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110 Media, Culture & Society 22(1) political economic concepts and theory. I argue that the political economy of com- munication is uniquely positioned to provide quality analysis of the most pressing communication issues of our era. This article has two components. I explain first why it remains such a marginal enterprise on university campuses, especially in the USA. I then look at the broader field of communication and its relationship to academic inquiry writ large. I argue that communication scholars in general have a crucial role to play in advancing democratic politics and that, to do so, political economic approaches have to be revitalized and privileged. Political economy of communication The scholarly study of the political economy of communication entails two main dimensions. First, it addresses the nature of the relationship between media and communication systems on the one hand and the broader social structure of society. In other words, it examines how media and communication systems and content reinforce, challenge or influence existing class and social relations. It does this with a particular interest in how economic factors influence politics and social relations. Second, the political economy of communication looks specifically at how owner- ship, support mechanisms (e.g. advertising) and government policies influence media behavior and content. This line of inquiry emphasizes structural factors and the labor process in the production, distribution and consumption of communica- tion. The political economy of communication cannot provide a comprehensive explanation of all communication activity, but it can explain certain issues extremely well and it provides a necessary context for most other research questions in communication. Although the political economy of communication can be applied to the study of precapitalist and postcapitalist societies and communication systems, it is primarily concerned with capitalist societies and commercial media systems, as these models dominate across the world (Mosco, 1996). It is the combination of these two dimensions that distinguishes the political economy of communication from other variants of communication or cultural analysis. Cultural studies, for example, often is concerned with the relationship of media 'texts' to audiences and both of them to existing class and social relations, but it is mostly uninterested in examining the structural factors that influence the production of media content. It is also uninterested, for the most part, with the broader relationship of economics to politics. Media 'economics' often provides microanalysis of how media firms and markets operate but, like the field of mainstream economics, it assumes the existing social and class relations are a given, and a benevolent one at that. Likewise, communication policy studies examine the influence of government policies on media performance, but the work generally presupposes the necessary existence of the market and the broader social situation as the best of all possible worlds. The dominant form of communication research in the USA is drawn from quantitative behavioral social science. This work tends to be the polar opposite of the political economy of communication: it presupposes capitalist society as a given and then discounts structural factors in explaining media behavior. Nevertheless, quantitative communication research some- times generates valuable findings for political economists. For all the important matters to be studied by political economy of communica- tion, it is a marginal enterprise on many US campuses, especially at the pace- setting research universities. In one sense this is part and parcel of the broader fate of communication study, which tends to occupy the low-rent district of the academy. This marginalization of communication is due to the tendency – even among those on the left – to maintain the view that communication is a largely