Media Industries as Structure: Objectivism and the Societal Context - Case Study: The Political Economy of Television Sports Rights

The chapter as a whole will offer an outline how political economy has come to operate across different aspects of media, cultural and communication studies, and attempt to outline a methodology for how best to implement this approach for research. My contribution sits alongside this, offering a case study where I reflect quite openly about how I myself use political economy in my research, how exactly I went about doing this from a methodological standpoint, and also how effective it was as a method of research. I therefore frame my contribution around a piece of my research that I have actually done where I took a political economy approach. More specifically, readers will find below a piece that thinks about the how's and why's of using this approach for television sports rights. I have also used a political economy theory for the analysis of public service broadcasting (see Iosifidis, 2007, 2010), media ownership (see Iosifidis, 1997, 2011) and social media (see Iosifidis and Wheeler, 2016)