Neoliberal Imaginaries, Press Freedom and the Politics of Leveson

The 2011 Leveson Inquiry into the “culture, practices and ethics of the [UK] press” (Leveson Inquiry, 2012, p. 1) invites critical reflection on the problematic of neoliberalism, media and the political for at least two reasons. First, the events that led to the establishment of the Inquiry — The Guardian’s revelation of systematic phone hacking at the News of the World newspaper — symbolized the abject condition of journalism in a corporate media system. Neoliberal regimes are officially governed by the assumption that the organization of social life is best served by the market: in Hayek’s (1960) famous formulation, the “spontaneous order” of the market should be the primary mechanism for constituting the social. However, within the realpolitik of “actually existing neoliberalism” (Brenner & Theodore, 2002, p. 349), things often function differently. The appeal to “free market orthodoxies” acts as a “smokescreen” for policy regimes that “optimize the power and influence” (Puttnam cited in Gaber, 2012, p. 637) of corporations. Crouch (2011) suggests actually existing neoliberalism is “devoted to the dominance of public life by the giant corporation” (p. viii), ironically privileging a paternalistic and collectivist logic of “consumer welfare” over the individualist logic of “consumer choice” (p. 55). Choice, it turns out, is not that important at all — not even to Chicago School economists. So long as there is a “general gain in efficiency across the economic system” (p. 56), how the gain is socially distributed or organized does not matter much. Two newspapers in a city might give us more choice. However, if merging them produces economic efficiencies, the interests of the (rational) consumer will have been served within the Chicago School imaginary.