even political party, while accepting restricted freedoms associated with democratic citizenship. The detailed development of a new form of capitalism is the strength of the book. The a priori theoretical framework of media capitalism to understand the world is an impressive theoretical contribution to social science in general, including the field of organization studies.
The key concept advanced in the book to explain the new age of media capitalism is hegemonic ideology. Hegemonic ideology “stabilises media capitalism’s entire structure” (p. 458) and, according to Klikauer, it fulfils three functions: “it camouflages contradictions, cements domination and annihilates emancipation” (p. 8). In Klikauer’s structural position, individual citizens are not able to see through the doxa of media capitalism, turning humans in to hyper-consumers that do not “recognize their own alienation. . .[and]. . . life’s emptiness” (p. 362). Resting the framework in the form of a new stage of capitalism on the concept of hegemony is perhaps somewhat old-fashioned and it is arguably worth unpacking the term to discuss the key theoretical concept of the book.
Hegemony is an established and productive concept to describe the influence of corporations, supported by major parties in western capitalist democracies, and their successful expansion into health and education. In this vein, Klikauer convincingly shows how most aspects of human relations are now incorporated into supporting capitalism’s ideological powers, with adult citizens conditioned to consume and work (p. 307). The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated rather neatly how this hegemony works: most western nation states responded through coercive state measures, outsourcing political decisions to big tech companies, and monetarily propping up corporations. That the COVID years increased both inequality and the wealth of the richest people in the world supports Klikauer’s thesis. The pandemic was an opportunity to strengthen the hegemony.
However, Klikauer’s strong notion of hegemony can be contrasted with Gramsci’s (1971) discussion of the concept. For Gramsci, who popularized the concept, a large part of the governing hegemony is dependent on passive consent. This does not necessarily mean that people follow blindly, and it is becoming evident that people are experiencing injustices and humiliations following decades of austerity and increasing inequality. People are recognizing the fact that during the pandemic big corporations were getting monetary support while citizens were restricted politically. The key to understand hegemony is this paradox of domination: people accept the leadership of these corporations and institutions, despite recognizing this domination. Without this paradox, hegemony becomes a “‘dominant ideology’ that is externally imposed to distract people from reality” (Martin, 2022: 4). This is an important distinction and Klikauer’s position appears to use the notion of ideology as a unitary structure. That is, the ideology in the book appears dominant, rather than hegemonic. While Klikauer shows four key engagements of how this dominant ideology work—education, work, consumerism and democracy—the muscular structure of ideology camouflages the situation. For Klikauer, people are unable to recognize “the badness of the present conditions” (p. 458).
To the contrary, recent political movements suggest that people are recognizing the “badness” of the current situation. Movements such as Black Lives Matter, Me Too and Extinction Rebellion have articulated critique of existing hegemonies. They have done this by making everyday oppressions explicit and revealing the extent to which issues such as unequal wealth distribution, racial and sexual violence and the impacts of carbon emissions maintain the hegemony that are against the interests of the vast majority (Nyberg et al., 2022). While these experiences may not have bearing on major political decisions, since they are situated at the margins of “reality”—often referred to as “subjective,” “naïve” or “radical” (Boltanski, 2011). These voices from the margins can become counter-hegemonic in showing the contradictions of media capitalism and promoting alternatives. There is the possibility to create equivalence across interests and priorities in challenging the status quo.
Without recognizing these political projects and affective dimensions, everything is collapsed into a structure of domination. The marginalized movements are the sources of radical critique that can open up pathways to an alternative world. Without neatly categorizing these and other movements, it is possible to distinguish between the reformist critique intended to improve the existing dominant hegemony and the radical critique that challenges the social order (Boltanski, 2011). Within organization studies, the former is represented by Political CSR (Scherer and Palazzo, 2011) and most critical performativity scholarship (see e.g. Spicer et al., 2009). The aim is to improve media capitalism and its supporting institutions, which, simultaneously, also would strengthen it. The latter is represented by more radical scholars (see e.g. Fleming and Banerjee, 2016; Parker and Parker, 2017), who aim to exploit the contradiction of media capitalism in showing that there is no solid ground on which this hegemony rests on. What is seen as natural or taken-for-granted can, and must, change. This includes recognizing that the public sphere in the form of media and social media is “grounding” a particular “reality”—media capitalism—that sustains hyper-consumerism, which alienates humans and destroys the environment (Nyberg et al., 2022). Klikauer’s radical critique successfully shows how this grounding works, while others are opening up pathways to a decolonized (Banerjee, 2022), queered (Zanoni et al., 2017), or greened (De Cock et al., 2021) post-capitalistic and alternative “reality.”
