201,22

Male
“io +~=3Miass Media
and
Society
Second Edition

Edited by
James Curran
Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths’ College,
University of London
and

Michael Gurevitch
Professor, College of Journalism, University of Maryland

A member of the Hodder Headline Group

LONDON « NEW YORK «SYDNEY * AUCKLAND
THE MASTER'S COLLEGE
POWELL LIBRARY
SANTA CLARITA, CA 91321
 First published in Great Britain in 1996 by
Arnold, a member of the Hodder Headline Group
338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Second impression 1997

Distributed exclusively in the USA by

St Martin’s Press Inc.,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10010

© 1996 Introduction, Selections and Editorial Matter

James Curran and Michael Gurevitch

Chapter 1 © Peter Golding and Graham Murdock

Chapter 2 © Liesbet van Zoonen
Chapter 3 © John Fiske
Chapter 4 © Denis McQuail
Chapter 5 © James Curran
Chapter 6 © Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch
Chapter 7 © Michael Schudson
Chapter 8 © Simon Frith
Chapter 9 © Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi
Chapter 10 © Michael Gurevitch
Chapter 11 © Judith Lichtenberg
Chapter 12 © Daniel C. Hallin
Chapter 13 © Christine Geraghty
Chapter 14 © John Corner
Chapter 15 © Sonia Livingstone
Chapter 16 © Ien Ang and Joke Hermes
Chapter 17 © Janet Wasko

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior
permission in writing from the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In
the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency: 90
Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mass media and society/edited by James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-340-61418-8 (pbk.)
1. Mass media—Social aspects. 2. Mass media—Political aspects.
I. Curran, James. II. Gurevitch, Michael.
HM258.M185 1996
302.23-dc20 9541436

Composition by J&L Composition Ltd, Filey, North Yorkshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by J. W. Arrowsmith, Bristol
Contents

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction to the Second Edition

Section I: Mass Media and Society: General Perspectives

1 Culture, Communications, and Political Economy
Peter Golding and Graham Murdock
2 Feminist Perspectives on the Media
Liesbet van Zoonen
3 Postmodernism and Television
John Fiske
4 Mass Media in the Public Interest: Towards a Framework of
Norms for Media Performance
Denis McQuail
5 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited
James Curran
6 Media Change and Social Change: Linkages and Junctures 120
Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch

Section II: Media Production

7 The Sociology of News Production Revisited 141
Michael Schudson
8 Entertainment 160
Simon Frith
9 The Global and the Local in International Communications 77
Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi
10 The Globalization of Electronic Journalism 204
Michael Gurevitch
iv. Contents

11 In Defence of Objectivity Revisited 225

Judith Lichtenberg
12 Commercialism and Professionalism in the American
News Media 243
Daniel C. Hallin

Section III: Mediation of Meaning

13 Representation and Popular Culture 265
Christine Geraghty
14 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 280
John Corner
15 On the Continuing Problem of Media Effects 305
Sonia Livingstone
16 Gender and/in Media Consumption 325
Ien Ang and Joke Hermes
17 Understanding the Disney Universe 348
Janet Wasko

Index 369
List of Contributors

Ien Ang, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Western Sydney,

Nepean, Australia
Jay G. Blumler, Emeritus Professor, University of Leeds and University of
Maryland
John Corner, Professor of Communication, University of Liverpool
James Curran, Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths’ College, Univer-
sity of London
John Fiske, Professor of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-
Madison
Simon Frith, Professor and Director of the John Logie Baird Centre, Uni-
versity of Strathclyde
Christine Geraghty, Lecturer in Communications, Goldsmiths’ College,
University of London
Peter Golding, Professor of Sociology, University of Loughborough
Michael Gurevitch, Professor, College of Journalism, University of Mary-
land
Daniel C. Hallin, Professor of Communication, University of California, San
Diego
Joke Hermes, Lecturer in Mass Communication, University of Amsterdam
Judith Lichtenberg, Associate Professor, Institute for Philosophy and Public
Policy, University of Maryland
Sonia Livingstone, Lecturer in Social Psychology, London School of Eco-
nomics, University of London
Denis McQuail, Professor of Mass Communication, University of Amsterdam
Graham Murdock, Reader in Sociology, University of Loughborough
Michael Schudson, Professor of Communication, University of California,
San Diego
Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, Professor and Director of the Centre for
Mass Communication Research, University of Leicester
Liesbet van Zoonen, Senior Lecturer in Mass Communication, University of
Amsterdam iG *
Janet Wasko, Professor in Communication, University of Oregon
Acknowledgements

The editor and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to
use copyright material in this book:

The Central Statistical Office for Table 1.1 from Family Expenditure Survey,
1993, reproduced with permission of the Controller of HMSO; The World
Bank for Table 9.1 from UNESCO Statistical Yearbook, 1993; The UNESCO
Press for Table 9.2 from UNESCO Statistical Yearbook, © UNESCO, 1989
and for Table 9.3 from World Communication Report, © UNESCO, 1989;
Oxford University Press for data for Table 9.4 from Human Development
Report 1994; KGTV, San Diego for Figure 12.1.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material produced in
this book. Any rights not acknowledged here will be acknowledged in
subsequent printings if notice is given to the publisher.
Introduction to the Second
Edition

This book is the grandchild of Mass Communication and Society, published in

1977. That volume was produced and edited expressly for students of the
Open University course of that same title. It was designed to offer students a
collection of essays aimed at supplementing other course materials, and the
structure of the book therefore followed rather closely the structure of the
course.
Like other Open University texts Mass Communication and Society was
available to students and academics outside the Open University. We found to
our surprise that our collection of readings quickly reached an audience far
wider than the one for which it was originally intended.
However, in spite of its longevity (over the years the book was reprinted ten
times) we became increasingly aware of the ‘creeping obsolescence’ of the
1977 volume. We decided, therefore, to put together a revised edition. But, as
soon as we thought about it in detail, it became clear that a merely ‘revised’
edition would remain trapped in the models and paradigms of the 1970s and
fail to come to terms with the extraordinary transformation of the field that has
taken place since then.
The result was the first edition of Mass Media and Society, published in
1991. This followed its predecessor in that it retained the same organizing
framework of three sections. It also had some of the same authors (in addition
to younger ones who were still at school when its predecessor first appeared).
And it was pitched at about the same level as before.
But there the family resemblance ended. The new book had more overview
articles in order to carry the expository load formerly taken by Open Uni-
versity course units. It relied less on reprints. It was less parochial in feel
(relatively speaking) in that it was not written, as before, almost entirely by
British academics. Above all, it was different because it reflected and
responded critically to the new revisionism that had developed in mass
communication research during the previous decade.
A critical review of revisionist thinking is provided by James Curran (1990)
in an essay whose origins go back to earlier discussions concerning the
2 Introduction

structure of the revised edition of Mass Communication and Society. The

central theme of this essay is that the radical tradition in media research has
imploded in response to an internal debate. This has led to an increasing
repudiation of the totalizing themes of marxism, a reassessment of the power
structure of society and the media’s relationship to it, a stress on the
ambiguity and ‘discursive space’ afforded by much media content, a redis-
covery of the audience as an active creator of meanings, and a shift from a
concern with the media’s ideological influence to an increased interest in the
nature of people’s pleasure in media consumption. During the same period,
some researchers in the liberal-pluralist tradition have reconsidered their
position in response to attacks from radical critics; they have moved, in
effect, against the flow of traffic coming the other way. The result has been
a redefinition of the field in which the traditional dichotomy between neo-
marxist and liberal-pluralist perspectives have become less salient and also
less sharply defined, while other perspectives — notably, femininism, post-
modernism and particularistic versions of pluralism — have gained increased
prominence.
The other important shift in the field was prompted by changes in the media
industry, particularly television. The age of channel austerity was replaced by
an era of channel abundance, with the adoption of new TV technologies.
Much television news material is now distributed by satellites, ushering in an
era of ‘globalized’ news. The 1980s were also characterized by the dominance
of right-wing governments in many Western countries, and this led to
sweeping changes in the regulatory structures governing television both in
Europe and the United States. The upheavals of Eastern Europe in 1989-91
also engulfed its media, prompting a debate about how these should be
reorganized and democratized. Furthermore, new technological develop-
ments seem likely to change significantly the media landscape over the next
two decades. For all these reasons, a policy-oriented discussion of the political
and cultural role of the media and of so-called ‘technologies of freedom’
ote an importance that it lacked in the more static period of the mid-
S.
The first edition of Mass Media and Society reflected these different
changes and trends in mass communication research. But it also commented
upon and critically appraised them. This was done not by promoting one
particular point of view but by staging a debate, both explicit and implicit, on
the basis of which readers could form their own judgement.
_ The second edition follows essentially the same strategy. Broadly speaking,
it engages with the same set of debates as the first. The first edition met a clear
educational need in that it reprinted six times over four years, as well as being
republished in Korean and Japanese. Rather than reconceive the book for the
sake of it, we have sought instead to fine-tune it. This has involved publishing
seven new chapters especially written for the second edition;! getting six
other chapters revised and updated;* and leaving the remaining four
unchanged. The fine-tuning involves taking on board additional themes
re raneetaeane oe ree and social change and the debates

ing
eensto changes inne theey ete :ste meethete
ost notably declineitrpeairre
of traditional sce
concep-
professionalism and the continued rise of the transnational media
 Introduction 3
economy; and, above all, updating analysis to take account of new develop-
ments in the rapidly expanding field of media research.
There has also been a shift of emphasis in response to informal feedback we
received that some students found the book ‘difficult’. In part, this is unavoid-
able since some of the arguments that are advanced are necessarily and
unavoidably complex. However, this perception of difficulty may arise from
the fact that the first edition, though aimed primarily at students, was also
directed at academics. There would be little fun in editing a book unless it
caused a few feathers to fly, said new things and provoked new discussion in
the field. But, this time round, we have sought to emphasize rather more the
student constituency of our intended audience. The second edition has more
overview articles, while new and revising contributors have been exposed to
increased urging to make their chapters accessible. The second edition is more
overtly a textbook than the first in recognition of how it has come to be used.
Yet, it has not lost its ambition to influence as well as reflect academic debate.
The first section provides general accounts of the role of the media in
society, including normative liberal, postmodernist, feminist and neo-marxist
perspectives by advocates of these different positions. The second section
offers alternative views of the formative influences that shape the media, and
analysis of recent changes in the media industries. The last section explores
the role of the media in the social production of meaning, viewed from
different perspectives and methodologies.
‘Within this formal organization, there are a number of crisscrossing
interconnections between different parts of the book. Some essays confront
the viewpoint of others: others, still, complement and support one another.
Identifying all these skirmishes and liaisons (some unplanned and unex-
pected) would be otiose. It may be helpful, nevertheless, to point to certain
running debates that recur in the book as a whole.
One area of engagement takes the form of a tacit debate about how to
conceptualize the wider context in which the media are situated. The holistic
framework of neo-marxism that characterized 1970s ‘mainstream’ critical
research, and the totalizing themes of radical feminism that characterized
another branch of it, were rejected by many radical researchers in the
1980s and early 1990s in favour of a more complex and multifaceted
conspectus of society in which manifold relationships of power are said to
be in play in different situations. This led to the adoption of a number of
alternative models of society ranging from revised neo-marxist and socialist
feminist perspectives of society through to postmodernist accounts and new
versions of pluralism in which society is analytically disaggregated into a
series of discrete instances.
The chapters in this book illustrate these different models. It may be helpful
to pick out certain essays, however, since they exemplify strong revisionist
currents in the field. The first is what might be described as a ‘Foucauldian’
anlaysis by Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi. She traces different stages in
the debate about the media and the developing world: the initial, self-
confident conception of the media as an agency of modernization in back-
ward countries; the radical counterblast portraying western media domination
of the third world as a form of cultural imperialism that was imposing western
values; followed by the liberal rejoinder which pointed to two-way flows of
4 Introduction

communication between developed and developing countries, and emphasized

audience autonomy. Her conclusion at the end of this tantalizing resumé 1s
that the media in developing countries have an ambivalent role: they can be
both instruments of social control and agencies of emancipation, an expres-
sion of global western power and a means by which local identities are
revitalized. Underlying this conclusion is a reluctance to accept the nation
state as an adequate conceptual category in the analysis of dependency and
domination. But it also reflects a complex understanding of power relations in
terms of gender, class, ethnicity and centre-periphery cleavages. In effect,
indigenous audience responses to western media content are viewed by her as
a response to, and negotiation of, manifold relations of power and multiple
identities.
Sreberny-Mohammadi is working out of a radical, class-based paradigm.
Similar arguments are also emerging out of a revisionist, feminist perspective.
Liesbet van Zoonen, for instance, attacks the view that the media project only
sexist stereotypes that deny the true nature of women and condition female
audiences into passive acceptance of patriarchy. Instead, she argues, the
essentialist conception of feminity underlying this approach should be
replaced by a culturalist understanding of the socially constructed nature of
feminine subjectivities. Women’s pleasure in the media should be seen not as
a process of passive victimization and indoctrination but as a way in which
women actively express something about themselves as women; and the
media itself should be viewed as a site of negotiation between conflicting
definitions of gender rather than as an unproblematic agency of patriarchy.
Some of the themes of van Zoonen’s chapter are illustrated by Christine
Geraghty’s discussion of the issues raised by media representations of society.
She shows how sweeping indictments of the ‘reactionary’ images of women in
the media, advanced by some radical feminist critics, gave rise to misgivings
among other feminists. These indictments ‘seemed to privilege one type of
women over others and involved rejecting ‘more ‘“‘feminine”’ traditional roles’
in a way which seemed to collude with male denigration of them’. From these
misgivings emerged redemptive readings of TV soap operas and prime-time
melodrama which both took seriously women in ‘traditional’ roles and yet
offered scope for female audience rejection of patriarchal values. Geraghty’s
admirably clear guide to a complex and difficult literature also has subversive
implications in other directions as well. It implicitly challenges the assump-
tions that many news reporters bring to their work, while also contesting the
conception of ‘messages’, as transparent and determinate meanings, that
underlies much research into media effects.
Underlying revisionist feminist analysis is resistance to the conception of
women as a homogeneous group united by their gender. This is carried one
step further by Ien Ang and Joke Hermes who contest even the validity of
hisclbigees Tene for making sense of society, arguing that
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 Introduction 5

The stress on the creativity and resourcefulness of media audiences in Ang

and Hermes’s chapter article exemplifies in the context of a feminist debate a
central theme of revisionist analysis in the radical tradition as a whole. A view
of the media as an agency of elite or class domination was challenged partly
on the grounds that audiences are critical and independent in their responses
to the media. This stress on audience independence was further buttressed by
the claim that meaning is not fixed but is produced through the interaction
between text and the interpretative dispositions of audiences; that most media
texts can be understood differently; and that in general media content is more
diverse and contradictory than was alleged during the heyday of radical media
research in the 1970s. Ironically, an analysis emerged out of critical literary
theory and ethnography that sometimes came close to a view of the ‘obstinate’
audience that was a key building block in American liberal sociology, and that
served as the ground on which approaches such as ‘uses and gratifications’
flourished. Yet, ironically, it was precisely this tradition that radical media
analysis in the 1970s was seeking to dethrone.
The extent to which audiences can be said to be autonomous producers of
meaning, and the implications this may have for understanding the wider
relationship of the media to society, are linked issues that form the second key
area of engagement in the book. John Fiske provides an eloquent exposition of
the ‘bottom-up’ power of audiences, although he takes issue with the extreme
postmodernist view that people consume images without consuming their
meaning. Fiske’s position is explicitly contested by Peter Golding and
Graham Murdock who argue that audience autonomy is subject to finite
limits in the context of an inegalitarian society. A number of other chapters
also contribute implicitly to this debate. For example, Janet Wasko’s analysis
of Disney follows in some respects the contours of traditional radical analysis
in that she emphasizes the market power of the Disney empire, the unambig-
uous ideological themes of its output, and the way in which it has reinforced
the conservative and individualistic values of mainstream America. But her
audience evidence also points to the limitations of the influence exerted by
Disney’s films, videos, books, theme parks and merchandise. In effect, her
audience data qualifies the central thrust of her analysis.
Just how resistant audiences are to media influence is clearly a key issue to
which traditional radical media analysis, often based largely on a critical
examination of media content, paid insufficient attention. This book contains
therefore a critical review of two types of audience research, one lodged in the
liberal tradition and the other in the radical tradition. John Corner offers a
careful, critical analysis of audience reception studies, while Sonia Living-
stone provides an arresting and more selective interpretation of the much
larger literature on media effects. Both chapters conclude with thoughtful
observations about how these two traditions might develop in future.
Another focal point of debate in contemporary media research revolves
around the relationship of media organizations to the structure of power in
society. Here a number of arguments are in play in what is becoming an
increasingly complicated arabesque in which researchers in rival traditions
inflect the same arguments and incorporate the same evidence in different
ways. Simplifying greatly, neo-marxist researchers tend to stress state and
economic determinations ofthe media, and the formative influence of the
6 Introduction

dominant class culture, while liberal-pluralist researchers tend to see media

output as the product of relatively autonomous professionals responding to the
social organization of the media, the widely shared values and concerns of the
public, and ‘competition’ between different viewpoints 1n a pluralist democ-
racy.
This battleground is the third area of engagement in the book. What
relevant chapters indicate, however, is that the range of difference between
rival perspectives is narrowing. Although this may partly reflect the personal
views of the authors concerned, it is also a reflection of the general trend in
this particular area of research. Thus, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock are
at pains to distance themselves from simple instrumentalist and structuralist
views of marxist political economy, and define ‘economic determination’ as
an initial limitation and constraint on the general environment of commu-
nication activity. Michael Schudson and Simon Frith, covering respectively
news and entertainment organizations from a liberal-pluralist perspective,
nonetheless incorporate radical political economy arguments as a partially
valid element in a broader picture.
Schudson’s chapter is widely cited, while that by Frith is new to this
edition. Simon Frith offers a beguiling view of the transnational media
economy as a global distribution system, sucking in talent from different
directions, bound by the logic of the market-place (and consequently by the
star system and the complex politics of property rights) but policed by
independent consumers who keep media conglomerates on their toes by
regularly rejecting their products. While Frith is at pains to emphasize the
need to preserve spaces within the global economy in which the resources and
opportunities for collective expression are still available, he offers an essen-
tially optimistic understanding of the changes overtaking the world’s media. It
is complemented by Michael Gurevitch’s chapter which looks at the globa-
lization of journalism rather than of entertainment and which considers the
consequences of globalization in terms of how it has affected power relations
between media and political institutions, national and local news media,
professional communicators and audiences.
Both these chapters double up, so to speak (as do some other chapters
already mentioned), by contributing to a fourth concern of the book: an
analysis of how the media are changing, and how we should respond to these
changes. Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch, in another chapter new to this
edition, examine the linkages between changes in the mass media and wider
social change, an issue which, they argue, has been rather neglected in
media scholarship. They then identify a number of areas of study that
constitute significant sites in which the connections between developments
in the media and social changes are played out. Denis McQuail outlines
alternative ways of conceptualizing the functioning of the media, and of
judging their performance in terms of rival social theories. James Curran
argues that discussion of the democratic role of the media is dominated
by
old saws that fail to take account of the media’s transformation into
an
Sie avs eae and Suggests ways in which the media’s democratic
role can be - Sayan’, and realized in practice. This discussion is
continued
aaa na oe who defends the objective, professional
; m that differs from the way in which it is
 Introduction 7

often interpreted in practice. It is also continued by Daniel Hallin who

describes the ways in which traditional, professional conceptions of news-
making are in decline in the US media, and discusses the implications of
this shift. These are, he suggests, both positive — marking a break with
Establishment forms of journalism — as well as negative.
In short, this book seeks to generate a debate between more traditional
paradigms and new revisionist thinking, and to provide a commentary on
some recent changes in the media. Our thanks go to contributors who have
sought to define collectively but at some physical distance from one another
the changing contours of mass communication research, and who have put up
with requests for revisions and amendments. Our thanks go also to Lesley
Riddle at Arnold, with whom it has been a great pleasure to work.

Notes

1 Chapters new to this edition are Chapters 6, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 17.
2 Chapters that have been revised for this edition are Chapters 1, 5, 7,9, 10 and 11.
3 Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 16 have remained unchanged.

Reference

CURRAN, J., 1990: ‘The New Revisionism in Mass Communication Research: A

Reappraisal’, European Journal of Communication 5, 135-64.
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SECTION I

Mass Media and Society: General Perspectives

ravage) Feet? 23
1
Culture, Communications, and
Political Economy
Peter Golding and Graham Murdock

Everyone, from politicians to academics, now agrees that public communica-

tions systems are part of the ‘cultural industries’. The popularity of this tag
points to a growing awareness that these organizations are both similar to and
different from other industries. On the one hand, they clearly have a range of
features in common with other areas of production and are increasing
integrated into the general industrial structure. On the other hand, it is equally
clear that the goods they manufacture — newspapers, advertisements, televi-
sion programmes, and feature films — play a pivotal role in organizing the
images and discourses through which people make sense of the world. A
number of writers acknowledge this duality rhetorically, but go on to examine
only one side, focusing either on the construction and consumption of media
meanings (e.g. Fiske, 1989) or on the economic organization of media
industries (e.g. Collins et al., 1988). What distinguishes the critical political
economy perspective outlined here is precisely its focus on the interplay
between the symbolic and economic dimensions of public communications.
It sets out to show how different ways of financing and organizing cultural
production have traceable consequences for the range of discourses and
representations in the public domain and for audiences’ access to them.

