Marxist approaches to media studies: The British experience

Analysis of contemporary mass communication research in Great Britain reveals a Marxist paradigm growing in influence over the past two decades. Developing largely out of literary criticism, this line of British research has bifurcated, with one line moving toward cultural analysis and the other toward a more traditional social‐scientific model with particular emphasis on class and economic structures as independent variables. This paper provides an introduction to the body of cultural research and theory, and indirectly, to the growing corpus of Marxist communication study throughout the world.