Towards the Liberation from Capitalist Business Models: The De-capitalisation of Journalism and Communication Studies

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31269/m3bsez24

Keywords:

capitalism, journalism, Critique of the Political Economy of the Media, de-capitalisation, academic publishing

Abstract

This paper introduces a perspective on media companies, journalism, and Communication Studies beyond capitalism. It starts from a critique of German Communication Studies that has neglected the critical, Marxian-inspired analysis of the relationship of the media and capitalism. The article introduces elements of a Critique of the Political Economy of the Media. It discusses foundations of the liberation of the media from capitalist business models. The author in this context introduces the notion of the decapitalisation of the media, the rollback and abolition of the logic of capital in the media economy and society. He shows what role decapitalisation could play in journalism, communication studies, and academic publishing.

Acknowledgement: This article was first published as open access chapter in Manfred Knoche’s book “Critique of the Political Economy of the Media: Foundations and Application”, https://doi.org/10.16997/book79 Reproduced based on a CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

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Author Biography

  • Manfred Knoche, University of Salzburg

    Manfred Knoche is Professor Emeritus of Media Economics and Media and Communication Studies at the University of Salzburg in Austria. He studied Journalism, Sociology, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Mainz and the Free University of Berlin. He obtained his PhD (1978) and defended his habilitation (1981) at the Free University of Berlin. He was Research Assistant in the years 1974-1979 and Assistant Professor of Communications Politics in Berlin in the years 1979-1983. From 1983-1994, he was Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, where he was also the Director of the Centre for Mass Communications Research. From 1994-2009 he held the Chair Professorship of Journalism and Communication Studies with Special Focus on Media Economics at the University of Salzburg’s Department of Communication Studies, where he was the Head of the Department’s Section on Media Economics and Empirical Communication Research. He chaired the German Association for Media and Communication Studies’ (DGPuK) Media Economics-section. He is author of many publications on the Critique of the Political Economy of the Media. His work has especially focused on the critique of the political economy of media concentration and the media industry’s structural transformations. A collection of English translations of his most important works is available from University of Westminster Press as open access book under the title Critique of the Political Economy of the Media.

    http://www.medienoekonomie.at,
    https://www.kowi-salzburg.at/team/manfred-knoche/
    Twitter: @Medoek

    Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Knoche

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Published

2025-08-08

Issue

Vol. 23 No. 2 (2025):

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2025 tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

tripleC is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal (ISSN: 1726-670X). All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License.

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