Critical Political Economy of Communications — Straw Men

and Stereotypes

Some terms become notoriously loose in practice, acquiring the status of

cliché or slogan rather than analytical precision. One such term in our field
is ‘critical’ analysis, often and wearily contrasted with ‘administrative’
research. The dichotomy between empirical (often implying simply quantita-
tive) work and more theoretical concerns became equated rather loosely with
the distinction between administrative (meaning commissioned by the media
12 Peter Golding and Graham Murdock

companies by and large) and critical work (meaning broadly marxisant). The
dichotomy was always false and has been much lamented and regretted.
The approach we are outlining here is clearly critical, but in a sense which
necessarily engages with empirical research, and which has no qualms about
addressing issues of pragmatic and policy concern. It is critical in the crucial
sense that it draws for its analysis on a critique, a theoretically informed
understanding, of the social order in which communications and cultural
phenomena are being studied. ’
This is a characteristic which it shares with another major tradition of
research — cultural studies. Both work within a broadly neo-marxist view of
society, both are centrally concerned with the constitution and exercise of
power, and both take their distance from the liberal pluralist tradition of
analysis with its broad acceptance of the central workings of advanced
capitalist societies (Curran, 1990: 139). But this shared general stance con-
ceals long-standing differences of approach, generated by the divergent
intellectual histories of these traditions, and sustained by their very different
locations on the contemporary academic map.
Whereas critical political economy has been institutionalized within facul-
ties of social science, and draws its major practitioners from the ranks of
people trained in economics, political science and sociology, departments and
programmes of cultural studies are still mostly situated in humanities faculties
and pursued by scholars drawn from literary and historical studies. As a result,
the two groups tend to approach communications with rather different inter-
ests and reference points, even when there is a strong desire to cut across
disciplinary boundaries, as there often is.
Work on communications from within a cultural studies perspective ‘is
centrally concerned with the construction of meaning — how it is produced in
and through particular expressive forms and how it is continually negotiated
and deconstructed through the practices of everyday life’ (Murdock, 1989a:
436). This project has generated work in two distinct but related areas. The
first, and by far the largest, concentrates on the analysis of cultural texts,
including those produced by the media industries. In contrast to transportation
models, which see media forms such as thrillers, soap operas or documentary
films as vehicles for transmitting ‘messages’ to consumers, cultural studies
approaches them as mechanisms for ordering meaning in particular ways.
Where content analysis sees the meaning of say, a violent act in a television
drama, as definable in advance and detachable from its position in the text or
the programme’s relation to other texts, cultural studies insists that its mean-
ing is variable and depends crucially on the contexts supplied by the overall
narrative, the programme’s genre, and the previous publicity surrounding the
show and its stars.
This emphasis on the relational dimensions of meaning and its consequent
mutability is pursued in a second major stand in cultural studies research,
which is concerned with the way that audience members interpret media
artefacts and incorporate them into their world views and lifestyles. This
ethnographic thrust celebrates the creativity of consumers, (see
e.g. Willis,
ees and offers a powerful and necessary counter to simple ‘effects’

sipigcling (otnakeleenaeifqheispinuation,
ecoesrsratherme ee
than as passiv e objects of
 Culture, Communications, and Political Economy 13
a dominant production system. This thrust is part of cultural studies’ wider
attempt to retrieve the complexity of popular practices and beliefs. As a
powerful counter to the simpler notions of ‘effects’ and the dismissive
critiques of popular culture as trivial and manipulative, it is clearly a very
considerable gain. However, as we shall see, it can easily collude with
conservative celebrations of untrammelled consumer choice.
In common with liberal defenders of the ‘free’ market, the new populists of
cultural studies focus on the moment of exchange when the meanings carried
by texts meet the meanings that readers bring to them. In both styles of
analysis, this encounter is removed from its wider contexts and presented as
an instance of consumer sovereignty. For writers like John Fiske, it is also a
signal of popular resistance of ‘ideology countered or evaded; top-down
power opposed by bottom-up power, social discipline faced with disorder’
(Fiske, 1989: 47). This romantic celebration of subversive consumption is
clearly at odds with cultural studies’ long-standing concern with the way the
mass media operate ideologically, to sustain and support prevailing relations
of domination. But even if this wider perspective is restored there is still the
problem that cultural studies offer an analysis of the way the cultural
industries work that has little or nothing to say about how they actually
operate as industries, and how their economic organization impinges on the
production and circulation of meaning. Nor does it examine the ways in which
people’s consumption choices are structured by their position in the wider
economic formation. Exploring these dynamics is the primary task for a
critical political economy of communications. In doing so we would be
following Raymond Williams’ injunction that ‘we should look not for the
components of a product but for the conditions of a practice’ (Williams, 1980:
48).
Critical work, then, is not the opposite of administrative research, nor is it
unambiguously opposed to the methods or concerns of cultural studies. Two
central features of critical analysis take us a little nearer a meaningful
demarcation, firstly in terms of epistemology, secondly in terms of historicity.
The critical perspective assumes a realist conception of the phenomena it
studies in the simple sense that the theoretical constructs it works with exist in
the real world, they are not merely phenomenal. For this reason critical
analysis is centrally concerned with questions of action and structure, in an
attempt to discern the real constraints which shape the lives and opportunities
of real actors in the real world. In this sense critical theory is also materialist,
in its focus on the interaction of people with their material environment and
its further preoccupation with the unequal command over material resources
and the consequences of such inequality for the nature of the symbolic
environment. :
Secondly, critical analysis is historically located. It is specifically interested
in the investigation and description of late capitalism, which it defines as both
dynamic and problematic, as undergoing change and as substantially imper-
fect. This historical anchoring of critical analysis is distinct from any
approach which is essentialist, detached from the specifics of historical time
and place. be etree ees
In this chapter, however, we have a less ambitious objective, which is to
describe the basic tenets of a critical political economy of the media. While
14. Peter Golding and Graham Murdock
it is far
this approach assumes a critical analysis of contemporary society,
from a full account.

What is Critical Political Economy?

Critical political economy differs from mainstream economics in four main

respects. Firstly, it is holistic. Secondly, it is historical. Thirdly, it is centrally
concerned with the balance between capitalist enterprise and public interven-
tion. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it goes beyond technical issues of
efficiency to engage with basic moral questions of justice, equity and the
public good.
Whereas mainstream economics sees the ‘economy’ as a separate and
specialized domain, critical political economy is interested in the interplay
between economic organization and political, social and cultural life. In the
case of the cultural industries we are particularly concerned to trace the
impact of economic dynamics on the range and diversity of public cultural
expression, and its availability to different social groups. These concerns are
not of course exclusive to critical commentators. They are equally central to
political economists on the Right. The difference lies in the starting points of
the analyses.
Liberal political economists focus on exchange in the market as consumers
choose between competing commodities on the basis of the utility and
satisfaction they offer. The greater the play of market forces, the greater
the ‘freedom’ of consumer choice. Over the last two decades, this vision
has gained renewed credence with governments of a variety of ideological
hues. Born again in their faith in Adam Smith’s hidden hand of ‘free’
competition, they have pushed through programmes of privatization of public
services designed to increase consumer choice by extending the scale and
scope of market mechanisms. Against this, critical political economists follow
Marx in shifting attention from the realm of exchange to the organization of
property and production, both within the cultural industries and more gen-
erally. They do not deny that cultural producers and consumers are continu-
ally making choices, but point out that they do so within wider structures.
Where mainstream economics focuses on the sovereign individuals of
capitalism, critical political economy starts with sets of social relations and
the play of power. It is interested in seeing how the making and taking of
meaning is shaped at every level by the structured asymmetries in social
relations. These range from the way news is structured by the prevailing
relations between press proprietors and editors or journalists and their
sources to the way that television viewing is affected by the organization of
domestic life and power relations within the family. These concerns are of
course widely shared by researchers who are not political economists. What
marks critical political economy is that it always goes beyond situated action
to show how particular micro-contexts are shaped by general economic
dynamics and the wider structures they sustain. It is especially interested in
the ways that communicative activity is structured by the unequal distribution
of material and symbolic resources.
 Culture, Communications, and Political Economy 15
Developing an analysis along these lines means avoiding the twin tempta-
tions of instrumentalism and structuralism. Instrumentalists focus on the ways
that capitalists use their economic power in a commercial market system to
ensure that the flow of public information is consonant with their interests.
They see the privately owned media as instruments of class domination. This
case 1s vigorously argued in Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s book,
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).
They develop what they call a ‘propaganda model’ of the American news
media, arguing that ‘the powerful are able to fix the premisses of discourse, to
decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear and think about, and
to ‘manage’ public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns’ (1988: xi).
_ They are partly right. Government and business elites do have privileged
access to the news; large advertisers do operate as a latterday licensing
authority, selectively supporting some newspapers and television pro-
grammes and not others; and media proprietors can determine the editorial
line and cultural stance of the papers and broadcast stations they own. But by
focusing on these kinds of strategic interventions they overlook the contra-
dictions in the system. Owners, advertisers and key political personnel cannot
always do as they would wish. They operate within structures which constrain
as well as facilitate, imposing limits as well as offering opportunities.
Analyzing the nature and sources of these limits is a key task for a critical
political economy of culture.
At the same time, it is essential to avoid the forms of structuralism which
conceive of structures as building-like edifices, solid, permanent and immo-
vable. Instead, we need to see them as dynamic formations which are
constantly reproduced and altered through practical action. In his review of
news studies, Michael Schudson argues that political economy relates the
outcome of the news process directly to the economic structure of news
organizations, and that ‘everything in between is a black box that need not
be examined’ (Schudson, 1989: 266). This is a misreading. Although some
studies confine themselves to the structural level of analysis, it is only part of
the story we need to tell. Analyzing the way that meaning is made and re-
made through the concrete activities of producers and consumers is equally
essential to the perspective we are proposing here. The aim is ‘to explain how
it comes about that structures are constituted through action, and reciprocally
how action is constituted structurally’ (Giddens, 1976: 161).
This, in turn, requires us to think of economic determination in a more
flexible way. Instead of holding on to Marx’s notion of determination in the
last instance, with its implication that everything can eventually be related
directly to economic forces, we can follow Stuart Hall in seeing determination
as operating in the first instance (Hall, 1983: 84). That is to say, we can think
of economic dynamics as playing a central role in defining the key features of
the general environment within which communicative activity takes place, but
not as a complete explanation of the nature of that activity. GT SE
Critical political economy is also necessarily historical, but historical in a
particular sense. In the terms coined by the great French historian, Fernand
Braudel, it is interested in how ‘the fast-moving time of events, the subject of
traditional narrative history’ relates to the ‘slow but perceptible rhythms’
which characterize the gradually unfolding history of economic formations
16 Peter Golding and Graham Murdock

and systems of rule (Burke, 1980: 94). Four historical processes are particu-
larly central to a critical political economy of culture: the growth of the
media; the extension of corporate reach; commodification; and the changing
role of state and government intervention.
What Thompson describes as ‘the general process by which the transmis-
sion of symbolic forms becomes increasingly mediated by the technical and
institutional apparatuses of the media industries’ (1990: 3-4) makes the media
industries the logical place to begin an analysis of contemporary culture.
Media production in turn has been increasingly commandeered by large
corporations and moulded to their interests and strategies. This has long been
the case, but the reach of corporate rationales has been considerably extended
in recent years by the push towards ‘privatization’ and the declining vitality of
publicly funded cultural institutions. Corporations dominate the cultural
landscape in two ways. Firstly, an increasing proportion of cultural produc-
tion is directly accounted for by major conglomerates with interests in a range
of sectors, from newspapers and magazines to television, film, music and
theme parks. Secondly, corporations which are not directly involved in the
cultural industries as producers can exercise considerable control over the
direction of cultural activity through their role as advertisers and sponsors.
The financial viability of commercial broadcasting together with a large
section of the press depends directly on advertising revenue, while more
and more of the other ‘sites where creative work is displayed’ such as
museums, galleries and theatres ‘have been captured by corporate sponsors’
and enlisted in their public relations campaigns (Schiller, 1989: 4).
The extension of corporate reach reinforces a third major process — the
commodification of cultural life. A commodity is a good which is produced in
order to be exchanged at a price. Commercial communications corporations
have always been in the business of commodity production. At first, their
activities were confined to producing symbolic commodities that could be
consumed directly, such as novels, newspapers, or theatrical performances.
Later, with the rise of new domestic technologies such as the gramophone,
telephone and radio set, cultural consumption required consumers to purchase
the appropriate machine (or ‘hardware’) as a condition of access. This
compounded the already considerable effect of inequalities in disposable
income, and made communicative activity more dependent on ability to
pay. Before they could make a telephone call or listen to the latest hit record
at home, people needed to buy the appropriate hardware. As we shall see, the
higher a household’s income, the more likely it is to own key pieces of
equipment — a telephone, a video recorder, a home computer — and hence
the greater its commmunicative choices.
At first sight, advertising-supported broadcasting seems to be an exception
to this trend, since anyone who has a receiving set has access to the full range
of programming. They do not have to pay again. However, this analysis
ignores two important points. Firstly, audiences do contribute to the costs
of programming in the form of additions to the retail price of heavily
advertised goods. Secondly, within this system, audiences themselves
are
the primary commodity. The economics of commercial broadcasting revolves
around the exchange of audiences for advertising revenue. The price that
corporations pay for advertising spots on particular programmes is deter-
 Culture, Communications, and Political Economy 17
mined by the size and social composition of the audience it attracts. And in
prime time the premium prices are commanded by shows that can attract and
hold the greatest number of viewers and provide a symbolic environment in
tune with consumption. These needs inevitably tilt programming towards
familiar and well-tested formulas and formats and away from risk and
innovation, and anchor it in commonsense rather than alternative view-
points. Hence the audiences’ position as a commodity serves to reduce the
overall diversity of programming and ensure that it confirms established
mores and assumptions far more often than it challenges them.
The main institutional counter to the commodification of communicative
activity has come from the development of institutions funded out of taxation
_ and oriented towards providing cultural resources for the full exercise of
citizenship. The most important and pervasive of these have been the public
broadcasting organization, typified by the British Broadcasting Corporation
(the BBC) which has distanced itself from the dynamics of commodification
by not taking spot advertising and by offering the full range of programming
equally to everyone who had paid the basic annual licence fee. As the BBC’s
first Director General, John Reith, put it: public broadcasting ‘may be shared
by all alike, for the same outlay, and to the same extent . . . there need be no
first and third class’ (Reith, 1924: 217-8). As we shall see, however, this ideal
has been substantially undermined in the last decade as the Corporation has
responded to a fall in the real value of the licence fee by expanding its
commercial activities in an effort to raise money. In a marked departure
from the historic commitment to universal and equal provision, these include
plans to launch subscription channels for special-interest groups.
At the same time, the Corporation has also come under intensified political
pressure, particularly in the areas of news and current affairs. Its always
fragile independence from government has been challenged by a series of
moves, ranging from well-publicized attacks on the ‘impartiality’ of its news
coverage to police seizures of film, and, for several years until 1994, a
government ban on live interviews with members of a range of named
organizations in Northern Ireland, including the legal political party, Sinn
Fein.
These attempts to narrow the field of public discourse and representation
are part of a wider historical process whereby the state in capitalist societies
has assumed a greater and greater role in managing communicative activity.
From its inception, political economy has been particularly interested in
determining the appropriate scope of public intervention. It is therefore
inevitably involved in evaluating competing policies. It is concerned with
changing the world as well as with analyzing it. Classical political economists
and their present-day followers start from the assumption that public inter-
vention ought to be minimized and market forces given the widest possible
freedom of operation. Critical political economists on the other hand point to
the distortions and inequalities of market systems and argue that these
deficiencies can only be rectified by public intervention, though they disagree
on the forms that this should take. )
Arguments within political economy on the proper balance between public
and private enterprise are never simply technical, however. They are always
underpinned by distinctive visions of what constitutes the ‘public good’.
18 Peter Golding and Graham Murdock

Adam Smith ended his career as a professor of moral philosophy. He saw

markets not simply as more efficient but as morally superior. Because they
gave consumers a free choice between competing commodities, only. those
goods that provided satisfaction would survive. At the same time, he saw very
clearly that the public good was not simply the sum of individual choices, and
that private enterprise would not provide everything that a good society
required. He saw particular problems in the sphere of culture, and recom-
mended various public interventions to increase the level of public knowledge
and provide wholesome entertainment. Critical political economy takes this
line of reasoning a good deal further, linking the constitution of the good
society to the extension of citizenship rights.
The history of the modern communications media is not only an economic
history of their growing incorporation into a capitalist economic system, but
also a political history of their increasing centrality to the exercise of full
citizenship. In its most general sense, citizenship is ‘about the conditions that
allow people to become full members of the society at every level’ (Murdock
and Golding, 1989: 182). In an ideal situation, communications systems
would contribute to these conditions in two important ways. Firstly, they
would provide people with access to the information, advice and analysis
that would enable them to know their rights and to pursue them effectively.
Secondly, they would provide the broadest possible range of information,
interpretation and debate on areas that involve political choices, and enable
them to register dissent and propose alternatives. This argument has been
elaborated by the German theorist, Jurgen Habermas, in his highly influential
notion of the ‘public sphere’.
His historical narrative explains that in the early capitalist period a range of
practices and institutions were evolved which facilitated rational and critical
discussion of public affairs (Habermas, 1989; Golding, 1995). This open arena
of debate, in which the emerging newspaper press played a prominent role,
especially in Britain, was, so Habermas argues, a feature found throughout
industrializing western Europe. As critics have pointed out, however, his view
of the past is highly idealized. In the first place, like early enthusiasts of a
‘free’ commercial press, he is ‘far too sanguine about the capacity of market
competition to ensure the universal access of citizens to the media of
communication’ and fails to examine ‘the inevitable tension between the
free choices of investors and property owners and the freedom of choice of
citizens receiving and sending information’ (Keane, 1989: 39). Secondly, this
historic public sphere was an essentially bourgeois space, which largely
excluded the working class, women and ethnic minorities.
Nevertheless, the idea of the public sphere is worth retaining, providing that
we add that it needs to be open enough that all groups in the society can
recognize themselves and their aspirations as being fairly represented. This
general ideal of a communications system as a public cultural space that is
open, diverse, and accessible, provides the basic yardstick against
which
critical political economy measures the performance of existing systems
and formulates alternatives.
 Culture, Communications, and Political Economy 19

Political Economy in Practice: Three Core Tasks

In order to illustrate the concerns and distinctive priorities of a critical

political economy of communications we briefly outline three areas of
analysis. The first is concerned with the production of cultural goods, to
which political economy attaches particular importance in its presumption
of the limiting (but not completely determining) impact of cultural production
on the range of cultural consumption. Secondly, we examine the political
economy of texts to illustrate ways in which the representations present in
media products are related to the material realities of their production and
consumption. Finally, we assess the political economy of cultural consump-
tion, to illustrate the relation between material and cultural inequality which
political economy is distinctively concerned to address.

The Production of Meaning as the Exercise of Power

Philip Elliott, in a bleak reading of developments in Britain in the early 1980s,
suggested that the public sphere has been seriously eroded by recent devel-
opments. Technological and economic developments were promoting ‘a
continuation of the shift away from involving people in societies as political
citizens of nation states towards involving them as consumption units in a
corporate world’. Intellectuals, in particular, were ‘being robbed of those
public forums in which they could engage in their culture of critical dis-
course’ (Elliott, 1982: 243-44). A focal question for the political economy of
communications is to investigate how changes in the array of forces which
exercise control over cultural production and distribution limit or liberate the
public sphere.
In practice this directs attention to two key issues. The first is the pattern of
ownership of such institutions and the consequences of this pattern for control
over their activities. The second is the nature of the relationship between state
regulation and communications institutions. We can briefly review each of
these in turn.
The steadily increasing amount of cultural production accounted for by large
corporations has long been a source of concern to theorists of democracy.
They saw a fundamental contradiction between the ideal that public media
should operate as a public sphere and the reality of concentrated private
ownership. They feared that proprietors would use their property rights to
restrict the flow of information and open debate on which the vitality of
democracy depended. These concerns were fuelled by the rise of the great
press barons at the turn of the century. Not only did proprietors like Pullitzer
and Hearst in the United States and Northcliffe in England own chains of
newspapers with large circulations, but they clearly had no qualms about
using them to promote their pet political causes or to denigrate positions
and people they disagreed with.
These longstanding worries have been reinforced in recent years by the
emergence of multi media conglomerates with significant stakes across a
range of central communications sectors. Rupert Murdoch's News Interna-
tional empire is a well-known case in point. It includes major press and
20 Peter Golding and Graham Murdock

