Power
by
Whatever “media power” means, almost everyone thinks it is important. “It all,” wrote Roger Silverstone, “is about power in the end” (1999, 143). Great historians take the power of the media for granted, even as they worry about it: “as the 20th century ended, it became evident that the media were a more important component of the political process than parties and electoral systems… however… they were in no sense a means of democratic government,” writes Eric Hobsbawm (1995, 581–82). Media—understood to include all technologically based means of communication, means of organizing communication, information, and data—matter. So why do textbooks on power often say nothing about media? Jonathan Hearn’s respected textbook Theorizing Power states that “power is the central thing that social scientists study,” and “at the core of who and what we are” (2012, 3–4), yet media and communication are absent from the book’s index, and feature only in a passing reference to popular culture and taste (100). If power is so important, how can a theory of power ignore one of the most important dimensions of power today: media? And yet this is what theories of power have done for a century or more, and we need to...
This essay may be found on page 145 of the printed volume.