Envisioning Media Power

A penetrating and thought-provoking analysis of an industry that is under-researched and yet of great cultural and economic significance. Using the UK and New Zealand TV industries as windows onto wider processes, Christophers skilfully reveals the complex intersections of knowledge, power and geography through which the sector is constantly being made and remade. Most significantly, the analysis lays bare the different modalities of power which shape the media worlds that surround us all. -- Neil Coe, University of Manchester, UK
Television today is a major locus for the organization of knowledge, the accumulation of capital, and the exercise of power. Envisioning Media Power offers a forceful and insightful examination of how these processes interact. The book should be read by anyone interested in rethinking the ways the media industries have given contemporary political economy some of its most distinctive political and financial forms. -- Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University
Brett Christophers brings acute intelligence and original research to bear on television. This innovative study offers a new and exciting approach that blends political economy, geography, and cultural theory. Bravo! -- Toby Miller, New York University
This book will appeal to sophisticated students and to scholars looking for a deeply empirical study that engages much of the recent debates and research in media economics and the economic geography of culture industries. * Journal Of Economic Geography *
Brett Christophers’s book Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television has set itself an ambitious agenda. It aims to capture how power operates and flows through media across geographic space, focusing on the medium of television, with media understood as its programs, production processes, ratings data, and policy discourses. The book aims to develop an original application of economic geography—particularly David Harvey’s notion of a 'spatial fix' embedded in the contradictory circuits of capital accumulation—while updating the political economy of the media approach through specific application of such developments as localized case studies in the recent context of the United Kingdom and New Zealand. * Economic Geography *
For those interested in a critical understanding of the relations between television, cultural production, and the geographical political economy of media, this book will be an immensely rich resource. * Environment And Planning A: Intl Journal Of Urban And Regional Research *
[This] detailed and well-written monograph combines a political economy approach with concepts from classical economics. Those who will find the book most useful are economic geographers, economically oriented media scholars, and persons seeking to bring a progressive approach to media administration. * Progress In Human Geography *
Rarely...have considerations of the meanings and practices of consumption been extended to consider the geographies of television production and distribution that Christophers focuses on in this book...Indeed, overall the book provides a powerful sense of the multiple geographies that underlie the production of the programming that so many of us rely on for information about, and windows onto, the world around us, as well as escapist entertainment and morning-tea-break fodder. * Social & Cultural Geography *
A brief series of remarks at the end draw out both conclusions, comment, and some further research ideas. * Communication Booknotes Quarterly *
Through his combination of conceptual insights with empirical substance, the author lays open the fabric of television's international economy, and ultimately offers a new theoretical argument—suggesting that power, knowledge and geography are inseparable not only from one another, but from the process of accumulation of media capital. -- Chris Sterling * Communication Booknotes Quarterly *
Christophers approaches these debates in a refreshingly level-headed way….These detailed insights, which hint more suggestively than explicitly towards effective media politics, are the greatest contribution of this work and are crucial to understanding the deeply internationalized system of media production, finance, and distribution….Envisioning is timely and its empirical and theoretical insights are necessary….This book will appeal to sophisticated students and to scholars looking for a deeply empirical study that engages much of the recent debates and research in media economics and the economic geography of culture industries. Readers will find it dense but informative. * Journal Of Economic Geography *
Envisioning Media Power effectively confronts complacent assumptions about space and place—or 'anaemic geographies'—within the media of political economy. It reads recent histories of television in the UK and New Zealand from multiple angles. * New Zealand Geographer *
It is a study of the political economy of the Hollywood-studio-dominated television industry and of the complexities that attach to the production, distribution, and consumption of arguably very unusual commodities—television programs—across various scales. Under this umbrella, Christophers fits a lot of fascinating material. * Environment And Planning D: Society And Space *