publishing interests in the USA, UK and Australia, as well as America’s

fourth largest television network, Fox, and a controlling stake in Britain’s
direct satellite broadcasting service, British Sky Broadcasting. Other impor-
tant examples include Sony of Japan, which owns CBS records and
Columbia Pictures, and the Bertelsmann company of Germany, which
controls RCA records and Doubleday books as well as a major domestic
chain of newspapers and magazines.
The rise of communications conglomerates adds a new element to the old
debate about potential abuses of owner power. It is no longer a simple case of
proprietors intervening in editorial decisions or firing key personnel who fall
foul of their political philosophies. Cultural production is also strongly
influenced by commercial strategies built around ‘synergies’ which exploit
the overlaps between the company’s different media interests. The company’s
newspapers may give free publicity to their television stations or the record
and book divisions may launch products related to a new movie released by
the film division. The effect is to reduce the diversity of cultural goods in
circulation. Although in simple quantitative terms there may be more com-
modities in circulation, they are more likely to be variants of the same basic
themes and images.
In addition to the power they exercise directly over the companies they
own, the major media moguls also have considerable indirect power over
smaller concerns operating in their markets or seeking to break into them.
They establish the rules by which the competitive game will be played. They
can use their greater financial power to drive new entrants out of the market-
place by launching expensive promotional campaigns, offering discounts to
advertisers, or buying up key creative personnel. Firms that do survive
compete for market share by offering similar products to the leading concerns
and employing tried and tested editorial formulae.
The powers of the major communications corporations and their cultural
and geographical reach are currently being extended by the move towards
digital technologies coupled with the world wide romance with ‘free’ markets
(see Murdock, 1994b). For the first time, all forms of communications —
written text, statistical data, still and moving images, music and the human
voice — can be coded, stored and relayed using the same basic digital array of
zeros and ones, the language of computing. As a result, the boundaries that
have separated different communications sectors up until now are being
rubbed away. We are entering the era of convergence. The potentials are
impressive. Cultural products flow between and across media in an increas-
ingly fluid way. New combinations become possible. Consumers can use the
upgraded telecommunications and cable networks to call up materials of their
choice from vast electronic archives and libraries in the combinations and
sequences they desire when they wish. Enthusiasts present these possibilities
as ushering in the transfer of power from owners to audiences. One of the
most vocal celebrants is Rupert Murdoch, one of the most powerful of the
present-day media moguls. As he told a conference in September 1993, ‘I
must add (with maybe a tiny touch of regret) that this technology has liberated
people from the once powerful media barons’ (quoted in Greenslade, 1993:
17). Because, in the age of digital technology, he believes ‘anybody will be
able to start media, or get anything they want for the price of a phone call
 Culture, Communications, and Political Economy 21
there will be no place for him or his fellow media barons (quoted in Bell,
19932:25):
The spectacle of Rupert Murdoch cheerfully writing his own business
obituary is attractive but deeply flawed. The fact that consumers will have
access to a wider range of cultural goods, providing they can pay (a point we
shall come back to presently) does nothing to abolish the power of the media
moguls. In the emerging environment power will lie with those who own the
key building blocks of new communication systems, the rights to the key
pieces of technology and even more importantly, the right to the cultural
materials — the films, books, images, sounds, writings — that will be used to
put together the new services. And in the battle for command over intellectual
properties, the media moguls have a sizeable advantage, since they already
own a formidable range of the expressive assets that are central to public
culture, and this range is steadily increasing through acquisitions, mergers and
new partnerships. Moreover, the geographical reach of these conglomerates
and strategic alliances is being rapidly extended as governments around the
world embrace privatization and ‘free’ market economies, allowing the major
communications companies access to previously closed or restricted markets
and increased scope for action. The opening-up of markets in the former
territories of the Soviet empire and in China are simply the most substantial
instances in a general trend.
Historically, the main interruptions to this process have come from state
intervention. These have taken two main forms. Firstly, commercial enter-
prises have been regulated in the public interest with the aim of ensuring
diversity of cultural production, including forms that would be unlikely to
survive in pure market conditions. British commercial television companies,
for example, are required to make a range of minority-interest programmes,
even though they are not profitable. Secondly, cultural diversity has been
further underwritten by various forms of public subsidy.
Over the last two decades, however, this system has been substantially
altered by privatization policies. Major public cultural enterprises, such as
the French TF1 television network, have been sold to private investors.
Liberalization policies have introduced private operators into markets which
were previously closed to competition, such as the broadcasting systems of a
number of European countries. And regulatory regimes have been altered in
favour of freedom of operations for owners and advertisers. The net effect of
these changes has been greatly to increase the potential reach and power of the
major communications companies and to reinforce the danger that public
culture will be commandeered by private interests. Charting these shifts in
the balance between commercial and public enterprise and tracing their
impact on cultural diversity is a key task for a critical political economy.
There are several dimensions to this process. Firstly, state agencies such as
the army and police have become major users of communications technolo-
gies both for surveillance and for their own command and control systems.
Secondly, governments and state departments have become increasingly
important producers of public information in a variety of forms ranging
from official statistics and daily press briefings to public advertising cam-
paigns. Thirdly, governments have extended their regulatory functions in
relation to both the structure of the media industries (through restrictions
22 Peter Golding and Graham Murdock

on ownership and pricing, for example) and the range of permissible public
expression (through regulations relating to areas such as obscenity, incitement
to racial hatred, and ‘national security’). Lastly, and most importantly, liberal
democratic governments have widened the range of cultural activities that
they subsidize out of the public purse, either indirectly, by not charging value
added tax on newspapers for example, or directly, through various forms of
grants. These range from the monies provided for museums, libraries and
theatres to the compulsory annual licence fee for television set ownership
which funds the BBC.
Broadcasting in Britain has evolved as a quasi-public institution, in which
the ideals of public service have been translated into both law and custom and
practice. The BBC, particularly under its first Director-General John Reith,
construed itself as undertaking a mission to inform, educate and entertain, in a
potent if indistinct ideology which has been readily adopted by commercial
broadcasting. Both see themselves as performing a role more akin to educa-
tion or health than to conventional purveyors of commodities in the market
place. The patrician overtones in such a self-assigned role, and the contra-
dictions it generates for a medium dependent on advertising revenue, have
undermined the credibility of this conception of broadcasting, and the
enterprise culture of 1980s Conservatism enthusiastically challenged the
idea that broadcasting should be protected from the disciplines of the
market, arguing that consumer choice and cultural independence were best
guaranteed by liberating the broadcast media from state regulation.
Defenders of public service broadcasting have found themselves wrong-
footed, appearing to support a bureaucratic and statist conception of commu-
nications which was far from the ideals of the ‘public sphere’. In addition,
they seem to be ignoring the boundless potential of new technologies which
might deliver the choice and communicative opportunities of an ideal ‘public
sphere’ far more readily than the dead hand of state intervention.
The contribution of political economy to this debate is to analyse how and
in what ways the relation between the media and the state has consequences
for the range of expression and ideas in the public arena. The present dilemma
of the BBC in Britain provides an instructive case in point. After a long and
often ill-tempered debate, the Government finally published its plans for the
Corporation’s future in July 1994. The document was greeted with a sign of
collective relief from the BBC’s supporters. The Royal Charter (under which
the BBC operates) was to be renewed for a further ten years when the present
one expires in 1996. The vocal lobby in favour of privatizing the Corporation
had been routed. It appeared to be business as usual. But a closer look reveals
a rather less clear-cut outcome (Murdock, 1994a). The licence fee (which
provides the great bulk of the BBC’s income) is only renewed for five years
and will be reviewed ‘before then in the light of technological and other
developments’. In particular, there will be continuing consideration of the
possibility of transferring ‘all or some of the BBC’s services to a subscription
system’. Converting them from public goods, equally available to all, into
commodities, accessible only at a price, would transform the Corporation into
a major commerical company in the international media market-place
(HMSO, 1994: 31).
Indeed, this move is already under way. The Government have nominated
 Culture, Communications, and Political Economy 23
the BBC as a ‘national champion’ and encouraged it to capitalize on its
reputation as vigorously as possible in the expanding global market-place
for television programming created by the growth of home video, satellite and
cable systems. To enable the Corporation to ‘create and sustain a United
Kingdom presence in an international multi-media world ... the Govern-
ment has encouraged [it] to develop its commercial activities, seeking private
sector partners and finance’ (HMSO, 1994: 24). However, the more successful
it iscommercially and the more revenue it generates, the weaker the case for
retaining the licence fee and the greater the pressure on programme-makers to
take account of the requirements of the international market-place. This
would mean less diversity, less creative risk-taking and more reliance on
tried and tested formats and established reputations.
However, the state is not only a regulator of communications institutions. It
is itself a communicator of enormous power. How this power is exercised is of
major interest to a political economy of culture. Governments are inevitably
anxious to promote their own views of the development of policy, and to
ensure that legislative initiatives are properly understood and supported. In
recent years this desire has fostered a rapid growth in communications
activity, so that by 1990 the government was the second biggest advertiser
in the country (see Golding, 1990: 95). Between 1986 and 1992 government
advertising increased in real terms by 16 per cent, and more or less doubled in
the previous decade (Deacon and Golding, 1994: 6). Communications
researchers have commonly analyzed this process as one of agenda-build-
ing, in which the state effectively gives subsidies to media organizations by
reducing the effort required to discover and produce information for their
audiences. As Gandy defines the term, an information subsidy ‘is an attempt
to produce influence over the actions of others by controlling their access to
and use of information relevant to those actions’ (Gandy, 1982: 61). In an
increasingly public relations state the provisions of such subsidies can range
from the entirely healthy distribution of essential information with which to
explain and facilitate public policy to the nefarious management of news in
which ‘being economical with the truth’ becomes an accessory of political life
(see Golding, 1986; 1994).
The production of communications, however, is not merely a simple
reflection of the controlling interests of those who own or even control the
broad range of capital plant and equipment which make up the means by
which cultural goods are made and distributed. Within the media are men and
women working, within a range of codes and professional ideologies, and
with an array of aspirations, both personal and social. These ambitions can be
idealized; much cultural production is routine, mundane, and highly predict-
able. But the autonomy of those who work within the media is a matter of
substantial interest to political economists. Their aim is to discover how far
this autonomy can be exercised given the consequences of the broad economic
structure we have described above, and to what extent the economic structure
of the media prevents some forms of expression from finding a popular outlet
and audience. es
An example can illustrate the point. Successive Royal Commissions have
remarked on the significant absence within the British media of a popular
newspaper with political sympathies to the radical left. The last Royal
24 Peter Golding and Graham Murdock

Commission on the Press, for example, concluded that ‘There is no doubt that
over most of this century the labour movement has had less newspaper
support than its right-wing opponents and that its beliefs and activities have
been unfavourably reported by the majority of the press’ (House of Commons,
1977: 98-99). ‘There is no doubt’, it went on, ‘that there is a gap in political
terms which could be filled with advantage’ (ibid.: 110). Many journalists
would sympathize with this view. As senior Fleet Street commentator Tom
Baistow has lamented ‘For millions of Left, Centre and agnostic Don’t Know
readers there is no longer any real choice of newspapers’ (Baistow, 1985: 57).
To explain this, political economists will examine the impact of shifts in
advertising support and ownership to discover why this gap exists and why,
therefore, opportunities for the expression of radical views of the political left
do not routinely find space in the organs of the British national press. To do so
they will wish to go beyond these broad structural features, however, to assess
the consequences for daily practice, routine news gathering and processing,
journalistic recruitment and professional ideology, of these larger structures.
This will require detailed study of the work of journalists, the way sources of
varying power and authority engage in ‘agenda-building’, and the link
between what industrial sociologists have traditionally characterized as
market situation and work situation.
The political economy of cultural production, then, is concerned with the
concrete consequences for the work of making media goods of the broad
patterns of power and ownership which are their backdrop. To see where this
takes us in the analysis of what gets produced we need to move on to the
political economy of media output.

Political Economy and Textual Analysis

As we noted earlier, research in cultural studies has been particularly con-
cerned with analyzing the structure of media texts and tracing their role in
sustaining systems of domination. As it has developed, this work decisively
rejected the notion that the mass media act as a transmission belt for a
dominant ideology and developed a model of the communications system
as a field or space, in which contending discourses, offering different ways of
looking and speaking, struggle for visibility and legitimacy. But, outside of
televised political speeches, discourses are seldom available for public con-
sumption in their ‘raw’ state. They are reorganized and recontextualized to fit
the particular expressive form being used. Discourses about AIDS, for
example, might well feature in a variety of television programmes, ranging
from public health advertisements, to news items, investigative reports, studio
discussion programmes, or episodes of soap operas or police series. Each of
these forms has a major impact of what can be said and shown, by whom, and
from what point of view. In short, cultural forms are mechanisms for
regulating public discourse. We can distinguish two dimensions to this
process. The first has to do with the range of discourses that particular forms
allow into play — whether they are organized exclusively around official
discourses, or whether they provide space for the articulation of counter
discourses. The second concerns the way that the available discourses are
 Culture, Communications, and Political Economy 25
handled within the text, whether they are arranged in a clearly marked
hierarchy of credibility which urges the audience to prefer one over the
others, or whether they are treated in a more even-handed and indeterminate
way which leaves the audience with a more open choice.
If cultural studies are primarily interested in the way these mechanisms
work within a particular media-text or across a range of texts, critical political
economy is concerned to explain how the economic dynamics of production
structure public discourse by promoting certain cultural forms over others.
Take, for example, the increasing reliance on international coproduction
agreements in television drama production. These arrangements impose a
variety of constraints on form as the partners search for subject matter and
narrative styles that they can sell in their home markets. The resulting bargain
may produce an americanized product which is fast-moving, based on simple
characterizations, works with a tried and tested action format, and offers an
unambiguous ending. Or it may result in a variant of ‘televisual tourism’
which trades on the familiar forms and sights of the national cultural heritage
(Murdock, 1989b). Both strategies represent a narrowing of the field of
discourse and inhibit a full engagement with the complexities and ambigu-
ities of the national condition. The first effects a closure around dominant
transatlantic forms of story-telling with their clearly marked boundaries and
hierarchies of discourse. The second reproduces an ideology of ‘Englishness’
which excludes or marginalizes a whole range of subordinate discourses.
This general perspective, with its emphasis on the crucial mediating role of
cultural forms, has two major advantages. Firstly, it allows us to trace detailed
connections between the financing and organization of cultural production and
changes in the field of public discourse and representation in a non-reducible
way, that respects the need for a full analysis of textual organization. Indeed, far
from being secondary, such an analysis is central to the full development of
the argument. Secondly, by stressing the fact that media-texts vary consider-
ably in their degree of discursive openness, it offers an approach to audience
activity that focuses on structured variations in response. However, in contrast
to recent work on audience activity produced within cultural studies, which
concentrates on the negotiation of textual interpretations and media‘use in
immediate social settings, critical political economy seeks to relate variations
in people’s responses to their overall location in the economic system
(Murdock, 1989c). Of course, this cannot explain everything we need to
know about the dynamics of response, but it is a necessary starting point.

Consumption — Sovereignty or Struggle

For political proponents of a free market philosophy communications goods
are like any other. Since the best way of ensuring adequate distribution and
production of the general commodities people want is through the market, so
too, the argument follows, is this true for cultural goods. It is the truth or
otherwise of this proposition that provides the analytical target for a political
economy of cultural consumption. ;
Curiously, an influential version of this free market philosophy has had
considerable currency in much work within recent cultural studies. In an

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26 Peter Golding and Graham Murdock

attempt to contest the apparent simplistic determinism of a view which sees

audiences as the passive dupes of all-powerful media, some writers have
asserted the sovereignty of viewers and readers to impose their own mean-
ings and interpretations on material which is ‘polysemic’ — that is capable of
generating a variety of meanings. This analysis has tempted writers of very
varying political or social presuppositions. For liberal pluralists it has refur-
bished the view that the checks and balances of cultural supply and demand,
though admittedly uneven, are far from bankrupt. The customer, though
perhaps a little bruised, is still ultimately sovereign. For writers with more
critical or radical instincts, it is a view which has unleashed a populist
romance in which the downtrodden victims caricatured by crude economic
determinists are revealed as heroic resistance fighters in the war against
cultural deception.
Consumer sovereignty is in any total sense clearly impossible — nobody has
access to a complete range of cultural goods as and when they might wish,
without restriction. The task of political economy, then, is to examine the
barriers which limit such freedom. It construes such barriers as being of two
kinds, material and cultural. We can examine each of these in turn.
Where communications goods and facilities are available only at a price
there will be a finite capacity to have access to them limited by the disposable
spending power of individuals and households. Spending on services gener-
ally has grown significantly in the last generation. In 1953/4 spending on
services made up 9.5 per cent of household expenditure; by 1986 this
proportion had risen to 12.7 per cent, and by 1993 to 19.6 per cent (Central
Statistical Office, 1994). All expenditure on personal and household services
and on leisure goods and services amounted to over a third of household
expenditure by 1988 (ibid.: 24). Within this global figure, spending within the
home has risen as a proportion, linked most significantly to the television set
as an increasingly dominant hub of leisure time and expenditure. On average
British adults in 1993 spent 26 hours a week watching television broadcasts,
and an as yet uncertainly calibrated amount of- time using television for
related activities, such as viewing videos or playing computer games. As
the range of hardware required for such activities grows, however, so too
does the demand on private expenditure necessary to participate in them.
As Table 1.1 shows there is a marked difference in the ownership of home
computers and videos between different income groups, a gap that is unlikely
to diminish substantially due to two factors. First, income differentials
themselves have sharply widened in the last decade. Between 1980 and
1993 the top 1 per cent of tax-payers had pay rises averaging £93,958, while
the bottom 50 per cent gained an average of £4,014. By the early 1990s the
gap between the lowest paid tenth of wage-earners and the highest paid tenth
was higher than at any date in modern times (Welch, 1994: 8). In addition the
gap between households dependent on social security benefits for their income
and those in the labour market has also increased. Together these changes
meant that between 1979 and 1992 the share of incomes (after allowing for all
taxes paid and benefits received) of the poorest fifth fell from 10 per cent of
the total to 5 per cent, while the share enjoyed by the richest fifth grew from
35 per cent to 40 per cent. The disposable spending power of different groups
in the population is thus significantly polarized. Secondly such goods require
 Culture, Communications, and Political Economy 27
Table 1.1 Ownership of communication resources among households at
selected income levels (UK 1993) (CSO, 1994: Table 9:4).
rr eee en ee eet BONE Ae
% of households with
Weekly household Telephone Video CD player Home
income
SRE (£) computer*
ees et ee ORR ah rasa
Under 60 65.0 37.6 16.0 - 6.5
80-100 78.7 52.6 18.9
150-175 88.5 65.1 19.9 12.5
275-325 91.6 80.0 41.3 16.3
425-475 96.7 87.5 49.9
650-800 99.5 94.1 69.7 36.9

All households 89.6 73.4 38.5 19.1

x Figures for home computers are for 1992 as this category was not included in the 1993
Family Expenditure Survey - income categories are slightly different for the two years.

regular updating and replacement, disadvantaging groups with limited spend-

ing power and cumulatively advantaging the better off. Owning video or
computer hardware requires expenditure on software, owning a telephone
means spending money on using it. Thus limited spending power is a
deterrent not only to initial purchase but to regular use. Not surprisingly
these figures disguise even sharper divisions among social groups. For
example, telephone ownership among single parents with more than one
child falls to 70.2 per cent (1993 figures). In other words nearly one in three
such households is excluded from a communication resource for which they
might be argued to have particular need.
However, not all expenditure on communications goods involves expensive
acquisition of equipment. Television programmes can be viewed once you
have a set to watch them on, as most people do, while many cultural materials
are available as public goods; they are paid for from taxation as a common
resource — public library books, for example. This is not a static situation,
however. For political economists a shift in the provision and distribution of
cultural goods from being public services to private commodities signals a
substantial change in the opportunity for different groups in the population to
have access to them. If television channels, or individual programmes, are
accessible by price, as was envisaged for much of the new television structure
heralded by the 1990 Broadcasting Act, then consumption of television
programmes will be significantly governed by the distribution of household
incomes. Similar considerations would come into play if, for example, public
libraries were to make greater use of powers to charge, as was proposed in a
government Green Paper in 1988, even though, at the time, such proposals
were shelved (Office of Arts and Libraries, 1988). By imposing the discipline
of price on cultural goods they acquire an artificial scarcity which makes them
akin to other goods of considerably greater scarcity. It is for this reason that
the political economy of cultural consumption has to be especially concerned
with material inequalities.
Critical political economy is not only concerned with monetary barriers to
28 Peter Golding and Graham Murdock

cultural consumption, however. It is also interested in the ways in which

social location regulates access to other relevant resources. Central to this
analysis is the attempt to trace the consequences of differing positions in the
system of ‘production’, understood not simply as paid labour but as the
complex intersection of waged work and domestic labour, including the
work of caring. Three kinds of non-material resources are relevant to a fuller
understanding of consumption and audience activity — time, space and the
cultural competences required to interpret and deploy media materials in
particular ways. de
Time, particularly true leisure time, is a highly unevenly distributed
resource, and, as much research in domestic settings has shown, access to
unaccounted-for time, time for oneself, is strongly stratified by gender.
Women’s prime responsibility for the ‘shadow work’ (Illich, 1981) of shop-
ping, cleaning, cooking and nurturing has fundamental consequences for their
relation to the mass media. Not only are their choices often constrained by the
prior demands of husbands and children, but the fact that no one else in the
family is regenerating their affective resources leads them to look for other
ways of maintaining psychological support. For example, where men mostly
use the telephone instrumentally, to ‘get things done’, women often use it
expressively, to sustain social networks. What appears from the outside to be
trivial gossip is experienced from the inside as an emotional life saver.
Access to space is also a key resource which structures communicative
choices, though it has so far been relatively little studied. The experience of
watching television will differ depending on whether it is viewed in ‘a room
of one’s own’, in a living room, kitchen or other communal family space, or in
a public site such as a bar. What is at issue here is the shifting spatial
organization of privatized and sociable consumption and its implications for
media experience. In order to map these varying mixes of spatial zones we
need to trace their links to the dynamics of production and the patterns of
geographic mobility and immobility, social separation and solidarity, and
psychological identification and antipathy, that these generate.
An analysis of ‘production’ is also central to understanding the differential
distribution of cultural competences. One of the strongest empirical traditions
within cultural studies — running from studies of youth subcultures to research
on differential ‘readings’ of television texts. — has concerned itself with how
social locations provide access to cultural repertoires and symbolic resources
that sustain differences of interpretation and expression (Morley, 1983).
But critical political economy needs to go a stage further to explore how
access to systems of meaning, particularly those offering frameworks of
interpretation that cut across the grain of the cultural mainstream, is linked
to involvement in the social sites that generate and sustain them, and how
these sites in turn are being transformed by political economic changes more
generally, as contemporary ‘production’ moves, shifts and recomposes. What
happens to the micro-cultures of neighbourhoods in the face of urban
redevelopment? How does de-industrialization and the shift from manufactur-
ing to services alter occupational cultures and the critical cultures produced
by the labour movement? How are the cultural relations between local and
global formations reshaped by the migratory and diasporic movements of
labour? These questions can only be tackled by reconnecting the political
 Culture, Communications, and Political Economy 29
economy of communications with the political economy and cultural sociology
of the contemporary world.

Conclusion

People depend in large measure on the cultural industries for the images,
symbols, and vocabulary with which they interpret and respond to their social
environment. It is vital, therefore, that we understand these industries in a
comprehensive and theoretically adequate way which enables the analysis of
communications to take its place at the heart of social and cultural research.
We have argued that a critical political economy provides an approach which
sustains such an analysis, and in so doing have illustrated, in a preliminary
way, the origins, character and application of such an approach. Much
remains to be done, both theoretically and empirically, however, before
we can claim to have fully established a critical political economy of
communications.

