In this study, the contribution of Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller, who work in the field of political economy of communication in the USA, to the field of communication sciences was examined with a qualitative approach and document analysis method. The fact that both thinkers were accepted as the people who established and developed the political economy of communication enabled them to be the subject of this study. The main body of our study is that Smythe sees the mass media as the direct producer of the capitalist system and Schiller sees the hegemony of the America in the field of communication and culture as the dominance of the military-industrial complex of the USA. In our study, first, the critical political economy of communication has been tried to be explained with the main lines. Afterwards, Smythe's concepts of audience commodity and consciousness industry and Schiller's cultural imperialism applied by the America to the rest of the world were tried to be explained on the basis of the political economy of communication. In this context, in line with the concepts put forward by both Smythe and Schiller, the audience of the CNN international news channel and its news programs and broadcasts are taken as an example, and it has been tried to show that it is a complementary part of the American monopoly capitalist system in a holistic sense.