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MEDIA CULTURE &SOCIETY Commentary The political economy of communication and the future of the field Robert W. McChesney INSTITUTE OF COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH & GRADUATE SCHOOL OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN Introduction The academic field of communication (or media studies) enjoyed a rapid rise to prominence in the generations following the Second World War, at least in the USA, Britain and the English-speaking world. By the 1970s and into the 1980s important epistemological, theoretical and political debates were at the heart of communication, and the discipline encapsulated the vitality of intellectual life in those times. Since the early 1980s, and clearly by the 1990s, the dynamism has been extinguished, mirroring the overall trend toward quiescence and depoliticiza- tion on university campuses. The field of communication has settled into a second- tier role in Western academic life, providing mostly inconsequential research of little interest to anyone outside narrow subsets of the field, not to mention to any- one outside the field or outside the academy. Were it not for the large undergraduate demand for training and degrees leading to employment in the media/information sector, the very future of the field as a distinct research enterprise would be open to question. As it is, the product of the communication research is unimpressive, especially when viewed against the backdrop of the crucial political and intellectual questions surrounding communication in the present time. There is little reason to suspect that anything will change in the foreseeable future. In my view the current malaise or impasse in academic communication is not only a problem for a small group of professional academics, it is a problem for all who care about democracy and the key issues surrounding the relationship of communication to democracy and to capitalism, and the relationship of democracy and capitalism with each other. In this commentary I argue that my particular subfield, the political economy of communication, needs to play a much larger role in communication programs if communication is to escape its present path to irrelevance. I do not argue that the political economy of communication should be the dominant component of all communication programs, merely that it be a cornerstone of all of them. And I argue that all communication scholars, regardless of their areas of expertise, would benefit from a working knowledge of basic Media, Culture & Society © 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 22: 109–116 [0163-4437(200001)22:1;109–116;011271] from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.