Finance, Culture, and Deregulation: The Making of Financialized Media Policy

Shirin Purkayastha, Yale University

Over the past half century, the United States has undergone a significant transformation toward financialization, marked by the growing influence of financial markets, actors, and metrics across economic and organizational life. While a large body of scholarship has documented the institutional drivers of financialization, less attention has been paid to the cultural processes through which financialized understandings of markets come to be accepted as legitimate frameworks for public policy. This paper examines the cultural legitimation of financial logics within debates over economic regulation in the United States. Specifically, it analyzes the transformation of media ownership policy culminating in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a landmark moment in the deregulation of American communications industries. For much of the twentieth century, media industries were governed by regulatory frameworks grounded in public-interest principles that emphasized diversity of ownership, limits on concentration, and the civic responsibilities of broadcasters. Beginning in the late twentieth century, however, these principles were increasingly challenged by arguments emphasizing market competition, economic efficiency, and corporate scale. Using a process tracing approach, this paper reconstructs the evolution of regulatory discourse from the 1960s through the early twenty-first century. Drawing on music industry trade publications such as Billboard alongside major newspapers including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the analysis traces how financialized conceptions of value and market efficiency entered policy debates and gained legitimacy. By identifying the cultural mechanisms through which financial logics reshaped regulatory thinking, the paper contributes to broader debates about financialization and modern economic governance, demonstrating how financialized market rationality emerged as a historically contingent framework for organizing economic policy.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 117. Morality in Economic and Political Transformations