ll Medien/ Kultur Peter Golding, Graham Murdock (Hg.): The Political Economy of the Media Cheltenham, Brookfield: Edward Elgar Publishing 1997 (The International Library of Studies in Media and Culture; Bd. 2), 2 Bde., 1.424 S., ISBN 1-85278-777-5, :t 285.00 41 Tue two volumes of „Tue Political Economy of the Media" bring together key readings in the political economy of the mass media. The books include otherwise hardly accessible articles of seminal thinkers Iike Theodor W. Adorno, Juergen Habermas and Herbert Schiller, as weil as carefully selected extracts from important books and official documents. They cover a wide spectrum of writings on mass media and communications spanning about almost nine decades ( 1910-1994). In the first part of Volume 1 the editors suggest a definition of the political economy approach to communications. Their attempt is followed by a set of articles which all delineate and chart the field of endeavour in slightly different manners. Tue following section is concemed with the finance, structure and extemalities of capitalist enterprise. Tue third part of Volume I tums to the question of ideology. Section 4 finally addresses the global reach of communications. Whereas Volume I is mainly concerned with the general and economic foundations of „The Political Economy of the Media" , Volume II puts some emphasis on the very notion of „political" in the couplet of political economy, and is concerned „most especially with ensuring the common good in the regulation and management of communications and media;' (Vol. I p. xvii). These issues are introduced by the editors on the first pages of Volume II in a very detailed manner. The headlines of the four sections of Volume II are the following: ,,Private Interest to Common Goods"; ,,Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest"; ,,Policing the Public Interest and lnstitutionalising Diversity". On the introductory pages (Vol. I pp. xiv-xv) the editors refer to Adam Smith as the founding father of political economy. They maintain that „it was Smith 's destiny to be understood and misquoted for over two centuries" (Vol. I pp. xiv). Golding and Murdock (Vol. I p. xiv) qualify Smith's concern with the protection and advancement of self-interest and natural Iiberty. This qualification prepares the ground for the frontal attack ridden by the authors against mainstream econornics later on. Tue editors are implicitly in agreement with the so-called new left having emerged in European and US-American social sciences during the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Referring to Lindbeck they accuse the mainstream economists of having ,,lost all interest in the distributional consequences of the market, especially the evidently re- gressive pattem of income and wealth; that it ignored the social political factors shaping demand and supply; was obsessed with micro processes while ignorant of macro structures; and was either deliberately or unwittingly ideological in its unspoken defence of a taken-for-granted capitalist order" (Vol. I pp. xv). One can not assess the value of the two volumes of „The Political Economy of the Media" properly without knowing this particular ideological background of the