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2
Feminist Perspectives on the
Media
Liesbet van Zoonen

With the current proliferation and fragmentation of feminist theory and

politics, reviewing feminist perspectives on the media has become a hazar-
dous task. A general overview of the field can hardly do justice to the variety
of feminist discourse while advancing one’s own particular approach inevi-
tably excludes other, often equally valid feminist discourses. In this chapter I
shall use both approaches. While I cannot deny my own political and
academic preferences, I do hope to provide a framework general enough to
understand historical developments and recent trends in feminist media
studies.
How does feminist media theory distinguish itself from other perspectives
such as postmodernism, pluralism, neo-marxism, etc.? Its unconditional focus
on analyzing gender as a mechanism that structures material and symbolic
worlds and our experiences of them, is hard to find in other theories of the
media. Even by mid and late seventies mainstream communication scholars
did not seem to be very interested in the subject ‘woman’. ‘And why. should
they? Before the advent of the women’s movement these [sex-role] stereo-
types seemed natural, “given”. Few questioned how they developed, how
they were reinforced, or how they were maintained. Certainly the media’s role
in this process was not questioned’ (Tuchman, 1978: 5). Nor were critical
communication scholars in the forefront of recognizing the importance of
gender, as the account of the Women’s Studies Group of the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham confirms: ‘We found
it extremely difficult to participate in the CCCS groups and felt, without being
able to articulate it, that it was a case of the masculine domination of both
intellectual work and the environment in which it was being carried out’
(Women Take Issue, 1978: 11).
The situation has improved to a certain extent. There seems to be a
hesitant acknowledgement of the necessity and viability of feminist
approaches to the media. Academic journals of communications have
published review articles of feminist media studies and sometimes devoted
whole issues to it (Communication, 1986; Dervin, 1987; Foss and Foss,
32 Liesbet van Zoonen

1983; Journal of Communication Inquiry, 1987, McCormack, 1978; Rakow,

1986; Smith, 1983; Steeves, 1987; van Zoonen, 1988). However, in ‘gen-
eral’ reviews of main trends in communication theory and research one finds
few traces of this growing body of feminist scholarship. In special issues
about communications research in western and eastern Europe published by
the European Journal of Communication and Media, Culture and Society
(1990) references to gender or feminism are all but absent.
In the field of cultural studies feminist concerns have gained more ground.
Many innovating studies about ‘women’s genres’ such as soap operas,
romance novels and women’s magazines and their audiences have informed
and have been informed by this approach (e.g. Hobson, 1982; Modleski, 1982;
Radway, 1984; Winship, 1987). Moreover, authors such as Fiske (1987) and
Morley (1986) addressing other issues in cultural studies, have incorporated
gender in their research as one of the crucial mechanisms in structuring our
cultural experiences and our outlook on daily life. Notwithstanding the
successful and inspiring conjunction of feminist and cultural studies, not all
feminist studies are cultural studies, and not all cultural studies are feminist
studies. I shall elaborate the former as I review different feminist perspectives
later on. The latter brings me to a second distinctive feature of feminist media
studies.
The feminist academic venture is intrinsically political. In the early years of
the revived movement, a concurrence of research writing and political
activism was common practice. A typical example is Betty Friedan’s
research about the construction of the American cultural ideal of ‘the happy
housewife-heroine’ in women’s magazines and advertisements.' The book
The Feminine Mystique (1963) was an immediate bestseller and gave rise
to a revival of the women’s movement which had been dormant since the
successful struggle for women’s suffrage. One of the first ‘second wave’
feminist groups was the National Organisation of Women, headed by Betty
Friedan. Not surprisingly, NOW declared the media to be one of the major
sites of struggle for the movement: in the spring of 1970 approximately 100
women occupied the offices of The Ladies Home Journal demanding among
other things a female editor in chief, a child care centre for employees and the
publication of a ‘liberated issue’ to be compiled by the protestors. At least one
feminist supplement to the Journal appeared. A nationwide research project
monitoring television networks and local stations for sexist content was
conducted with the intention to challenge the licence of any station with a
sexist record when it came up for renewal before the Federal Communications
Commissions (Hole and Levine, 1972: 264). Although by the beginning of the
eighties much feminist research came from the academy, its political nature
remained, therewith fundamentally undermining the dominant academic,
paradigm, of objectivity, neutrality and detachment. For example, Tuchman
(1978: 38), introducing one of the first volumes about women and the media,
asks herself: ‘How can the media be changed? . . . How can we free women
from the tyranny of media messages limiting their lives to hearth and home?’
The book concludes with a chapter discussing the policy implications of the
research material presented. Numerous other academic publications conclude
with recommendations for change (e.g. Creedon, 1989; Gallagher, 1980;
Thoveron, 1986).
 Feminist Perspectives on the Media 33
With its substantial project, it is the reciprocal relation between theory,
politics and activism, the commitment of feminist academics to have their
work contribute to a larger feminist goal — however defined, the blurred line
between the feminist as academic and the feminist as activist, that distin-
guishes feminist perspectives on the media from other possible perspectives.
Paradoxically, as I shall try to show in this review, the growing theoretical and
empirical sophistication of feminist media studies has not only jeopardized its
relevance for a critical feminist media politics but also diminished its
potential as a comprehensive cultural critique. For example, as we acknowl-
edge the pleasure women derive from watching soap operas, it becomes
increasingly difficult to find moral justifications for criticizing their contribu-
tion to the hegemonic construction of gender identities. To disentangle this
paradox I shall first discuss liberal, radical and socialist feminist discourses
which share — in spite of their many differences — a social control model of
communication, and a conceptualization of gender as a dichotomous category
with a historically stable and universal meaning.

Liberal, Radical and Socialist Feminism

Classifying feminism in three neatly separated ideological currents is certainly at

odds with the present fragmentation of feminist thought. It seems hard to
include, for example, postmodern and psychoanalytic trends satisfactorily in
this tripartition. Also, feminist theory and practice is often rather eclectic,
incorporating elements from different ideologies as circumstances and issues
necessitate. As a result few feminist media studies can be unequivocally
classified in one of the three categories. However, taken as ideal types — which
I shall do here — they are indicative of the various ways in which feminists
perceive the media. Although less dominant than in the seventies and early
eighties, they still underlie many feminist self-perceptions and analysis.

Liberal Feminism
In liberal feminist discourse irrational prejudice and stereotypes about the
supposedly natural role of women as wives and mothers account for the
unequal position of women in society. General liberal principles of liberty
and equality should apply to women as well. ‘Equal Rights’ or ‘reformist’
feminism are other labels for these principles which find their political
translation in attempts to change legislation, in affirmative action programs,
in stimulating women to take up non-traditional roles and occupations and to
develop masculine qualities to acquire power. Such role reversal is much less
strongly advocated for men. .
Sex role stereotypes, prescriptions of sex-appropriate behaviour, appear-
ance, interests, skills and self-perceptions are at the core of liberal feminist
media analyses (Tuchman, 1978: 5). Numerous quantitative content analyses
have shown that women hardly appear in the mass media, be it depicted. as
34 Liesbet van Zoonen

wife, mother, daughter, girlfriend; as working in traditionally female jobs

(secretary, nurse, receptionist); or as sex-object. Moreover they are usually
young and beautiful, but not very well educated. Experimental research done
in the tradition of cognitive psychology tends to support the hypothesis that
media act as socialization agents — along with the family — teaching children
in particular their appropriate sex roles and symbolically rewarding them for
appropriate behaviour (cf. Busby, 1975; Gallagher, 1980). It is thought that
media perpetuate sex role stereotypes because they reflect dominant social
values and also because male media producers are influenced by these
stereotypes.
The solutions liberal feminism offers are twofold: women should obtain
more equal positions in society, enter male-dominated fields and acquire
power. With a time lag mass media will reflect this change. Meanwhile,
media can contribute to change by portraying more women and men in non-
traditional roles and by using non-sexist language. The strategies liberal
feminists have developed to reach these goals are many: teaching ‘non-
sexist professionalism’ in Schools of Journalism (van Zoonen, 1989);
creating awareness among broadcasters and journalists about stereotypes
and their effects; putting ‘consumer pressure’ on media institutions, espe-
cially on advertisers; demanding affirmative action policies of media institu-
tions (cf. Thoveron, 1986). Liberal media strategies have had some
unwarranted consequences. The emphasis on role reversal for women in
particular has created a new stereotype of ‘Superwoman’, the response of
commercial culture to the demands of liberal feminism. Women’s magazines
and advertisements portray her as an independent and assertive career
woman, a successful wife and mother, who is still beautiful and has kept
the body she had as a girl in perfect shape. Real women trying to live up to
this image end up suffering from serious burn-out symptoms (Dowling,
1989),
Another unforeseen consequence of liberal strategies is showing painfully
in developments in the media workforce. The numbers of female journalists
have increased considerably in recent years with the United States in the
forefront (MRTW, 1989). Sadly enough, however, as American researchers
have observed ‘a female majority in the field does not translate into superior
power or influence for women: instead, it has been translated to mean a
decline in salaries and status for the field’ (Creedon, 1989: 3). In part these
problems arise from liberal feminism’s disregard for socio-economic struc-
tures, and power relations. Social conflict is presented as a difference of
opinion which can be resolved through rational argumentation. This assump-
tion is reflected in the emphasis on strategies which imply teaching and
raising awareness of (male) media producers, and in the rather optimistic
belief that media institutions can be changed from within by female media
professionals. That men — as radical feminists would argue — or consumer
capitalism — as socialist feminists would argue — have vested interests in
maintaining their power over women, does not easily fit in the ideal of
rational disinterested argumentation.
 Feminist Perspectives on the Media 35

Radical Feminism
In radical feminist discourse ‘patriarchy’, a social system in which all men are
assumed to dominate and oppress all women, accounts for women’s position
in society. Patriarchy is conceived to be the result of men’s innately wicked
inclination to dominate women, a genetically determined need which they can
fulfil — in the last instance — by exercizing their physical strength. Radical
feminists have been in the forefront of exposing male abuse of women and
politicizing issues formerly considered as private: sexual violence, wife
battering, incest, pornography, and more recently, sex tourism and trafficking
in women. It is obvious that men can have no place in radical feminist utopias.
In order to free themselves completely women have to cut off all ties with
men and male society, and form their own communities. Lesbianism therefore
is necessarily following political choice — another example of the radical
politicization of the personal.
Since mass media are in the hands of male owners and producers, they will
operate to the benefit of a patriarchal society. Apparently this premise does
not need further research, given the few media studies that have been
conducted from a radical feminist perspective. The main focus is on porno-
graphy and rather polemical: ‘Pornography exists because men despise
women, and men despise women because pornography exists’ (Dworkin,
1980: 289). In radical feminist media analyses the power of the media to
affect men’s behaviour towards women and women’s perception of them-
selves is beyond discussion: ‘Researchers may have been unable to prove a
direct connection between any particular instance of media and any particular
act, but there can be no doubt that media distortion contributes to a general
climate of discrimination and abuse of women’ (Davies et al., 1988: 6, author
italics).
The media strategies of radical feminism are straightforward: women
should create their own means of communication. Technological develop-
ments in print and audiovisual media made the proliferation of feminist
writing, newsletters, magazines, radio and TV programmes, video and film
groups possible. A host of feminine ideas would otherwise have not received a
public forum (Kessler, 1984). Most media are produced by a collective of
volunteers, who usually work without profits motives and share responsibil-
ities. Radical feminist logic does not allow for hierarchies; they are thought to
be a perversion of masculine society. Contributions are anonymous or signed
with first names only since it is assumed that all women share the same kind
of patriarchal oppression.
Radical media strategies have been more problematic than they seemed at
first sight: the belief that women together — all innately good people — would
be able to work without competition, hierarchy or specialization, and would
write or film from the same source of essential femininity, proved an illusion.
A constant feature of radical feminist media has been internal conflict about
organization and editorial policy. Power differences, difference of opinion
and interests appear to exist among women also, and are not a male preserve.
Another dilemma has been posed by the inability of feminist media to attract
readers and audiences beyond the feminist parish. While their self-proclaimed
aim often is to inform and mobilize larger audiences, movement media tend to
36 Liesbet van Zoonen

fulfil more of a ritual function. With the waning enthusiasm for collective
expressions of feminism, the circulation figures of feminist media declined
rather dramatically resulting in the demise of many of them. ; ‘
In its pure form, radical feminist media analyses have not gained much
ground. However, many elements of it are also found in other theories.
Socialist feminism incorporates the concept of patriarchal ideology in its
marxist analysis of women’s position, without however adopting its essenti-
alist stance. The conviction that differences between men and women are
essentially biological has emerged in other feminist perspectives as well.
French feminists drawing heavily from psychoanalytic theory have very
sophisticatedly located the difference between men and women in the differ-
ent structure of male and female genitals, considering, for example, classic
linear narrative structure as an expression of masculine, goal oriented sexu-
ality. French feminist theory has particularly influenced literary and film
studies, but is rare in studies of mass media (e.g. Mattelart, 1986). The
solution for women’s position is not sought in withdrawing from patriarchal
culture, but in creating new and legitimate spaces for the feminine voice,
supposedly more process oriented. This has been extremely successful in the
area of women’s writing, but the feminist avant-garde film of the seventies
never acquired a large following (e.g. Pribram, 1988).

Socialist Feminism
Unlike radical and liberal feminism, socialist feminism does not focus
exclusively on gender to account for women’s position, but attempts to
incorporate an analysis of class and economic conditions of women as well.
Central concepts are ‘the reproduction of labour’ and ‘the economic value of
domestic labour’. Although not recognized as such, the nurturing, moral,
educational and domestic work women do in the family is said to be
indispensable for the maintenance of capitalism. Were all this labour to be
paid, the profit margins of capitalism would be critically diminished (cf.
Zaretsky, 1986). Socialist feminism shares with liberal feminism an emphasis
on the need for women to take up paid labour. However, at the same time a
fundamental restructuring of the labour market is called for, in which the
average labour week is reduced to 25 hours so that women and men have time
left to share nurturing and domestic responsibilities.
More recently, socialist feminism has tried to incorporate other social
divisions along the lines of ethnicity, sexual preference, age, physical abil-
ity, since the experience of, for example, black, lesbian and single women did
not fit nicely in the biased gender/class earlier model. This has resulted in an
increasingly complicated and incoherent theoretical project, which until now
has not produced a satisfactory account of the way material and cultural
conditions interact. More and more, ideology in itself has become the main
object of study. The work of Althusser, stating the relative autonomy of
ideological apparatuses like the family, school, church and the media vis a
vis the economic conditions, and the work of Gramsci analyzing how
dominant ideology takes on the form of common sense (hegemony) have
been particularly influential in socialist feminism. Cultural Studies
 Feminist Perspectives on the Media 37
approaches to gender and media, that I shall discuss later, build on these
concepts of ideology. Many authors (e.g. Steeves, 1987) place them in the
same category. I suggest it is important to distinguish between socialist
feminist discourse and cultural studies approaches due to their different
conceptualizations of power. In socialist feminist discourse power remains
located in socio-economic structures, be it mediated through the relatively
autonomous level of ideology. Cultural studies approaches account for power
as a discursive practice that can appear independent from material conditions.
The distinction however is one of emphasis; both are reluctant to focus on
gender exclusively and try to incorporate material and cultural conditions in
accounting for women’s position in society.
In its most crude form, the socialist feminist communication model of the
seventies clings to radical models in which media are perceived to be
ideological instruments presenting the capitalist and patriarchal society as
the natural order. However, socialist feminism is distinguished by a much
greater concern for the way in which ideologies of femininity are constructed
in the media, and to whose avail? Much of its research consists of ideological
analysis of media texts, using the analytic instrumentarium offered by struc-
turalism and semiology (e.g. Coward, 1984). The solutions socialist feminism
offers are not so much different from liberal or radical media strategies.
Usually a double strategy is advocated: reforming the mainstream media as
well as producing separate feminist media. What distinguishes the socialist
call for female media producers is an awareness of the middle class bias of that
strategy (e.g. Baehr, 1981) and the acknowledgement that at the same time
structural changes in the organization of media labour are necessary. For
example, a Dutch pressure group of feminist journalists campaigned rather
successfully for affirmative action policies in journalism, increase of part-time
job possibilities, parental leave and childcare facilities at the newspapers
office (Diekerhof et al., 1985).

Concepts of Gender and Communication

Strategies for change follow logically from liberal, radical and socialist
feminist media analyses. They aim either at reforming existing media institu-
tions and professions, or at creating new feminist ‘institutions’ and developing
proper feminine and feminist interpretations of professionalism. However,
with the privilege of hindsight, we are now in a position to observe how
useful these strategies have been. It would appear that some of them have not
been very successful. Some even seem to have been counterproductive, as in
the case of American journalism becoming a female-dominated field reduced
in status and salaries. Such political disillusions are intricately linked to
theoretical flaws which all three perspectives share. These flaws concern
the conceptualization of gender as a dichotomous category with a homoge-
neous and universal meaning, and the premise of mass media being instru-
mental to the control needs of respectively, society, patriarchy, and
capitalism.
38 Liesbet van Zoonen

Gender

Radical and liberal feminism share their appreciation of gender as an inevi-

table consequence of sex differences, consisting of two binary and universal
canons of behaviour, characteristics and values found either in women — the
feminine canon — or in men — the masculine canon. Femininity is supposed to
be composed of emotionality, prudence, cooperation, communal sense, com-
pliance, etc. Masculinity supposedly is its opposite: rationality, efficiency,
competition, individualism, ruthlessness, etc. Liberal feminism has it that we
learn to accept these canons as normal through women’s mothering role in the
family and through other socialization agents like the media, while radical
feminism believes in the essential nature of these differences. Transgressions
of this dichotomy, manifested for example in androgynous appearances like
Grace Jones and Prince, in certain types of lesbian and homosexual culture, in
the phenomenon of transsexuality, and more routinely in daily lives and
experiences of women and men whose behaviour and characteristics do not
fit easily in the feminine or masculine canon, are considered exceptions to the
thus defined universal ‘sex-gender system’.
Consider the ‘sameness-difference’ dilemma such a universal transcendent
concept of gender runs into: for liberal feminism women are essentially the
same as men but not equal; for radical feminism women are essentially
different from men and not equal. (It is most easy to explain this dilemma
by juxtaposing liberal and radical feminism. That is not to say, however that
socialist feminism is less bothered by it.) Liberal feminism urges women in
particular to regain that sameness becoming equal in the process. Radical
feminism tells women to celebrate their being different and to struggle for a
social revaluation of femininity. Both solutions are intrinsically problematic.
Liberal feminism implicitly accepts the values of the protestant work ethic
basic to modern capitalism by telling women to leave their domestic world,
enter the (male) workforce and develop the masculine features necessary to
acquire power. Masculinity is advocated as an ideal to live up to, at the
expense of human values traditionally associated with women. Role reversal
might render equality to women, but in the process important ‘feminine’
values are dismissed and lost. This is an outcome no liberal feminist aspires
to, it is thus argued that women should go public without forsaking their
femininity. Moreover their supposedly moral superiority should feed and
improve the degenerated public world (cf. Elshtain, 1981). In feminist media
studies this liberal dogma is reflected in the call for more female journalists
whose specific feminine input of concern for human relations and personal
experiences would improve the current distanced and dehumanized news style
(e.g. Neverla and Kanzleiter, 1984). There is a theoretical inconsistency here:
whilst the essential sameness of women and men is used to legitimize
demands for equality, difference enters again through the backdoor as
women need their specific ‘feminine’ features to modify the egalitizing
consequences of the struggle for equality. The rather naive assumption that
dominant masculine culture would easily make room for its necessary
feminine complementation has more important practical consequences. As
already mentioned, the recent increase of the number of female journalists in
 Feminist Perspectives on the Media 39
the US has not led to an increase in their influence, but instead to a
devaluation of the status and the salaries of the field (Creedon, 1989: 3):
The remaining option for liberal feminism then seems to be a mere adjustment
strategy: equality as defined by dominant masculine culture; ‘equal but the
same’.
Radical feminist assumptions of essential differences between women and
men, and their call for separate women’s spaces and communities are equally
problematic. They imply a return to an ontological explanation of human
differences introducing a tyranny of biological destiny historically used to
circumscribe women’s place in society. As such radical feminism has the
same totalitarian tendencies as its main antagonist patriarchal society. How,
for instance, can radical feminism perceive women who do not conform to
their supposedly innate femininity, other than as genetical deviations? (cf.
Elshtain, 1981: 204-28). Radical feminist strategies inevitably condemn
women to a marginal position: they will be either oppressed suffering from
false consciousness within patriarchal society which is supposed to be beyond
reform. Or they choose to step out of patriarchal society being free and true to
their nature but remaining isolated and marginal, as for instance the lifecycle
of radical feminist media illustrates. The problem is similar in psychoanalytic
essentialist currents: ‘For if, as some psychoanalytic theories appear to
suggest, social subjects are determined through family relations and language
acquisition, prior to the introduction of other considerations, including race,
class, personal background or historical moment, the social construct thus
described is a closed system unamenable to other subject formations’ (Pri-
bram, 1988: 6). In radical feminist discourse the inevitable outcome of the
sameness-difference dilemma is ‘different but not equal’.
This paralyzing dilemma is a product of radical and liberal conceptualiza-
tions of gender as having a universal and transcendent meaning. Feminist
philosophers and historians have pointed to the historical specificity of the
idea that men are political and rational, while women would be more
personal, emotional and inclined to nurture. Landes (1988) locates the origins
of these ideas in the work of Rousseau, Montesquieu and other philosophers
of the French Revolution, who inspired republicans to banish women to the
home and called men to their supposedly natural fulfilment in the world of
politics. The resulting gendering of the public and the private sphereas we
know it today, feeding many (feminist) discourses about the meaning of
gender, can thus be considered to be a historically specific construction, by
no means universal and transcendent. Thus not only has the French Revolu-
tion banished women to the family, it has also succeeded in imprisoning
feminist theory and politics in its philosophical framework (cf. van Zoonen,
1991). An acknowledgement of the historical specificity of current dominant
beliefs about women and men opens up new ways of conceptualizing gender,
not as universally given, but as socially constructed. The issue, then, is no
longer how to promote a certain type of femininity as in radical feminism, or
how to dismiss femininity and masculinity altogether as in liberal feminism,
but rather to analyze how and why particular constructions of masculinity and
femininity arise in historical contexts, how and why certain constructions gain
dominance over others and how dominant constructions relate to the lived
realities of women and men.
40 Liesbet van Zoonen

