(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
newspapers are analyzed with content analysis and the findings are evaluated qualitatively
within political economy approach.
Post-Fordist Production, New Middle Class and Cultural Mediators
Between 1969 and 1971, the unemployment rate boosted, wages decreased and the
growth came to a halt in the United States of America (U.S.A.) (Heffernan, 2005: 27-28). The
inflationist policy that the U.S.A. pursued to fight against unemployment caused the
breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreement on fixed exchange rates with the overvalue of
dollar. As a result, the U.S.A. abandoned Keynesian economics and gradually withdrew the
state support on real sector. That brought a shift to money market and banking oriented
monetary policies (Mishkin, 1998: 412). The growth in service sector with the banks and
intermediaries, as opposed to the real sector, created the circumstances for the birth of cultural
mediators, that is, new journalists and advertisers of the next period.
The economy politics of the new liberalism were gradually carried into effect.
Conservationism was a means of providing mass obedience to the new liberal economy
politics. The rise in capital mobility caused a contraction in working class rights and decline
in nation states. The rise of private sector made the state abandon market mechanisms giving
up its effort to manage markets. Thus, the markets were under the control of individual profit
phenomenon and the invisible state hand.
It could be agreed upon that media, standing out among the other superstructural
institutions during the mentioned period, placed itself at the center of ideological
reproduction. In the context of critical paradigm; social power relations, economic life and
social institutions accepted as superstructure have to be examined altogether and how antimass
structures could reproduce themselves has to be understood.
In the context of mainstream media studies, the function of media to inform the
citizens is emphasized (Mc Quail and Windahl, 1981). Despite ignoring ethical principles of
liberal journalism, media intensively publishes advertisements in the shape of news. This
asserts the conclusion that media acts in favor of the dominant classes in reproducing the
hegemony relations.
The term cultural mediators by Pierre Bourdieu means cultural positioning of
occupations and subjectively individuals (1992: 230). New middle class, as a related term, can
be regarded as the social class that the cultural mediators belong to in the discussed economic
structure. Cultural mediators and the new middle class are both the producers of the content in
advertorial news (in some cases the news source) and the consumer, and as the representative
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