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McChesney, The political economy of communication 113 trailblazing work of Dallas Smythe and Herbert I. Schiller, in particular, that the political economy of communication became widely recognized in the USA as an important area of inquiry in both left and academic circles. The boom in critical media studies in Britain during the same period was also influential in the USA. Writers like James Curran, Nicholas Garnham, Graham Murdock and Peter Golding, among others, established a sophisticated political economic approach to media and cultural questions that remains unrivaled. At the same time, while obviously presuming the importance of communication to social analysis, political economists of communication have battled at their rear flank against the tendency among communication scholars to decontextualize communication from the social frame- work and thereby exaggerate its explanatory powers. The political economy of communication peaked on US campuses in the generation that followed the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s. By the end of the 1990s there has been a retrenchment, and few political economy positions remain. For the ambitious US communication graduate student, 'political economy’ is probably as close to a career-dampening area of specialization as one could find. But that can change again. And since political economic research is of little use to moneyed interests, it is an area that does not tend to attract gobs of research money. This is a decisive factor in explaining the marginal status of the political economy of communication. Indeed, in the 1940s there was a conspicuous shift away from dealing with struc- tural factors when researching media and communication, a process encouraged by powerful media interests, university administrations and foundations as well as the US government. Thereafter, US communication research revealed an absurd contra- diction: in the USA, ownership and subsidy of media were of little explanatory value and, furthermore, media had 'limited effects' over the citizenry. In other nations, especially official enemies like the USSR, on the other hand, issues of ownership and control were assumed by mainstream US scholars to be of central importance in evaluating media performance, and the effects were assumed to be immense if not always measurable (Schiller, 1989). So what should communication do, as a field, to establish its position in the US academic firmament? Or, perhaps more accurately, what should the field of com- munication do to elevate the quality of its work? Regrettably, for reasons mentioned above, accomplishing the latter will not necessarily improve the former. Indeed, becoming a great field, in my view, will almost certainly generate controversy and jeopardize industry funding, two matters that university administrators avoid like the plague. It would be comforting to think that intellectuals committed to democratic communication could bail out of the university system and do their work independently, perhaps holding down 'day jobs' or incorporating their intellectual interests into nonacademic employment. But this is not really an option nor should it be. Societies need public intellectuals and it needs to provide them with some autonomy and insulation in the academy. People outside the academy are going to have their judgment affected by the positions they are in and, while that has positive aspects, it also compromises their vision. I do not therefore mean to posit university intellectuals as being 'objective', because that clearly is not the case. But I would say that once one factors in their values - and their self-interest in the university system – university intellectuals can be more objective than those seeing the world from a more narrowly defined vantage point. We can defend the tenure system only on the grounds that it protects the integrity and autonomy of intellectuals, so they can tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may. To do this effectively requires time and institutional support, and that means a healthy and vibrant university sector.