Communication

Liberal, radical and socialist feminist discourse share an instrumental -per-

spective on communication. Media are perceived as the main instruments in
conveying respectively stereotypical, patriarchal and hegemonic values about
women and femininity. They serve as mechanisms of social control: in liberal
feminist discourse media pass on society’s heritage — which is deeply sexist —
in order to secure continuity, integration, order and the transmission of
dominant values (Tuchman, 1978); radical feminism argues that patriarchal
media serve the needs of patriarchal society by suppressing and distorting
women’s experiences which, if expressed in their true form, would seriously
disturb the patriarchal set up (Mattelart, 1986); socialist feminism assumes
that media present the capitalist, patriarchal scheme of things as the most
attractive system available. Direct social control becomes unnecessary since
dominant ideology has been translated into ‘common sense’ (Women Take
Issue, 1978). Media fulfil the structural needs of respectively democratic,
patriarchal and capitalist society by transmitting its distorted dominant
values about women. What feminism of each kind advocates is the transmis-
sion of the reality of women’s lives instead: media should be instrumental to
creating feminist utopias. Feminist value judgements are thus completely cast
in future oriented political terms, with ‘political’ referring to the complete
social set-up. As a result ‘good’ media — contributing to feminist goals — and
‘bad’ media — maintaining the status quo, are easily distinguished. Suppo-
sedly, it is only a matter of time for women’s collective awareness to surface
resulting in a massive exchange of ‘bad’ women’s magazines, romance
novels, etc. for ‘good’ feminist media.
In the 1990s, however, having more than 20 years of organized feminism
behind us, Utopia is still far from near. A variety of new women’s magazines
have entered the market successfully adapting to the fragmentation of a
formerly unified female readership: girls, young women, older women, career
women, rich housewives, the avid cook or gardener, ordinary working
women, travelling women and the traditional housewife all happily subscribe
to their own kind of women’s magazine; romance novels have introduced new
heroines profoundly touched by feminist calls for independence, but still
longing for and always attaining heterosexual everlasting romance; soap
operas like Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest and its successors — a typical
1980s television genre — attract a predominantly female audience in spite of
its ‘overtly’ sexist, patriarchal and capitalist content; and feminist media
struggle with reaching a larger audience, attracting advertisers, maintaining
their old audience, or suffer from internal conflict or simply boredom.
Obviously the feminist transmission model of communication cannot account
for these developments, other than plaintively reproaching the avid consumers
of the ‘bad’ media with ‘false consciousness’. I suggest instead to ascribe this
ineptitude to the realistic bend and the passive audience conception of the
model.
 Feminist Perspectives on the Media 41

Realism
It is obvious that many aspects of women’s lives and experiences are not very
well reflected by the media. Many more women work than media-output
Suggests, very few women are like the ‘femme fatales’ of soap operas and
mini series, and women’s desires consist of a lot more than the hearth and
home of traditional women’s magazines. A call for more realistic images of
women might seem self-evident, but is quite problematic. Gender stereotypes
for instance do not come out of the blue, but have social counterparts which
many might perceive as ‘real’. Thus a common negation of the accusation that
media distort reality is: ‘But many women are mothers and housewives.’ Who
can define the objective reality media should transmit? Feminists? They are
divided among themselves as the previous paragraphs have only minimally
illustrated. Women? They can even much less be considered a uniform
category. As Brunsdon (1988: 149) duly argues: ‘Thus for feminists to call
for more realistic images of women is to engage in the struggle to define what
is meant by “realistic’’, rather than to offer easily available ‘‘alternative”
images. . . . Arguing for more realistic images is always an argument for the
representation of “‘your” version of reality.’
A related problem of the ‘reality reflection thesis’ is the implication that
media output has unequivocal meanings: they are either real or not real. This
denies the complex and multiple meanings of media texts implied by the
commercial logic of mass media needing to be popular among a variety of
social groups and subcultures (cf. Fiske, 1987). In facing the dilemmas of the
reflection thesis, feminist media studies have been profoundly influenced by
cultural studies and by its own shift to a constructivist theory of gender.
Although not a unified approach with a consistent programme, cultural
studies’ central tenet of ‘communication as a process through which a shared
culture is created, modified and transformed’ (Carey, 1989: 43), implies a
conceptualization of media texts as sites of struggle over meaning (e.g. of
gender), rather than as transparent cultural prescriptions. The reality media
offer is a product of ongoing negotiation at the level of media institutions,
texts and audiences (Gledhill, 1988). As a result media texts are inherently
‘polysemic’ (Fiske, 1987) and construct diverging and sometimes conflicting
articulations of femininity. Although it is often quite clear which articulations
of femininity are to be preferred according to media producers (the dominant
meaning of the text), the idea of a polysemic nature of media texts under-
mines the possibility of thinking of audiences as onesidedly and unambigu-
ously affected by media. Which of the many meanings of the texts will they
take up? This brings me to the second major problematic of the feminist
transmission model of communication: its passive audience conception.

The Audience and ‘Us’

In feminist transmission models of communication audiences don’t have
much as
choice in interpreting media texts. Either they can accept them
true to reality, in which case they are successfully socialized (liberal femin-
ism), brainwashed (by patriarchy) or lured to the idea that what they see and
42 Liesbet van Zoonen

read is ‘common sense’ (socialist feminism). Or they see through the tricks
mass media play on them and reject the sexist, patriarchal, capitalist repre-
sentation of things. It seems clear that many feminists consider themselves
among the latter ‘enlightened’ people raising themselves ‘to the lofty pedestal
of having seen the light’ (Winship, 1987: 140). A deep gap Is constructed
between ‘us’ feminists, and ‘them’ the audience. Objectionable in particular
are soap operas, romance novels, and women’s magazines which create a ‘cult
of femininity and heterosexual romance’ that — since these media are pre-
dominantly consumed by women — set the agenda for the female world (cf.
Ferguson, 1983). Such a strong conviction about the value (or rather lack of it)
of these media for women’s lives, is remarkably similar to the patriarchal
attitudes of men knowing what is best for women. Dismissing women’s
genres for their supposedly questionable content, carries an implicit rejection
of the women who enjoy them. That is obviously at odds with the feminist
mission to acknowledge and gain respect for women’s experiences and view-
points. Moreover, it does not contribute to our understanding of how con-
tending constructions of gender are articulated in such cultural phenomena.
Why, then, are these genres so popular among women? How do women use
them to give meaning to their daily experiences? How do ‘discourses of
femininity’ articulated in them interact with other non mediated discourses
of femininity such as motherhood and sexuality (cf. Brunsdon, 1981).
The above questions have activated a unprecedented concern with the
female audience, expressed in a boom of mainly ethnographic studies about
female recipients of particular genres, soap operas and romance novels
leading the field (see Ang and Hermes in this volume). However, the problem
of ‘us’ feminists versus ‘them’ the audience is not solved by the ethnographic
twist in feminist media studies and might in some cases even be intensified as
the feminist researcher puts herself in the authoritative position of the all
knowing expert of female media pleasures, while in the end still rejecting
them as unproductive for ‘the’ feminist revolution. This is utterly problematic
in Radway’s by now almost classic study Reading the Romance. After
respectfully analyzing the romance reading experiences of married working
women, she claims that romance reading contains an act of protest against
patriarchal culture. Briefly and bluntly summarized: by the social act of
reading romance, women signal a time-out for their domestic and caring
labour; and by taking up romances in particular with their omnipresent
androgynous hero capable of nurturing woman herself, they deny the legiti-
macy of patriarchal culture in which such men are quite hard to find. Radway
now militantly concludes that ‘we, who are committed to social change’ (my
italics), should keep looking for and encouraging these traces of social
protest: ‘If we do not, we have already conceded the fight and, in the case
of the romance at least, admitted the impossibility of creating a world where
the vicarious pleasure supplied by its reading would be unnecessary.’ (Rad-
way, 1984: 222). In the end the only value of romance reading Radway
acknowledges is its potential - however far hidden — for the feminist
revolution.
But what to make of those feminists who enjoy soap operas, who revel in
harlequin novels and who are addicted to their weekly subscription of their
favourite women’s magazine, to mention just a few ‘bad’ genres. Winship
 Feminist Perspectives on the Media 43
(1987) addressing precisely this question in her analysis of women’s maga-
zines confesses that she has been a ‘closet reader’ of Cosmopolitan and
Woman’s Own for years, since a ‘true’ feminist is not supposed to derive
pleasure from such ghastly products. Hers is one of the few examples of a
study in which the personal experiences and pleasures of the researchers are
an integrated element of the study, thus releasing the tension between ‘us’ and
‘them’. As Skirrow (1986: 115) has argued: ‘In investigating popular culture
the only way not to feel like a snooping health investigator, sniffing out
whether someone’s environment is fit to live in, is to examine some aspect
or form of it which evokes passionate feeling in oneself.’

Feminism and Cultural Studies

From the points of criticism to feminist transmission models of communica-

tion that I laid out in the previous paragraphs, the contours of a ‘cultural
feminist media studies’ project emerge. Though it would be hard to defend the
existence of a well-defined theoretical and empirical program, to which a
majority of feminist communication scholars adhere, it does seem justified to
say that cultural studies approaches are gaining momentum given the growing
number of publications in this vein (e.g. Baehr and Dyer, 1987; Brown, 1990;
Gamman and Marshment, 1988; Pribram, 1988; Shevelow, 1989).
My own formulation of its theoretical premises would start from Harding’s
(1986: 17) definition of gender ‘as an analytic category within which humans
think about and organize their social activity, rather than as a natural
consequence of sex-difference, or even merely as a social variable assigned
to individual people in different ways from culture to culture’. Such a
conceptualization of gender implies that its meaning is never given but varies
according to specific cultural and historical settings, and that its meaning is
subject to ongoing discursive struggle and negotiation, the outcome having far
reaching socio-cultural implications. This struggle over meaning is not a mere
pluralistic ‘debate’ of equal but contending frames of reference. It is circum-
scribed by existing ethnic and economic power relations, and by the fact that
‘in virtually all cultures, whatever is thought of as manly, is more highly
valued than whatever is thought of as womanly’ (Harding, 1986: 18).
What part do media play in the ongoing social construction of gender?
Much depends on their location in economic structures (e.g. commercial
versus public media), on their specific characteristic (e.g. print versus broad-
cast), on the particular genres (e.g. news versus soap opera), on the audiences
they appeal to and on the place they occupy in those audiences’ daily lives.
But obviously all media are among the central sites in which struggle over
meaning takes place. Stuart Hall’s (1980) encoding-decoding model is a good
starting point in case. According to Hall the production structure yields an
‘encoded’ text which does not constitute a closed ideological system but in
which contradictions of the production process are discounted. The thus
encoded structure of meaning is brought back into the practices of audiences
by their similar but reverse ‘decoding’ process. Encoding and decoding need
not to be symmetrical, i.e. audiences don’t need to understand media texts as
44 Liesbet van Zoonen

producers have intended them. In fact, a certain ‘misunderstanding’ is likely,

because of ‘the a-symmetry between the codes of “source” and “receiver” at
the moment of transformation in and out of the discursive form. What are
called “distortions” or ‘“‘misunderstandings” arise precisely from the lack of
equivalence between the two sides of production’ (Hall, 1980: 131, original
italics). Gledhill’s (1988) analysis of meaning production as cultural negotia-
tion at the level of institutions, texts and audiences builds on the encoding/
decoding model.
Institutional negotiation results from conflicting frames of reference within
media organizations. ‘Creative’ personnel is guided mainly by professional
and aesthetic logic, while managing directors predominantly have economic
and ideological interests in mind. D’Acci’s (1987) analysis of the American
police series Cagney and Lacey, featuring two female detectives, illustrates
the intricate interplay between institutional and textual negotiations indicative
of the complexities and contradictions of the encoding process. Having a
female buddy pair at the heart of the series satisfied two institutional needs
at once: to revitalize the popular but somewhat stale genre of police series,
and to respond to social changes caused by the women’s movement. In
practice these two claims were not easily realized. A continuous struggle
between the writers and the network accompanied the production of the
series, the conflicts all boiling down to the question of how to reconcile the
treatment of feminist issues with the commercial interest of the network to
keep away from controversial topics. The negotiations about an episode in
which unmarried career cop Cagney thinks she is pregnant shows how
diverging frames of reference enter at the level of script development. The
writers did not even consider to let Cagney have an abortion, anticipating that
the network would never allow that solution. So a miscarriage was proposed,
but the network rejected the story anyway, not wanting ‘to shine the spotlight
on pregnancy and the problems of an unmarried pregnant woman’ (D’ Acci,
1987: 219). Obviously, negotiation at this point concerns the ideological
implications of the script. The networks countered the writers with a proposal
of a story in which Cagney (in her late thirties) has to decide whether she will
ever have children. This was unacceptable to the writers for its lack of
narrative resolution, the negotiation here being about professional standards
of sound scripts. Finally, the contending claims were reconciled by letting
Cagney think she is pregnant. As becomes clear by the end of the episode, she
is not. How her pregnancy could happen and what she means to do about it is
hardly discussed in the rest of the episode, since that would involve such
politically and socially explosive issues as birth control and abortion. A rather
dim narrative remains to which each woman can bring her own experiences
with (un)wanted pregnancies and ‘career/children’ dilemmas. D’ Acci’s ana-
lysis of Cagney and Lacey is a rare exception to the tendency within feminist
media studies to focus on gender only as explaining particularities of media
content. .
Negotiations at the level of texts concern the availability of meanings in a
text as expressions of the encoding process, and as a result of independent and
unpredictable interactions between contending elements in the text. Next to
that textual interactions allow audiences to take up different ‘subject posi-
tions’. To take another analysis of Cagney and Lacey as an example: Clark
 Feminist Perspectives on the Media 45
(1989) argues that the series’ narrative form, representational codes and
structures of looking empower women and encourage women-identified
constructions of meaning. The series combines the linear narrative of the
police series — a crime usually related to such feminist issues like sexual
harassment, rape, prostitution, etc. is committed and solved — with the more
circular structure of the soap opera. Integrated in the linear narrative is the
personal life of the heroines which follows a more open and fragmented
course. In that narrative the emphasis is on process rather than action, on
dialogue rather than solution: ‘We don’t know from any cause effect structure
what Chris [Cagney] will decide about marriage or how MaryBeth [Lacey]
will cope with having breast cancer’ (Clark, 1990: 119). What we do see are
their considerations, their ideas and feelings which are extensively played out,
while the outcome of their deliberations (not to marry, what kind of treatment
to take) does not get much emphasis. According to Clark representation of the
decision-making process ‘invites the participation of the spectator to complete
the process of meaning construction in ways that are meaningful to her’ (119).
Textual analysis such as described above, utilizing concepts from psycho-
analysis, structuralism and semiotics, has been quite common in film studies
(Pribram, 1988) but more and more television texts are being analyzed in a
similar vein. For example, Ang (1990) analyzes how the textual construction
of Sue Ellen, one of the major female characters of Dallas, provides several
imaginary subject positions for women: Lewis (1990) and Kaplan (1988)
discuss how music videos appeal to a gendered audience; Holland (1987)
and van Zoonen (1991) examine the significance of women newsreaders for
the ongoing construction of traditional femininity. Older research about
romance novels and women’s magazines can also be considered part of this
body of work (Modleski, 1982; McRobbie, 1982; Winship, 1987).
The concept of polysemic media texts should be embraced with caution,
however. In spite of its essential ambiguity, the range of meanings and subject
positions a text offers is not infinite. ‘Encoding will have the effect of
constructing some of the limits and parameters within which decodings will
operate’ (Hall, 1980: 135). So most texts do have a ‘preferred reading’ which,
given the economic and ideological location of most media, will tend to
reconstruct dominant values of a society — unless we are dealing with
alternative media which should also be thought of as polysemic and
encoded, within a rather different set of constraints, however. Moreover,
meanings in texts need to be activated by real audiences before they can
take on any social significance. The negotiation over meaning at the level of
audience ‘reception’ has the most radical potential. ‘Reception’ implies two
related sets of audience practices: use and interpretation.
In Hall’s encoding-decoding model three hypothetical positions from which
audiences may interpret television texts are identified: the viewer who takes
up a dominant-hegemonic position reads the texts in terms of its encoding
which makes the model symmetrical; the negotiated positions entail many
more contradictions since the negotiating viewer accepts the global sense of
the dominant encoding, but lets her own logic prevail at a more situated level;
the most radical reading comes from an oppositional position in which the
reader/viewer recognizes the text as inflected with dominant codes and
recodes it within her own alternative frame of reference. Hall’s hypothetical
46 Liesbet van Zoonen

positions have been empirically validated by Morley’s (1980) research on

Nationwide Audience, a British current affairs program which indeed proved
to be subject to a variety of interpretations of the audience. The situation in
which audiences actually turn on the television set or pick up a magazine —
their social use of media — circumscribe their interpretations. Some examples
illustrate this: Bausinger (1984) describes a family in which the man returns
home from work and immediately turns on the TV, seemingly to watch the
news, but effectively expressing a desire to be left alone. Gray (1987)
observes how watching rented videos and discussing soap operas form an
important part of the friendship of a group of neighbours: “These popular texts
(...) give a focus to an almost separate female culture which they can share
together within the constraints of their positions as wives and mothers’ (Gray,
1987: 49). Ang and Hermes (in this volume) present a detailed analysis of
studies about gender and reception.
The concept of negotiated meaning and the emphasis on reception practices
implies acknowledgement of gender construction as a social process in which
women and men actively engage. In transmission models of communication
women are perceived as victims of dominant culture as expressed in media
messages. Supposedly, they are bombarded by disempowering images all but
alien to their true selves. The interaction between media and female audiences
thus takes on the form of a one-way street. However, people do not only take
media as expressions of dominant culture, they also use media to express
something about themselves, as women or as men. Being a woman (or a man)
implies ‘work’ since modern society offers so many distinct and sometimes
contradicting subject positions (cf. Rakow, 1986). In each social situation an
appropriate feminine identity has to be established and expressed. Women can
use media to pick up and try out different feminine subject positions at the
level of fantasy. But the actual use of media can also be expressive as the
glossy existence of expensive ‘life style’ magazines, read by many not so well
off readers, proves. Another illustration comes from Turkle’s analysis of the
reticence of women to bother about the relatively new social domain of
information technologies. She argues that ‘women use their rejection of
computers (... ) to assert something about themselves as women . . It is
a way to say that it is not appropriate to have a close relationship with a
machine’ Turkle (1988: 50). Although many men reject information technol-
ogies for exactly the same reason, the attitude of women takes on extra
meaning considering the continuous social construction of gender differences.

Feminist Media Politics Reconsidered

The concepts of gender as a social construction and culture as negotiated

meaning release feminist media studies from many of the tensions of trans-
mission models of communication. Paralyzing debates about the autonomous
gendered contribution of individual female media producers become redun-
dant by giving precedence to the institutional context of media production.
The multiple realities of media texts are acknowledged as is the relative
autonomy of audiences to accommodate them to their own situation. Women
 Feminist Perspectives on the Media 47
are taken seriously as active creators of their own daily lives and experiences,
instead of being ‘medicalized’ as helpless victims of dominant culture. By
way of conclusion, in true feminist tradition of undermining certainties rather
than advancing them, I would like to raise some new problems associated with
current theoretical and empirical practices of feminist media studies. Since the
field is fully in motion, I can only call attention to them and consider some
possible angles from which to approach them. Offering definite and author-
itative solutions is beyond my capacity and my conviction that feminism
eee develop in mutual deliberation, not by the prescriptions of academic
‘elites’:
Pll begin with a relatively easy problem of empirical emphasis. In spite of
the theoretical recognition that gender construction involves both women and
men, we have focused on constructions of femininity in media and genres that
are read and appreciated predominantly by women; soap operas, romance
novels and women’s magazines. Alongside this focus we have limited our
attention to implied and actual female audiences of those genres, more often
than not drawn from traditional family situations. The knowledge we have
accumulated by now, concerns a very particular group of media consumed by
a very particular group of women. This is a focus born out of necessity since
these are precisely the genres and audiences that have been neglected by
mainstream research. An academic community preoccupied with such presti-
gious issues as new communication technologies, the future of public broad-
casting or the effects of political communication, does not come down very
easily to the more profane level of media use in the daily lives of ‘ordinary
women’. But consider the implicit message of our research focus: do we really
think gender is only constructed in ‘women’s media’? How about the con-
structions of masculinity found in sports programmes, war movies, Playboy
and Penthouse, to ventilate just a few stereotypes about men. How do men use
those media to construct their gender identity, to express that they are not
women? And to cut across the dichotomy of ‘women’s’ and ‘men’s’ media:
how do men’s ‘feminine’ activities such as reading a women’s magazine or
enjoying a soap opera relate to dominant constructions of masculinity?
With some exceptions men and masculinity have managed to remain
invisible in media research: ‘This has always been its ruse in order to hold
on its power. Masculinity tries to stay invisible by passing itself off as normal
and univeral. (... ) If masculinity can present itself as normal it automati-
cally makes the feminine seem deviant and different’ (Easthope, 1986: 1).
Moreover, the focus on the reception of soaps, romances and women’s
magazines seriously narrows our potential for articulating a comprehensive
cultural critique for we tend to ignore whole areas of social and cultural
practice: at the level of institutional negotiation, of the production of actual
texts there is little research that goes beyond the observation that women work
in a male-dominated field: at the level of textual negotiation there are many
genres we do not know much about yet, e.g. news and current affairs, quality
and popular press, sports, quizzes, etc. New media developments and the
information society’ do attract considerable funding for Research and Devel-
opment, but have only recently gained feminist attention (e.g. Jansen, 1989,
van Zoonen, 1990). I have called the narrow focus of current feminist media
studies a relatively easy problem, since its solution involves in theory a ‘mere’
48 Liesbet van Zoonen

incorporation of new fields of attention (transforming mainstream studies

seems less likely). In practice, however, given the minimally triple burden
of feminist academics (with personal, feminist and academic responsibilities)
this might not be an easy task at all. :
There is a more fundamental problem to culturalist feminist media studies.
As the importance of specific contextual and textual features for the construc-
tion of meaning suggests, it seems unlikely that from this field a general
theory of gender and media that goes beyond abstract premises will emerge.
For our understanding of contemporary cultural processes, fragmented and
unpredictable as they are, I suggest this a pro rather than a contra. But the
particularist shift in theory and research does raise some disturbing questions
about the political nature of feminist media studies, precisely the feature
which I suggest determines the exceptional nature of the feminist academic
project. If meaning is so dependent on context, can we still pass valid feminist
judgements about the political tendencies and implications of texts? For we
don’t know how audiences will use and interpret texts. A feminist judgement
of obvious textual oppression does not need to be shared by other (female)
audience groups. If one interpretation is not by definition better or more valid
than another, what legitimation do we have to discuss the politics of repre-
sentation, to try to intervene in dominant culture?
The above problem has been recognized and responded to in several ways:
Ang (1985: 135) proposes to consider the fantasies and pleasures involved in
watching Dallas as independent and relatively isolated dimensions of sub-
jectivity, making daily life enjoyable in expectation of feminist utopias:
‘Fiction and fantasy, then function by making life at present pleasurable, or
at least liveable, but this does not by any means exclude a radical political
activity or consciousness’ (Ang, 1985: 136) — a radical activity that applies to
the politics of representation in a very limited sense. Ang’s argument implies
that as feminists we are allowed to produce new fantasies and fictions
ourselves, but we should not interfere with the pleasures of the audience,
since ‘no fixed standards exist for gauging the “progressiveness” of a fantasy’
(ibid). Brown (1990) does not follow this reticence to evaluate soap operas
and the like. She appreciates ‘soap operas, like women’s talk or gossip and
women’s ballads as part of women’s culture that exists alongside dominant
culture and that insofar as the women who use these cultural forms are
conscious of the form’s otherness, they are practising feminine discourse’.
According to Brown ‘feminine discourse’ implies acknowledgement of
women’s subordination often expressed in parodic form by making fun of
dominant culture. Feminine discourse thus implies an act of resistance, albeit
with cultural tools provided by the dominant order. Brown’s appropriation of
women’s pleasure is useful for it implies a conception of politics that
incorporates power relations in the private domestic sphere of media con-
sumption. For example, women’s televisual pleasures tend to be ridiculed by
other (male) family members and often have to yield to sports and other male
favourites. Brown’s notion that research can contribute to the legitimation of
women’s fantasies can thus mean quite a relief in the here and now of daily
life. However, Brown’s appraisal of feminine discourse borders on simple
populism, for how women’s ‘nomination, valuation and regulation’ of their
own pleasure relate to the dominant social order remains undiscussed.
 Feminist Perspectives on the Media 49
The problems of cultural relativism and populism are not privileges of
feminist media Studies, but haunt each contemporary attempt to formulate a
progressive cultural critique. Schudson (1987: 66) discusses the new valida-
tion of popular culture in academic research and wonders how to respond to it:
‘I end up caught between a belief that the university should be a moral
educator, holding up for emulation some values and texts (and not others),
and a reluctant admission that defining the basis of moral education is an
unfinished often unrecognized task.’ Schudson’s doubts can be translated
almost literally to the dilemmas of a contemporary feminist media critique:
where can a feminist media critique derive legitimacy from and how do our
academic efforts contribute to feminism’s larger political project? If current
research has taught us anything, it is that general judgements and strategies
are not likely to gain much support or to be successful. The strategical
implications of our research are much less self-evident as they were in the
case of liberal, radical and socialist feminism. However, I will attempt to
conclude with some possibly relevant general considerations and questions.
I suggest a feminist media critique should start from the reception of
specific genres in specific social context. To give an example: genre codes
and conventions of news produce a relatively closed structure of meanings
when compared to soap operas for instance. Considering that news claims an
unambiguous relation with reality — a claim many people think justified — we
need quite a different set of moral considerations from which to develop
evaluations and strategies when analyzing news, which may not be applic-
able in the case of soap operas. Acknowledging that news too is a social
construction, would it still be very inappropriate to expect a decent and ethical
representation, of, for example, feminist issues and the women’s movement?
Another issue that might be explored is a consequence of the importance
given to audience-text relations. Does it not seem logical, now that we are
assuming and finding actively interpreting audiences, to develop strategies
aimed at the ‘semiotic empowerment’ of female media recipients? Schudson
(1987) makes a similar point when he argues that a task for the universities
should be to educate readers in reading critically and playfully. I do not mean
anything like making female audiences aware of the ‘true’ sexist, patriarchal
of capitalist meanings of a text. But rather I refer to the pleasures of
discovering multiple and sometimes contending constructions in atext, a
pleasure that I would gather is not so much different for academics and
‘ordinary women’.® Finally, we should not define our sense of ‘a larger
feminist political project’ too narrowly. Our own academic work is still
inevitably political, for unfortunately the relation between gender and culture
is, as yet, far from being a legitimate and integrated academic concern, with
the exception of a few enlightened places.

Notes

1 ‘Construction’ is not a label that Friedan would have used, but the word
summarizes her project in the vocabulary of current feminist theory.
50 Liesbet van Zoonen

2 The reader with a more specific interest in connecting authors and studies to
perspectives is referred to Steeves (1987). Ps eit
3 My discussion of the policies and problems of feminist media is based on
knowledge of the Dutch situation but I would be surprised if the gist of this analysis
does not apply to other western countries as well.
4 See note 3.
5 Iam indebted to Joke Hermes for this passage.
6 At least from my experience in teaching extramural courses about advertise-
ments and soap operas.

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3
Postmodernism and Television
John Fiske

Those who give us brief working definitions of postmodernism (e.g. Hebdige,

1988; Gitlin, 1989) agree on the fuzziness of the term and the difficulty of
finding any consensus among its users. In this essay I make no attempt to
emulate them, partly because they have done it better than I could, and partly
because applying postmodernism to television requires me to be selective, not
comprehensive, in my use of its constitutive elements. Television and popular
culture have tended to be marginal in most postmodern theory, which has
been more concerned to articulate its break with modernism in the ‘highbrow’
arts, particularly architecture, painting and literature. More recently Deleuze
has written extensively on cinema, but of the primary postmodern theorists,
only Baudrillard (1983a; 1983b; 1987) has addressed the mass media and
popular culture directly, so it is his brand of postmodernism that I shall discuss
in this essay. Of course, there have been a number of more general applica-
tions of postmodern theory to television (e.g. Connor, 1989; Grossberg, 1987,
1988; Kaplan, 1987; Wollen, 1986; Wyner, 1986) but on the whole television
as a cultural medium has not figured centrally in the debates around post-
modernism. There are, I believe, good reasons for this. For while contempor-
ary television exhibits many postmodern stylistic features, and postmodern
theory can offer us many provocative insights into the textuality of television,
there are important schools of television scholarship that provide strong
counterarguments. In this chapter, then, I wish to look at those features of
postmodernism which offer most potential for the study of television and then
to discuss their limitations.
One of the characteristics of ‘modernism’ (i.e. that which preceded the
postmodern) was its belief that understanding social experience was both
possible and the proper enterprise of art. Often the aim of this understanding
was to produce a ‘grand narrative’, a coherent theory capable of explaining
the multifarious and apparently unrelated facets of experience (e.g. marxism,
structuralism or psychoanalysis). Other modernist movements, such as the
avant-garde, tried to produce this understanding via the shock value of
powerful and contradictory images. In the study of television as discourse,
54 John Fiske

the modernist ‘grand narratives’ centred around the issues of mimesis, of

representation, of ideology and of subjectivity. Let me summarize these
briefly before moving on to postmodernism. The core argument in theories
of representation is that, despite appearances, television does not represent
(re-present) a piece of reality, but rather produces or constructs it. Reality
does not exist in the objectivity of empiricism, but is a product of discourse.
The television camera and microphone do not record reality, but encode it: the
encoding produces a sense of reality that is ideological. What is re-presented,
then, is not reality but ideology, and the effectivity of this ideology is
enhanced by the iconicity of television by which the medium purports to
situate its truth claim in the objectivity of the real, and thus to disguise the fact
that any ‘truth’ that it produces is that of ideology, not reality. Television,
therefore, works in the semiotic domain in the same way as the industrial
system does in the economic. The industrial system does not merely produce
and reproduce commodities: what it finally and inevitably reproduces is
capitalism itself. So, television, in its production of televisual reality, repro-
duces not objective reality, but capitalism, even if ideologically rather than
materially. The mimetic approach rests on the assumption that an image is, or
at least ought to be, a reflection of its referent. It is based upon a transparency
metaphor that constructs the camera lens as a window through which to view
the world. However, because this magic window can record and circulate
widely the image of what we see through it, it reverses the true, or logically
correct, relationship between image and referent: it makes the image more
important than the referent. The result of this is the development of a whole
industry of ‘image manipulation’ that focuses on the reproduction and
circulation of the image rather than any truth value it might have. Indeed,
this notional truth value is often directly subverted by the practice of staging
reality for its image-effect. Such ‘untruthful’ practices make it harder, the
argument runs, for people in an image-culture to distinguish between image
and referent.
These two theoretical approaches have little in common except a belief that
there is a ‘reality’, however problematic, that differs essentially from its
photographic image. In the theory of representation, however, this ‘reality’
is defined in terms of historical materialism, whereas the mimetic approach
defines it in terms of positivism. Theories of representation offer an ideolo-
gical critique of television’s construction of reality: what it misrepresents or
mystifies is its own ideological practice and therefore the relationship of the
ideological to the real: its critical point of comparison, therefore, is with other,
competing, more politically acceptable, senses of reality. For mimetic the-
ories, however, the critique focuses on photography’s deviation from or
replacement of an absolute truth, and its critical comparisons are with truer,
more accurate images of the real. Representational theories locate the episte-
mological problems of the television in its ideologically determined discur-
sivity, mimetic theories locate them in its relationship to an empiricist reality.
However, in one way or another, both argue that the camera is an agent of
misrepresentation. They both oppose the common sense apothegm that the
camera cannot lie by arguing, on the contrary, that the camera does nothing
but lie. Subjectivity theory extends theories of representation beyond the
public’ world of ideology and its sense of reality to the more private world
 Postmodernism and Television 55

of consciousness. Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of the subconsciousness

intersect neatly with Marx’s theory of ideology as false consciousness.
Subjectivity theories argue that ideology works to produce what we may
call a ‘false subconsciousness’. Subjectivity is the inscription of the social-
ideological upon the individual; it is where ideology becomes practised or
lived. Subjectivity determines the position from which we make sense of
ourselves, of our social relations and of our social experience. The dominant
ideology works to reproduce itself in our subjectivities, so, regardless of our
material social conditions, all of us who are subjects of capitalism have, to a
greater or lesser degree, subjectivities inscribed with white, patriarchal
bourgeois ideologies. More recent theories of subjectivity take better account
of the contradictions both within the dominant ideologies and between
dominant ideologies and the material conditions of the people, by splintering
the relatively coherent homogeneity of earlier accounts into theories of split
and multiple subjectivity. But all of them focus on the way that dominant
ideologies are reproduced in the subconsciousness of social subjects. All of
them seek some form of ‘grand narrative’ to explain how ideology does not
just re-present itself in its pictures of reality, but reproduces itself in the
subjectivities upon and within which those representations work. Ideological
reproduction and representation are part and parcel of the same process.
Baudrillard, however, sidesteps the misrepresentation/reproduction pro-
blem by defining it as a non-issue. In his postmodernist theory images and
reality (whether a reality of social relations or of an empiricist universe) do
not have different ontological statuses: there is no difference between image
and reality. The consequence of this is that we now live in an age which
Baudrillard (1983b) characterizes as one of the simulacrum. The simulacrum
is for him an ‘imploded’ concept, by which he means one whose meaning
derives, not from a sense of difference, but from the collapse or implosion into
each other of the terms which, in the preceding age of representation, used to
constitute the difference necessary for the production of meaning. The
concept ‘image’ is not an implosive one, for its sense depends upon its
difference from ‘referent’: similarly, the concept of ‘reproduction’ requires
that of the ‘original’. The simulacrum, however, is both the reproduction and
the original, both the image and the referent imploded into a single concept.
In this account there can be no original reality whose image is reproduced
on millions of screens. Margaret Thatcher smiling into the TV camera and
making an off-the-cuff remark for the microphone as she walks between the
helicopter and the waiting car is not a piece of reality whose image is
transmitted to our television screen. She is her own image. Her hairstyle
does not pre-exist its TV image and seeing it ‘live’ is no more authentic an
experience than seeing it on the screen. The smile, the hairstyle and the
comment would not be there if the TV cameras were not, if the viewers
were not. The smile, the hairstyle and the comment exist simultaneously
and similarly on the TV screen and on the helipad, there is no difference of
ontological status between them, nor is there any way in which one could be
said to precede or reproduce the other. Each is as real or as unreal as the other.
So when the minority who keep electing Thatcher vote they are not voting for
a real woman whose images had been reproduced around the nation ad
nauseam, nor, on the other hand, are they voting for an image that can be
56 John Fiske

tested for accuracy by its relation to a real person: Margaret Thatcher, whether
experienced on the TV screen, the convention platform or the helipad, is a
simulacrum, and she can be nothing else. This Thatcher simulacrum is not
‘unreal’ so she can and does perform real political acts. The simulacrum
denies not reality, but the difference between the image and the real. Thatch-
er’s political power is the same as her image power, her power to do is the
same as her power to seem. What the simulacrum produces is the ‘hyperreal :
a concept into which are imploded the previously distinct concepts of image,
reality, spectacle, sensation, meaning. The hyperreal has no origin in either
reality or its images, but it constitutes the postmodern condition by describing
both the real within which we live and our sense or experience of it as a single
concept.
By using such elusive and deliberately ill-defined terms, Baudrillard is
attempting to account for the key defining condition of our era: our society
is image-saturated. The saturation is such as to produce a categorical differ-
ence,-rather than one of degree, between our age and previous ones. In one
hour’s television viewing, one of us is likely to experience more images than a
member of a non-industrial society would in a lifetime. The quantitative
difference is so great as to become categorical: we do not just experience
more images, but we live with a completely different relationship between the
image and other orders of experience. In fact, we live in a postmodern period
when there is no difference between the image and other orders of experience.
New York is not a real city, it is hyperreal. As we approach it for the first or
the millionth time, there is no original authentic reality for us to experience,
New York is its images on TV and cinema screens, on calendars and posters,
on T-shirts and coffee mugs, through the windows of the bus about to descend
into the Lincoln tunnel or from the deck of the Staten Island Ferry. Walking
down Broadway is not a different order of experience from enjoying its
cinematic representation. In postmodernism the image has broken free from
the constraints of both mimesis and representation: it cannot be controlled by
either reality or ideology. A simulation is the implosion into a single concept
of image-reality-ideology that prevents the latter two terms of the triad from
acting as final explanations or guarantors of the first. If a simulation is real in
itself and not dependent upon its relationship to reality or ideology it becomes
available for any use at any time in any context.
The loss of both ‘reality’ and ‘ideology’ as grounding bases for images is
another facet of the loss of the ‘grand narrative’. A key consequence of this
loss is the fragmentation of experience and its images. Postmodern culture is a
fragmented culture, the fragments come together for the occasion and are not
organized into stable coherent groupings by an external principle. Television
is particularly suited to the culture of the fragment, for its continuous ‘flow’
(Williams, 1974; Altman, 1986) consists of relatively discreet ‘segments’
(Ellis, 1982; Fiske, 1987) following one another in a sequence dictated by
an unstable mix of narrative or textual requirements, economic requirements,
and the requirements of varied popular tastes. Watching fifteen minutes of a
soap opera, for example, will involve short scenes from up to five different
narrative strands, commercials for half a dozen different products, promos for
other TV shows and possibly current news headlines. Fragmentation over-
powers any attempts to provide coherence within the sequence. Such frag-
 Postmodernism and Television 57

mentation can be enhanced, of course, by using the remote control to ‘graze’

other channels during the ad breaks, or during the narrative lines in which the
viewer is less interested.
Even television news, which attempts to tell the ‘truth’ (a grand narrative)
about a reality that it still insists is different from and precedes its representa-
tion of it, shows postmodern characteristics. A story on a political kidnapping
in the Middle East, for example, may well contain images that vary widely in
their relationship to what ‘really’ happened: the studio anchor, the reporter on
the spot after the event, pictures of the street after the event, file footage an
editor has deemed appropriate, family snapshots or graduation photographs of
the victims, commentary by an ‘expert’, artist’s impressions of the event or of
the kidnappers, computer graphics — all of these confuse the possible relation-
- ships between an event and its representation, and their conventionality
suggests that they are not representing a unique event so much as reproducing
familiar images. The images of Middle-East unrest are not separable from that
unrest, not least because the kidnapping occurred only because of, and for, the
media coverage. The kidnapping was a simulacrum in that it was at one with
its representation, and thus there could be no contradictions between the
different modes of its representation (file footage, live footage, artist’s
reconstruction etc.) for, in the absence of any ontological difference between
image and referent, there can be no ‘true’ mode of representation against
which to measure others. Any image is as ‘true’ as any other, and thus there
are no contradictory differences between them.
These postmodern images, which not only escape referentiality and
ideology, also escape the textual discipline exerted by organizing concepts
such as genre, medium or period. They can be and are culled from any genre,
any medium, any period. The postmodern sensibility does not experience this
bricolage of apparently unrelated images as in any way cacophonous or
contradictory, for unrelatedness is a function solely of the system of cate-
gories that we use: dispensing with organizing concepts such as genre, period
or medium destroys the possibility of producing contradictions. In this,
postmodernism differs significantly from avant-gardist modernism, despite
the apparent similarity of their bricolage of images. For postmodernism the
crucial part of the play of images is the sensuality of their surfaces. Post-
modernism refuses a ‘deep’ meaning that underlines the surface; like post-
structuralism it refuses the difference between the signifier and the signified
and thus avoids the debate of which is the more significant. The object of
‘depth analysis’ (ideological, structuralist or psychoanalytic) is the determin-
ing structures that lie beneath our experience of both society and culture, and
that organize our social consciousness: in refusing depth, postmodernism is
denying the power or even the existence of these organizing structures.
One outcome of this denial is the stylistic device of pastiche. Pastiche is the
re-imaging of the signifier: it may be thought of as parody without the parodic
dimension. A scene from Miami Vice may be a pastiche of a music video: it
may reproduce its style, not in order to comment on it or mock it (as a parody
would), but simply to look like it. Parody depends on a difference between the
original and its parodic reproduction: pastiche denies such difference. In
pastiche images or styles from one period, genre or medium can be repro-
duced in another without that change of category having any significance (as
58 John Fiske

it does in both parody and avant-garde modernism, for instance). Indeed, in

postmodernism there can be no categorical transgression because there are no
categorical boundaries to transgress. The shift is not one of significance but of
spectacle. Equally, because simulacra do not have origins, there is no way in
which a pastiche can change or differ from an original and cannot then be said
to parody, subvert or criticize it. The signifying emptiness of pastiche is
another sign of postmodernism’s rejection of organizing structures. Quite
consistent with this is its refusal of genre, for ‘genre’ is a way of organizing
texts into a structure of similarity and difference. Because the textual is never
totally autonomous from the social, the denial of generic structure is not just a
textual refusal, it functions in the social as well. Genres are not only ways of
organizing textual products, they are also ways of organizing their social
circulation.
Via taste, whose function is to match the cultural product to the social
position of its consumer, genres organize social identities in structures of
similarity and difference. Soap opera, as a genre, not only organizes and
controls the images that constitute it and differentiate it from other genres,
but also organizes and controls the social meanings of femininity and domes-
ticity that distinguish its fans. Extensions of the genre, such as the inclusion of
popular singers and music performances, extend and change the social
allegiances of its viewers. The implosion of generic difference implies an
implosion of social difference.
The complex societies of late capitalism require a wide social diversity but
attempt to control and discipline this diversity in their own interests. The
production and definition of social difference from above is a means of social
discipline. This elaborated system of distinction and difference in the social
domain is reproduced in and by an elaborated system of material goods in the
economic domain and of cultural goods in the cultural domain. So the
indiscipline of postmodernism’s refusal to accept generic categories implies
a refusal of discipline not only in images, but also in social and economic
conditions. This refusal of the disciplinary order has, in theory at least, a
liberatory potential. But the constraints imposed by the material conditions of
social life are not always as easily evaded as those of the postmodern image.
The more that a social group is materially and politically deprived in a
society, the greater the constraint. The social and cultural fluidity proposed
by postmodernism can most easily be achieved by those with relatively high
economic and cultural capital. The refusal of generic categories may be,
indeed is, a refusal of order and the resultant fragmentation of the image
flow is a refusal of structure: order and structure are, we must remember, the
basis not only of meaning systems, but also of social systems. In theory, those
who have most to gain from such a refusal of order are those who are most
oppressed by the existing one. But this emancipatory potential is much more
a achieved by those who are less economically and culturally disadvan-
taged.
Baudrillard (1983a) attempts to explain this problem by redefining the
masses and their relationship to the social order. In earlier theories of mass
culture, the masses were seen as alienated individuals whose historically
real’ social relations of class had been broken by contemporary capitalism.
The masses thus had no stable place in the social order from which to base any
 Postmodernism and Television 59
resistance, and were thus vulnerable to ideological imposition. For Baudril-
lard, however, the alienation of the masses does not result in their vulner-
ability and passivity, instead it results in their freedom to refuse the social
order. In particular they can consume images without consuming their mean-
ings, whether referential or ideological. He argues that this refusal of meaning
is the only resistance possible for the masses. It is an articulation of difference
between the masses and the social order, but unlike the difference produced
by alienation, this difference is resistant because it is a bottom-up product.
The problem with this account is that it admits of no differences within the
masses, only of difference between them and the social order. This is
symptomatic of the social origin of postmodernism as a style and a theory:
its account of culture is most convincing for those in dominant social
formations. It is not a critical theory, nor a materialist one. Postmodernism
is both an aesthetic style and a theoretical account of its own aesthetic
practices. Representational and mimetic theories provided modes of analysis
of cultural practices that lay outside their epistemological framework. By
bringing to bear upon cultural practices a level of analysis that those
practices sought to repress they set up critical, political and contestatory
relationships between the critique and its object of criticism. Postmodernism
works within an epistemology whose modes of practice and modes of analysis
and theorizing enter a mutually endorsing relationship with each other. Its
implosive refusal of difference — whether between image and reality or
between image and meaning — constructs its own imploded universe that
denies the validity of any order of knowledge or being outside it from which
a critique can be mounted. It is, ultimately, a self-protective -ism.
To critique anything we need to stand outside it, to bring to bear upon it an
analytical lens from a different epistemology, and I wish to critique post-
modernism from the perspective of social materialism. For, even in late
market capitalism, which has brought the end of neither history nor social-
ism, there are still materialist ways of understanding both social experience
and the role of meanings of that experience that have a validity and explana-
tory power that postmodernism denies them. From a materialist point of view,
then, postmodernism, particularly in its Baudrillardian inflection, has ‘suspi-
ciously symptomatic similarities with old-fashioned aestheticism. This aesthe-
ticism sought to distance art from life: it sought to establish an aesthetic
distance between the art object and the mundanity of everyday life that
worked to emphasize the transcendent qualities of art and to detach it from
its immediate social and historical context. It also established a critical
distance between the artwork and its reader/spectator that delegitimated
socially and historically situated reading practices in favour of a transcendent
appreciation or aesthetic sensibility. Bourdieu (1984) argues that this distance
from everyday life in the domain of aesthetics is the equivalent of a freedom
from immediate necessity in that of economics. Making art into a self-
sufficient universe that is detached from the everyday is a practice of the
elite who can afford to ignore the constraints of material necessity and who
thus construct an aesthetic that not only refuses to assign any value to material
conditions but actually validates only those art forms that deny, transcend and
contradict them. Its antimaterialism is sustainable only from a position of
privilege. So, too, Baudrillard’s refusal to assign any significance to material
60 John Fiske

conditions seems sustainable only from a position where those conditions are
not ones of continuous constraint and oppression.
The various formations of the socially subordinate, which comprise the
majority of our society, do construct and circulate their own popular cultures
— they are far from being the cultureless, vulnerable mass that theoretical
positions as diverse as those of elite humanism, political economy and
postmodernism have constructed them; instead, there are active, productive,
intensely experience cultures which are as crucial to the daily life of the
people as are the material conditions which delimit that life. Popular culture 1s
less a culture of art-objects and images, and more a set of cultural practices by
which art is imbricated into the routines and conditions of everyday life. This
intersection between the images produced and circulated by the media
industries and everyday life is absent from representational, mimetic and
postmodern theories of the image. All of these focus their theoretical lens
upon macro-structural relationships whether between the image and ideology,
the image and reality, or the image and other images. None of them look at the
concrete, contextualized practices at the intersection between socially pro-
duced images and socially positioned people.
Leal (1990), for instance, studies an entourage of cultural objects around
the TV set in the working class suburban home of newly urbanized peasants in
Brazil. One set of objects is that of family photographs placed on the TV set:
there are large portraits of absent family members — either dead or still living
in the country: stuck into their frames are small ID photos of family members
who have made the transition to urban life. The ID photo is an image not just
of the family member but of his or her urban modernity; the composite image
of the ID and the portrait photograph is an image of social mobility, of the
transition between the rural past and the urban future. The images on the
television screen in this context are always, whatever else they may be,
images of the modern, the urban, the future. A soap opera in these conditions
of reception and reproductions is, as Leal (1988) shows, a quite different
cultural product from the same soap opera received and reproduced in middle-
class Brazilian homes.
Cho and Cho (1990), in their study of Korean women in the US watching
Korean soaps on video tape, show how the social conditions of the women and
the meanings and pleasures produced from the soap opera intertwine inex-
tricably. One particularly controversial story line in the soap opera followed a
wife’s reaction to her husband’s affair, and her decision to divorce him. Cho
and Cho show both how subversive it is to represent this decision sympathe-
tically and how many women watching used the narrative in their daily
struggles to increase the space of their own control within the repressive
patriarchy of a Korean marriage. They also show how the women’s experi-
ence of US television with its more active and more empowered women was a
factor in their production of meaning from the Korean soap and its transfor-
mation into their behaviour within the specific conditions of their own
marriages. For many US viewers, the Cosby Show, for example, may be a
reactionary representation of patriarchal bourgeois family ideology; but, when
the show is received in the social condition of Korean women, its relatively
greater gender equality and its humorous revelation of masculine fallibility
and cunning offered progressive, if not actually radical, meanings. The
 Postmodernism and Television 61

Korean soap opera’s story of the wife divorcing because of her husband’s
infidelity contained an image of the mistress driving off in the car given her by
the errant husband. To an American woman this might not seem a particularly
intense or significant image. To many Korean women, however, the image of
a woman driving a car is, according to Cho and Cho, a radical image of
liberation: to Korean women in the US, the radical, liberatory dimension of
the image remains, but is inflected with a sense of its achievability; this
utopian fragment, for these women, has the status not of an impossible dream
but an almost immediately achievable one, and in the US their husband’s
refusal or reluctance to let them drive lost whatever credibility it may have
had in Korea.
Williams (1988), too, in her study of mainly black working-class people in
Washington found their culture exhibited a contradictory mix of creativity and
constraint. Their poverty oppressed them materially — their apartments were
small, their mobility limited so that they rarely went beyond their immediate
neighbourhood. One strategy of coping with these material constraints was to
pack into them a density of cultural experience, to produce a densely woven
texture. So small apartments were filled with memorabilia and souvenirs that
carried unique personal memories and meanings, a walk down the street to the
shops was packed with meaningful encounters, gossip, and familiar places and
their intense micro-histories of the events and people associated with them.
Television, too, was part of this texture. It tended to be left on continuously,
its sounds and images woven into the packed apartment and into the routines,
experiences and conversations that filled the constraints of everyday life till
' they almost burst. Soap operas, such as Dallas, were particularly popular
because their densely woven texture of emotions, experiences and familiar
characters was easily assimilated into the texture of everyday life. The more
affluent incomers into the neighbourhoods, however, consumed more space —
their houses were larger, they moved freely through the city and beyond — and
in their consumption of space were able to experience the cultural variety that
the poor packed into the minimal spaces of their lives. The affluent may
indeed, have had a more mobile, postmodern experience of Washington;
the poor had a materially constrained and contextually experienced one.
The constraints were real, and the images that entered into them were real
ways of living within these constraints. Neither postmodernism’s referent-free
images, nor poststructuralism’s infinite deferral of meaning can be found in
the use of images in the lives of the subordinated. Indeed, the socially
oppressed seek only those images which can be relevantly grounded into
the material conditions of their social existence. It is in the conditions of
reception that a materialist theory of images must be sought.
Homeless Native Americans in a shelter in Madison derive great pleasure
from watching old Westerns on television; their pleasure peaks at the moment
of the Indian’s triumph, when they have taken the homestead or the wagon
train; so at that moment they switch off the set, before the inevitable white
restoration and retribution. Australian Aboriginals read Rambo as a member
of the Third World in conflict with the white officer class (Fiske, 1989a), and
African Americans at the turn of the century read Buffalo Bill’s touring Wild
West Show not as a story of white progress and civilization, but as one of
Indian genocide that paralleled their own history (Lipsitz, 1989).
62 John Fiske

Such freeing-up of meanings from those preferred by their conditions of

production, or from their work within and for the dominant ideology may, on
the face of it, appear to be an example of postmodernism’s refusal of
ideology, its refusal of the historical. Such instances do provide evidence to
support Baudrillard’s claim that the resistance of the masses lies in their
ability to consume images without their meanings, for the meaning-bearing
function of images is their power-bearing function. But the rejection of the
top-down meaning is not the whole story, for the gap created is then filled
with a bottom-up meaning that is relevant to the material social conditions of
those who produce it. Images are not meaningless surfaces, they are rather
resource banks from which meanings can be made and remade. As an account
of popular culture, Baudrillard’s theory of the refusal of meaning simply stops
too soon.
Similarly, postmodernism’s emphasis on the sensual pleasure of the sig-
nifier explains much of the popular pleasure in spectacle, but, it too, stops too
soon. A popular spectacle cannot be understood simply in terms of the
sensations of the surface. A popular spectacle is incomplete unless and until
people participate in it. The spectacle in the western of Native Americans
destroying the white homestead or wagon train not only refuses the white
meanings of the savage that has to be civilized, but can be and is enjoyed
intensely by certain formations of the subordinate as a spectacle of their own
vitality, opposition and empowerment. This spectacle works partly on the
plane of the affective, it stimulates pleasurable feelings of empowerment and
vitality whose significance lies in their intensity or texture, but it can also
stimulate people to produce context-specific meanings that are transposable
directly into their everyday lives. Many of the Korean women soap opera fans
studied by Cho and Cho (1990) made meanings that transferred directly to
their own marriages. These transformations were sometimes behavioural,
such as in the case of the woman who came to realize that she had as much
right to the family money as her husband, and so went out and spent as much
on herself as he did on fishing gear. On other occasions they took verbal form,
as in the case of the woman who tried to persuade her husband that, in order to
prevent their marriage suffering the same end as the one on the soap opera, he
would have to allow her to develop a career of her own when they returned to
Korea.
Such context-specific meanings are the result of popular productivity: they
are produced by the people from the images available to them, they are
transformed into the people’s words and behaviour, and in their new form
are textured into the conditions of their everyday lives. We should not think of
these meanings as affecting everyday life, as if they entered a casual relation-
ship with it; rather they are part of everyday life. Their production and
circulation is a necessary popular practice of the same order as the tactics
of creating popular spaces within the place of the dominant order, whether
these places be the crowded apartment block, the city street or even the most
tightly regulated of all, the workplace. Postmodernism is a movement which,
as Jameson (1984) has argued, is a product of late capitalism. But, within late
capitalism, it has been centred on the cultural elite — members of the ‘creative’
professions, including academics. There are few indications that people living
 Postmodernism and Television 63

under conditions of deprivation or subordination, who comprise the majority,

live a postmodern life style with a postmodern consciousness.
We must remember, too, that as such movements are not universal in the
society that has produced them, neither are they totally determined by their
historical conditions. It is not an essential characteristic of signs and sign
systems that they convey, defer or refuse meaning: refusing to conform to
generic or other forms of organization is not an action of late capitalist sign
systems in themselves. The way sign systems are put to work in a particular
socio-historical position is the result of how they are used by positioned social
agents. The term ‘social agents’ grants to people in capitalist societies a
degree of agency, by which I mean their ability to recognize their own social
interests in however incomplete or unarticulated a form, and the power to act
to promote those interests within social determinations which circumscribe
their sphere of agency but which can also be affected and modified by that
agency. Social agency is not a product of individualism, but a product and
activity of social formations. The agency of the cultural elites may well
promote its interests by celebrating the freedom of the sign from any
constraint (of meaning, ideology, discipline) and in so doing celebrate their
own individual creativity and freedom, whether in the production, use, re-use
or interpretation of postmodern texts. Such a celebration of freedom expressed
as individual creativity is a highly political depoliticization of culture, for it
refuses to acknowledge the most fundamental of all constraints that have to be
transcended for its freedoms to be achieved — the constraints of economic
necessity and of socio-political subordination. It also disguises the social
distinction between those who are able to evade these constraints and those
who are not. For those whose material conditions of life remind them every-
day of the omnipresence of these constraints, postmodernism is not an option.
Postmodern theory can, however, explain some elements in the culture of
subordinated social formations. Its account of how signs are not tied to their
conditions of production nor to their dominant conventions of use, its
separation of the signifier from a systematically determined relationship
with the signified and its consequent loosening of the links between ideology
and representation are all helpful in explaining how it is that subordinated
people can exercise their social agency in the cultural sphere by making their
contextually relevant meanings out of the signs produced and distributed by
the dominant Other.
There may also be an equivalent in the overtly political sphere. The belief
of many activists that politics is best fought today on multiple, local, even
fragmented sites and issues, rather than on a more singular national agenda
can be seen as an example of a postmodern shift of emphasis from the grand
narrative to the fragment. Postmodern radical politics may well be a frag-
mented politics, but, provided that this fragmentation is not random but
accommodates the specificities of the material social conditions that localize
each case, it can be an effective politics. The failure of the concept of a final
‘reality’ or ‘truth’ to hold up in postmodern conditions does not require us to
dispense with any notion of reality at all, but rather to reformulate the concept
into one of multiple, differently experienced realities within which people live
their everyday lives. These realities are ultimately structured by late capital-
ism, but emphasizing their fragmentation over their structuration leads us to
64 John Fiske

seek the greatest significance in the differences between their specificities, in

their discontinuities with the structure, and in their localization. Denying
totally the existence of a ground narrative or overdetermining structure, as
more extreme postmodernism does, can only entrench the status quo. But
shifting one’s theoretical and political focus away from the grand structure to
the multiple fragmented experiences in which it is made material offers a
potentially more progressive inflection of postmodernism because it takes
better account of the material conditions of the everyday lives of the sub-
ordinated.
Where Baudrillard’s postmodernism fails, therefore, is in two key areas. It
fails to recognize that the socially subordinate, at least, do make meanings, do
put them into social circulation and do use them as resources in their daily
lives. It fails to recognize, too, that the dominant sign systems, which are used
in the production of their bottom-up meanings, are not totally evacuated of
their meanings of domination: far from it. Bottom-up meanings are produced
in a structural relationship to top-down ones. The agency of the subordinate,
social or cultural, is always exerted within a system that works to confine,
contain or repress it. The evacuation of meaning, which characterizes much
postmodern and poststructuralist theory, can be seen, then, as a strategy of the
cultural elite to avoid recognizing its own implication in the structures of
domination which are inherent in all capitalist societies, however late.
Postmodernism must be judged by the uses to which it is put. I do not believe
that we can, or should, reject it altogether, for it does offer unique and
valuable insights into contemporary culture. I do believe, however, that we
should reject any use made of it which divorces those insights from politicized
accounts of the ways in which everyday life is lived in late, or developing,
capitalist societies. The postmodern needs grounding in social materialism.

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 Postmodernism and Television 65

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, 1988: ‘It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular’ in L. Grossberg et
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HEBDIGE, D., 1988: Hiding in the Light, London and New York: Comedia/Routledge.
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Postmodernism: ICA Documents 5, London: ICA.
4
Mass Media in the Public
Interest:
Towards a Framework of Norms for Media
Performance
Denis McQuail

Abandoning Theories of the Press

The purpose of this chapter is to move the discussion of media (or press)
theory a stage or two beyond the stagnation which has set in since the mid-
century, when the idea of a social theory of or for the press was given
extensive attention, especially in the work of Sebert and colleagues (1956),
in the wake of the American Commission on the Freedom of the Press
(Hutchins, 1947). The work of Siebert was in part advocacy of a liberal
model of a reformed free press operating ‘responsibly’ in a modern democ-
racy, but it was also a codification of stages of history of the press (from the
‘authoritation’ to the ‘libertarian’) and also a marking of difference between
western freedom models (responsible or not) and the soviet communist model,
in which the media were assigned clear functions in society, as propagator,
educator, mobilizer.
The ‘Four Theories of the Press’ have often been invoked as a framework.
The present author added two more — ‘development’ theory and ‘democratic-
participant’ — to take account of other realities and other models (McQuail,
1983). Merrill (1974) argued that there were really only two fundamental
kinds of theory of state-press relations, authoritarian or libertarian, a view
which might have found some support both from conservative critics of
intervention in the freedom of the media and from some critical theorists
who would place all established media, state or commercial, in the ‘author-
itarian’ category. Hachten (1981) added the concepts of ‘revolutionary’,
‘developmental’ and ‘Western’ to two of the original four (communist and
authoritarian). Altschull (1984) said there were basically three models —
‘market’, ‘marxist’ and ‘advancing’ — corresponding to the division into
three ‘worlds’ — First, Second and Third. In his view, each kind of system,
in different ways, ensured that media were responsive to their paymasters and
each had somewhat different versions of what might constitute freedom and
responsibility.
More recently, Picard (1985) made a determined effort to distinguish,
 Mass Media in the Public Interest 67

within the category of ‘Western’ models, a distinctive ‘social democratic’

version of press theory, which, in contrast to ‘social responsibility’ and
‘libertarian’ (free market) theory, provides legitimation for public interven-
tion, or even for collective ownership to ensure true independence from vested
interests, access and diversity of opinion. Whatever else, it is clear that there
are always likely to be alternative, inconsistent and changing conceptions of
the norms appropriate to the relations between media and their own society.
The attempt to formulate consistent ‘theories’ of the press is bound to break
down, for reasons other than the underlying differences of interest and
political ideology present in any society. The frameworks offered have
generally derived from a simple and outdated notion of ‘the press’, which
provides (mainly political) news and information and have failed to come to
terms with the great internal diversity of mass media types and services and
with changing technology and times. There is, for instance, little of relevance
in any of the variants of theory which might realistically be applied to the
cinema, or the music industry, or the video market, or even a good deal of
sport, fiction and entertainment on television, thus to much of what the media
are doing most of the time. It is hardly plausible that these phenomena should
lie entirely outside the scope of social-normative thinking. In fact, these are
often the aspects of media performance that have been especially the subject
of normative discourse, without much benefit of theory of the kind described.
The confusion over the status and possible application of normative theory
has been made worse by: their high level generality; their lack of direct
connection with actual media systems and often the lack of correspondence
between normative pretensions and reality of performance; their mixing of
ideas about structure with notions of good, or bad, performance. In many, if
not most, countries, the media do not constitute any single ‘system’, but are
composed of many separate, overlapping, often theoretically inconsistent
elements. For instance, values of independence and impartiality can be
pursued with equal chance of success (or lack of it) by systems based either
on principles of the free market or under strict public control. The practical
utility of the four (or more, or less) theories has always been extremely
doubtful and is even more so at a time when media technologies and
distribution systems are multiplying and when there is less consensus about
basic values than in the past.

Towards Principles of Media Performance

Of course, the verbal constructions which the theories comprised were largely
confined to the pages of academic theory and had no status in law, regulation,
self-regulation or policy. For decades, specific normative issues concerning
the media have been fought out in the political and judicial arenas of most
national societies. A wide-ranging body of principle concerning what media
ought, or ought not, to do in their public capacity, however much contested,
has slowly been developed. This is to be found in laws, regulations, court
decisions, reports of commissions in so far as it concerns what society
expects of the media. The extensive regulation of broadcasting (and even
68 Denis McQuail

its deregulation) have produced a very large body of proscription and

prescription which has largely been ignored in the earlier tradition of
theorising referred to above. The media themselves have produced yet
more numerous codes of journalistic practice (Nordenstreng and Topuz,
1989) and there has also been a gradual extension of regulation and of
the normative discourse to the international level (globally and regionally).
Some things have not changed fundamentally. There is still potential
conflict between the media and those who exercise political or economic
power and the mass media still tend to occupy a contested terrain of ‘public
space’, such that their conditions of operation and actual performance remain
of no less concern than in the past. There are still winners and losers as a
result of what the media do. There are still first and second class citizens in the
media audience, nationally and globally. There are still enormous variations
in the informational, cultural and professional quality of what the media do.
The implication of these remarks is that there is still a wide-ranging and
actively disputed set of ‘public interest’ claims, based on relevant values
relating to public communication, to be laid against the media structures
and what they do. It follows that there is more scope for communication
research and a need for theory to go with it.
The aim here is to suggest a different point of departure, an alternative to
the ‘plus or minus four theory’ approach. The starting point and the
empirical source for the rather loose framework of norms and principles
of media performance proposed is to be found in the proliferating ‘media
politics’ of recent decades. As far as the question of norms for media is
concerned, a signal difference between now and the immediate postwar
decade is the enormous expansion of mass media, a corresponding rise in
public debate and, as noted already, the wider range of criteria against
which their performance is likely to be judged.

The Concept of a ‘Public Interest’? Endures

Underlying the proposal for a normative framework is a fundamental pre-

sumption, that the media do serve the ‘public interest’ or ‘general welfare’,
whether by design or chance. This means, in practice, that mass media are not
the same as any other business or service industry, but carry out some
essential tasks for the wider benefit of society, especially in cultural and
political life. For this reason, the media can legitimately be held accountable
for what they do or do not do and be liable to some claims that they do things
which they might not choose to do. This presumption is, to some extent,
invited by the media themselves which often, albeit selectively, claim to
exercise a significant public role. Although the view has its opponents, it
also has good credentials, and in modern times the presumption has often been
acted on by way of commissions of enquiry, public intervention of various
kinds (legal or economic).
To make such assumptions about media accountability is not to claim that
there is a single known form which the media should take if they are to fulfil
the public interest, or that some particular goals or effects are more ‘in the
 Mass Media in the Public Interest 69

public interest’ than others. It does not imply, either, that the media are
obliged to conform to popular will or carry out some particular mission. It
is simply to say that in democratic societies there are likely to be grounds on
which an argued claim can be made, by reference to some of the values
indicated below, according to specific circumstances, that media should do
or should not do some particular thing, for reasons of wider or longer-term
benefit to the society. :
While the concept of the public interest has been slippery and controversial
(see Held, 1970), a simple definition, drawn from the field of public planning,
says that something ‘is in the public interest if it serves the ends of the whole
society rather than those of some sectors of the society’ (Banfield, 1955).
Without some guiding assumption of this kind about the public task of the
media, it is quite pointless for those outside the media to bother with
normative principles, or for those inside to claim to be putting them into
practice. Once it is made, however, it becomes quite useful, even necessary, to
have some ordered version of the range of relevant performance criteria on
matters which might affect the public life of society. The criteria for assessing
the media presented below are limited by their origin. The countries from
which they derive are politically pluralistic, predominantly capitalist, the
media arrangements in force often divergent. Even so, the structure and
operation of the media have often been hotly debated and public control of
media has often been advocated on grounds of the ‘public interest’, as have
deregulation and the further extension of the free market. This led to quite
wide-ranging enquiry and debate. In general, the limits of action, if not of
debate and advocacy, have been set by the status quo of property ownership
and the guidelines of electoral democracy. Within these limits, a quite diverse
set of expectations from, or on behalf of, ‘society’ has been articulated in
different fora, in most countries. It is the expressions of these expectations
which provided the materials from which to construct the framework offered
below, even if the wealth of source material cannot possibly be acknowl-
edged.

Locating the Foundations of Principle

The normative framework suggested is based on first principles — in the sense

that it derives from basic social and political values which are relevant to
communication but which obviously have a much wider range of reference to
issues of public concern. The more specific norms for media performance
which represent the application of these principles are not always consistent
and the preference for one norm over another will vary from place to place
and case to case. For this reason, there can be no single coherent body of
normative theory, nor do we need one, especially if we work ‘up’ from media
performance to media system rather than from ‘society’ ‘down’ to its media
system.
Insofar as societies do have coherent ideologies, we are likely to discover a
parallel ideology for the media as well. The option of following a consistent
line of theory remains open, but the alternative, ad hoc and fragmentary,
70 Denis McQuail

approach has some advantages, especially if it is true that ideologies are

temporarily in retreat and certainly if media are tending towards the adoption
of more universal, transnational, forms and practices. The strategy adopted
here is to draw (without specific acknowledgement) on the large universe of
public policy debate about media of the last fifty years, in order to find the
terms which widely expressed public expectation from (and sometimes public
purpose for, or criticism of), the media. It is quite explicitly not the intention
here to advocate the special claim of any particular value or set of values, but
to try to represent fairly the evaluative ideas and terms which are actually
encountered in public debate and in regulations concerning media perfor-
mance. These comprise, in effect, the terms of a particular policy dis-
course, whose meanings are rooted in typical and recurring circumstances
of the working of mass media. As with any discourse (here meaning an
identifiable and dedicated form of language usage), the terms are interrelated
and overlapping and their specific meanings are dependent on their place in a
larger frame of reference. The framework sketched is, first of all, an attempt to
say what are its component elements. It is also a map of space occupied by
public expectations and evaluative orientations towards the media, showing
key distinctions and interrelations.
Although the source material has an empirical basis, there is no purely
‘empirical’ way of drawing such a ‘map’, nor is there likely to be any
uniquely correct solution to the task. What is offered is no more than one
proposal, accompanied by argument and explanation, for arranging the most
frequently occurring normative terms and ideas in a single, logically inter-
related, structure. The most difficult task is to find an entry point — to identify
the irreducible core, the most economical statement of key principles, from
which other subprinciples can be derived or to which they can be related. This
is also the point where there is most chance of a subjective input, the personal
views and ‘bias’ of the author of any such proposal. Some such bias is bound
to have crept in.

Identifying Basic Values for Communication in Society

Fortunately, the discussion of media performance is not universal and freely

floating, but rooted in time and place and it is reasonable to suppose that the
core principles at stake largely coincide with the core values of modern
western society. While there are many variants and alternative interpreta-
tions, it 1s proposed to name these as: freedom; justice/equality; order/
solidarity.
Freedom as a value in civil society has often been defined in terms of
communication rights: of belief, speech, movement, assembly, association,
access to information. The most hated denials of freedom have been those
which impinge on the identity and integrity of individuals and their rights to
self-expression. The most practical instruments for protecting freedom and
combating tyranny have involved using the means of communication to claim
rights, criticize power-holders, advance alternatives. Legal guarantees of
fundamental Human Rights always name freedom of expressions and the
 Mass Media in the Public Interest 71

right to receive information as an essential principle (for instance Article 10

of the European Convention on Human Rights).
The value of equality, which corresponds in part with the idea of justice
(equality of rights and before the law, fairness of social arrangements), is
connected with public communication in less direct, but no less crucial, ways.
In brief: the expression of grievances and processes of justice require ade-
quate channels of communication and the means of publicity; the potential to
communicate and to receive communication is a social good which should be
fairly and universally if not strictly equally, available; democratic political
process designed to increase public welfare and equity also require the
services of public channels of communication; the full concept of citizenship
presupposes an informed and participant body of citizen (Golding, 1990).
Most generally, if we suppose there to be a ‘right to communicate’, then it
implies an equal individual claim to hear and to be heard. The fact that
modern mass media have, in practice, appropriated and almost monopolized
a good many of the real opportunities for public communication does not
diminish the claim.
The third basic value, that of order, although equally fundamental, is open
to more divergent definitions and evaluations than either freedom or equality.
It was, nevertheless, coupled with both, under one of its several names, in the
slogan of the French Revolution: liberté; égalité; fraternité. It was also a key
term, in the sense of the solidarity of workers, in the socialist and social
reform meanings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is usually
regarded as a precondition for a just and civilized society. It is a central
communication value: the interdependence and collective life of a society or
community derive from, and depend on, communication processes and calls
for communicative expressions of identity and belonging. Any social order,
whether or not based on freedom and equality, can only be maintained over
time through processes of public communication. The notion of order is,
nevertheless, ambiguous because of its association with control, with hier-
archy and subordination.
It is clear that the three basic values do often come into conflict with each
other and an appeal to one may be used to counter an appeal to another.
Freedom is not easy to reconcile with order and equality may call either for
limits on freedom or may be inconsistent with hierarchical forms of order.
Such tensions are often reflected in public debates about the structure,
regulation and performance of mass media, reminding us of the lack of any
consensus either over the way in which the values should be applied or over
their relative order of precedence. The space occupied by the discourse of
public communication is continually contested by opposing claims and
interests.
The elements of a normative framework offered here do not provide a
completely coherent or closed system of communication values. The aim is
only to offer a pragmatic description of the field of values, choices and
alternatives which have commonly been invoked and argued for in public
debate about public communication. In the following paragraphs, the various
elements which have been identified by this three-fold division of basic values
are discussed in terms of their implications for media performance. The terms
72 Denis McQuail

set out are intended to help generate more specific and testable criteria of
performance.

Freedom as a Public Communication Value

Freedom is a condition, rather than a criterion, of performance and does not

readily lend itself to either prescriptive or proscriptive statements. It refers
primarily to rights to free expression and the free formation of opinion.
However, for these rights to be realized there must also be access to channels
and opportunities to receive diverse kinds of information. Media freedom also
leads to positive benefits for the everyday needs of social organization. For
instance, the credibility of any news and information supplied is largely
dependent on confidence that it is not unduly or secretly influenced by
partisan or vested interests (of government, advertiser, proprietor, source,
etc.). Freedom is also thought to require and promote a diversity of channels
and thus more choice for the ‘consumer’ of information and other media
services. Press independence is also a precondition of the exercise of the
‘watchdog’ role — exercising public vigilance in relation to those with most
power, especially government and big business. Other practical benefits
include: openness to new ideas; a readiness to make access available to
different voices in the society. Free media will be prepared, when neces-
sary, to offend the powerful, express controversial views, deviate from
convention and from the commonplace. Freedom of communication has a
dual aspect: offering a wide range of voices and responding to a wide-ranging
demand. Similar remarks apply to the cultural provision of media, where
independence will be associated, other things being equal, with creativity,
originality and diversity. These ideas bring us to an interface and overlap with
benefits offered under the heading of ‘Equality’.
This brief discussion has sought to make a connection between the follow-
ing: structural conditions (legal freedom to publish); operating conditions
(real independence from economic and political pressures and relative auton-

FREEDOM

Independent Access to Diversity

status channels of supply

Reliability Originality Critical Choice Change

stance

Fig. 4.1 Freedom as a media performance principle

 Mass Media in the Public Interest 73

omy for journalists and other ‘communicators’ within media organizations);

opportunities for ‘voices’ in society to gain access to channels; benefits of
quality of provision for ‘receivers’ — according to criteria of relevance,
diversity, reliability, interest, originality and personal satisfaction. The main
elements discussed can now be expressed as the first set of components in a
larger normative framework, as follows. It has to be emphasized that these are
only theoretical benefits from freedom, logically linked. They may not be
realized in practice because of inconsistencies of claims and limited oppor-
tunities (see Lichtenberg, 1990).

Equality as a Public Communication Value

The basic value of equality has to be translated into more specific meanings
when it is applied to the mass media. As a principle, it underlies several of the
normative expectations which have already been referred to. In relation to
communication and political power, it is equality which requires that no
special favour be given to power holders and that access to media should
be given on a fair, if not always an equal, basis to contenders for office and, in
general, to oppositional or deviant opinions, perspectives or claims. In
relation to business clients of the media, equality requires that all legitimate
advertisers be treated on the same basis (the same rates and conditions).
Equality implies, in such matters, that the normal principles of the market
should operate freely.
It is equality which supports policies of universal provision in broadcasting
and telecommunications and of sharing out the costs of basic services.
Equality will support the expectation of fair access, on equivalent terms,
for all alternative voices (the diversity principle again) that meet relevant
criteria. In short, equality calls for an absence of discrimination or bias in the
amount and kind of access available to senders or receivers, as far as is
practicable. The real chances of equality are likely to depend on the level
of social and economic development of a society and the extent of its media
system. There will have to be enough space on different and mutually
independent channels, for any degree of equality to be realized in practice.
The principle of diversity (also identified as a major benefit of freedom),
which can be derived from these meanings of communication equality, is
. especially important because it underpins the normal processes of progressive
change in society (the periodic replacement of ruling elites, the circulation of
power and office, the countervailing power of different interests), which
pluralistic forms of democracy are supposed to deliver. In accounting for
diversity of provision, the extent to which real alternatives are on offer can be
measured according to several alternative yardsticks: type of media (e.g.
press, radio, TV, etc.); function or type (e.g. entertainment, information),
the level of operation (national, regional, local, etc.); the audience aimed at
and reached (differentiated by income, age, etc.); language, ethnic or cultural
identity; politics or ideology. In general, a media system is more equal in
character, the more diverse the provision according to the criteria mentioned.
Two basic variants of the ‘diversity-as-equal-treatment’ principle have been
74 Denis McQuail

identified. According to one version, a literal equality should be on offer —

everyone receives the same provision or chances for access as sender. This
applies, for instance, where contending parties receive equal time in an
election, or in those countries (such as Canada or Belgium) where separate
language groups receive an equivalent media service. An alternative, more
usual, version means only a ‘fair’, or appropriate, allocation of access and
treatment. Usually, fairness is assessed according to the principle of propor-
tional representation. Media provision should proportionately reflect the
actual distribution of whatever is relevant (topics, social groups, political
beliefs etc.) in the society, or reflect the varying distribution of audience
demand or interest. The differentiation of media provision (content) should
approximately correspond to the differences at source or to those at the
receiving end.
A consideration of equality as an evaluative principle also takes us into the
territory of objectivity, although this has other meanings and potential sources
of support, especially those provided by the value of independence and by
trends to professionalism and autonomy. Most centrally, objectivity is a
particular form of media practice and also a particular attitude to the task
of information collection, processing and dissemination. The main features
are: adopting a position of detachment and neutrality from the object of
reporting (thus an absence of subjectivity or personal involvement); lack of
partisanship (not taking sides in matters of dispute); attachment to accuracy
and other truth criteria (e.g. relevance, completeness); lack of ulterior motives
or service to a third party. The process of observing and reporting should,
thus, not be contaminated by subjectivity, nor should it interfere with the
reality being reported on. In some respects, it has an affinity, in theory at least,
with the ideal of rational, ‘undistorted’ communication advocated by Haber-
mas (1979).
This version of an ideal standard of reporting practice has many advocates
and has become the dominant model for the role of professional journalists
(Weaver and Wilhoit, 1986). It has links with the principle of freedom, since
independence is a necessary condition of detachment and truthfulness. Under
some conditions (e.g. political oppression, crisis, war, police action), the
freedom to report can only be obtained in return for a guarantee of objectiv-
ity. The link with equality is just as strong: objectivity requires a fair and non-
discriminatory attitude to sources and to objects of news reporting — all should
be treated on equal terms. Additionally, different points of view on matters
where the facts are in dispute should be treated as of equal standing and
relevance, other things being equal. Objective treatment or presentation may
in practice be achieved by allowing equal space or time for alternative
perspectives on, or versions of, facts.
In the set of normative interactions which develop between media and their
operating environments, objectivity may be crucial. Agencies of state and
advocates of various interests are able to speak directly to their chosen
audiences by way of the media, without undue distortion or intervention by
the mediators themselves and without compromising the independence of
channels. Because of the established conventions of objectivity, media
channels can distance their editorial content from the advertising matter
which they carry and advertisers can do likewise in respect of editorial
 Mass Media in the Public Interest 75

EQUALITY

ACCESS DIVERSITY OBJECTIVITY

Open/equal Proportional Change Reach Neutrality Truth

Fairness
Fig. 4.2 Equality as a media performance principle

content. In general, media audiences appear to understand the principle of

objective performance well enough and its practice helps to increase their
credence and trust in information and opinions which the media offer. The
media themselves find that objectivity gives their own news product a higher
and wider market value. Finally, because the objectivity standard has such a
wide currency, it is often invoked in claims and settlements concerning bias or
unequal treatment.
The main subprinciples related to the value of equality can now be entered,
as in Fig. 4.2.

Order as a Public Communication Value

The ambiguous standing of the order concept in discussions of media and

society has already been noted. From the standpoint of established authority,
the media are often viewed as potentially disruptive of the normal ‘order’ of
the society, although they are also indispensable to the maintenance of order,
in the wider sense of social ‘harmony’ and the normal running of things: From
the point of view of individuals and the component subgroups of society, mass
communication can also have both positive and negative tendencies. It helps
in forming and maintaining personal identity and group cohesion, but it can be
a source of disturbance or threat when it intrudes with alien values or as an
instrument of constraint. Theory of mass communication draws attention to
the dual effect of media in society — both centrifugal and centripetal, differ-
entiating and uniting (Carey, 1969; McQuail, 1987).
In many public policy debates, there are several matters which regularly
recur under the heading of ‘order’ in its widest sense, especially: the wish to
restrain any impulse to individual or collective disorder; the protection of
children and other vulnerable groups from moral or cultural harm; the
positive motive of promoting education and traditionally valued culture; the
question of cultural autonomy for language groups, regions and national
cultures.
The concept of order is used here in a rather elastic way, to apply to
symbolic (cultural) orders such as religion, art, customs, etc. as well as to
76 Denis McQuail

forms of social order (community, society, established structures of relations).

This broad distinction is also cut across by a distinction of perspective — from
‘above’ and ‘below’, as it were. This distinction is essentially that between
established authority of society on the one hand and individuals and minority
groups on the other. It also corresponds approximately to the distinction
between order, in the sense of control, and order in the sense of solidarity
and cohesion — the one ‘imposed’, the other voluntary and self-chosen. These
ideas about order can be arranged as follows.
Any complex and viable social system will exhibit all the subaspects of
order which are shown here. There will be mechanisms of social control as
well as voluntary attachments, often by way of membership of component
groups in society. There will be a sharing of common meanings and defini-
tions of experience as well as much divergence of identity and actual
experience. Shared culture and solidaristic experience tend to be mutually
reinforcing. The relationship between mass communication and these differ-
ent concepts has been handled in theories of media and society in divergent,
though not logically inconsistent, ways (McQuail, 1987). Functionalist theory
attributes to mass media a latent purpose of securing the continuity and
integration of a social order (Wright, 1960) by promoting cooperation and a
consensus of social and cultural values. Critical theory has usually interpreted
mass media as agents of a dominant, controlling, class of power-holders who
seek to impose their own definitions of situations and their values and to
marginalize or delegitimize opposition. The media are often seen as serving
conflicting goals and interests and as offering conflicting versions of an actual
or desirable social order. The assessment of media in terms of order is,
consequently, more dependent on the choice of perspective than is the case
in respect of concepts of freedom and equality. The question ‘Whose order?’
has first to be settled. In practice, most media assessment has tended to adopt a
conventional standard, shaped by the dominant perspective (of established
authority). As a result, more attention has usually been paid to disruption of
order (conflict, crime, deviance, etc.) than to the failings of the established
order as perceived by more marginal, or minority, social and cultural groups
in society.
The complexity of concepts, points of view and evaluative principles which
can be deployed in this territory is also an obstacle to research and some
simplification is needed, at the risk of drawing somewhat arbitrary lines of
demarcation. The solution adopted here is, first, to acknowledge a distinction
between the social and the cultural domains (as in Fig. 4.3). The social order
can, in turn, be treated under two alternative headings: one relating to social
control, generally the view ‘from above’, another to the more solidaristic
aspects of order — mutuality, cooperation, voluntarism, balance, etc. The
social control aspect of media performance can usually be recognized either
by way of very ‘negative’ portrayals of conflict, disorder and deviance or in
the differential access and positive support given, symbolically, to established
ae institutions and authorities — the law, church, school, police, military,
etc.
The second subprinciple (that of solidarity) involves a recognition that
society is composed of many subgroups, different bases of identity and of
different interests. Standing against a unitary perspective of consensual good
 Mass Media in the Public Interest 77

PERSPECTIVE

From ‘above' From ‘below'

Social: Control/compliance _ Solidarity/attachment

DOMAIN
Cultural: Conformity/hierarchy Autonomy/ideality

Fig. 4.3 Ideas concerning order

order in a nation state are a number of alternative perspectives on what is a

desirable social order. Some groups may have no attachment in the social
order beyond their own immediate social context and experience. A viable
normative expectation from mass media is that they will sympathetically
recognize such a perspective, providing some access and symbolic support
for the relevant groups. In general, this (normative) theoretical position will
encompass a generally outward-looking and empathetic orientation to social
groups and situations which are marginal, distant or deviant, from the point of
view of a dominant national society. This implies several possible expecta-
tions from the media. Firstly, it refers to media provision which supports the
aspirations of subgroups in society, either by giving access or positive forms
of representation. The principle of empathy refers to the extension of sym-
pathy to individuals or groups, the public recognition of shared risks, sorrows
and hardships, the linking of private and local experience to wider experience.
There is also a reflection here of aspects of media work which have been
referred to as ‘pro-social’ in their tendency — generally content which is held
to reinforce ‘positive’ social values, including those of caring for others and
extending understanding to the marginal and even deviant in society, as well
as to outsiders.
The domain of the ‘cultural’ is clearly not easy to keep separate from some
of the matters just mentioned. As used here, the term refers to any set of
symbols organized by way of language or in some other meaningful pattern-
ing. We can locate cultures in any of three main ways: as characteristic of a
set of people, identifiable by language, gender, class, ethnicity, etc; or as a set
of activities (work, home-related; politics; sport, etc.); or as represented in and
by forms and artefacts (books, films, types of performance, genres, etc.). The
first of these three is already largely covered under the ‘social’ designation
referred to above, although ‘people’ are identifiable, not only as groups, but
by their symbolic cultural characteristics — usages, customs, language, arte-
facts, etc. Media assessment has typically been directed either at matters of
cultural ‘quality’ or of ‘authenticity’ in relation to the group.
The subdivision of the sphere of the cultural, for present purposes of
constructing a clear framework, is not easy to accomplish in a neat way,
although line of division might be as follows: between a ‘dominant’, official
or established culture and a°set of possible alternative or subcultures. In
78 Denis McQuail

ORDER

SOCIAL CULTURAL
DOMAIN DOMAIN

Solidarity Control Authenticity Hierarchy/Quality

Fig. 4.4 Order and its main component principles

practice, the former implies a hierarchical view of culture, according to which

cultural values and artefacts which have been ‘certified’ by established
cultural institutions will be relatively privileged, compared to ‘alternative’
cultural values and forms. Typically, such an established culture will imply a
set of absolute cultural values and certifiable quality standards. The cultural
virtues of the ‘alternative’ perspective will, in contrast, be relative, based only
on personal perceptions of attractiveness, relevance and familiarity.
The component normative principles relating to ‘order’ can now be sum-
marized, as in Fig. 4.4.

Interrelations of Principle in an Overall Framework

These three basic principles of freedom, equality and order have been worked
out separately in terms of their implications for media performance. Never-
theless, they are intimately connected and inevitably overlapping. Thus, the
main concepts of Access and Diversity appear both under the heading of
‘freedom’ and under that of ‘equality’. While the order principle stands
somewhat apart, the connection between the ‘solidaristic’ component of
order and equality is very strong, and, in practice, solidaristic communication
values can only be realized by ‘access’ to channels and by some degree of
diversity in the media system.
The logic of the composition of the framework involves a progression of
increasing specificity from the most abstract and general level (the three basic
values), to the implications of these for media system and performance
(independence, diversity, etc.), to yet more specific subprinciples or concepts
which provide a link to the application of assessment procedures and research.
In conclusion, the three main component elements can be brought together to
offer a view of the upper levels (really the foundations) of the unified
framework of principle.
From these key terms, quite a large number of more specific terms can be
derived for application in the empirical assessment of media performance (as
in Stone, 1987; Lemert, 1989; McQuail, 1992). The main conclusion of this
chapter is that the practice of media criticism and of media research, as well as
of regulating and deregulating media have between them, almost fortuitously,
 Mass Media in the Public Interest 79

FREEDOM EQUALITY ORDER

Independence Access Diversity Objectivity Solidarity Control Culture

Fig. 4.5 Summary framework of principles of media performance

. provided the essential building blocks for a quite comprehensive, flexible and
changing ‘social theory of the media’, relevant to our times and of practical
value in the ever-widening circle of public discussion of the role of the mass
media in society. Of course, the apparent coherence and symmetry of the
framework of media norms is illusory. The key principles embody potentially
deep fissures and inconsistencies, depending on how they are interpreted.
They can be mutually contradictory and the subprinciples of media perfor-
mance can always be defined according to self-interest. This means that there
can be no straightforward ‘reading-off’ of ‘the public interest’ from this
framework. All claims about what is in the public interest have to be
specific, based on evidence and argued out in some relevant political forum.

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BURNS, T., 1977: The BBC: public institution and private world, London: Macmillan.
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HABERMAS, J., 1979: Communication and the Evolution of Society, Boston: Beacon
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HACHTEN, W., 1981: The World News prism: changing media, clashing ideologies,
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A. Anderson (ed.) Communication Yearbook 14, Newbury Park: Sage Publications.
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MERRILL, J. C., 1974: The Imperatives of Freedom, New York: Hastings House.
NORDENSTRENG, K. and Topuz, H. (eds), 1989: Journalist: status, rights and responsibil-
ities, Prague: IOJ.
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SIEBERT, F, PETERSON, T. and SCHRAMM, W., 1956: Four Theories of the Press, Urbana:
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STONE, P., 1987: Examining Newspapers, Newbury Park: California.
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Quarterly, 24, 1960, 606-20.
5
Mass Media and Democracy
Revisited
James Curran

Introduction

New times call for new thinking. Countries in eastern Europe have redesigned
their media systems, with one eye cocked to the west in search of new ideas
and models (as well as investment). The domination of public service broad-
casting in western Europe is weakening in response to a combined commer-
cial and political onslaught. The rapid expansion of TV channels, and new
communications technology, are also transforming the media landscape in a
way that calls for an intellectual adjustment.’
This chapter attempts therefore to do more than merely provide a textbook-
style summary of the traditional liberal arguments about the democratic role
of the media.” It also assesses their relevance for today. Much liberal
commentary derives from a period when the ‘media’ consisted principally
of small-circulation, political publications, and the state was still dominated
by a small, landed elite. The result is a legacy of old saws which bear little
relationship to contemporary reality but which continue to be repeated
uncritically as if nothing has changed. It is time that they were given a
decent funeral.
Discussion of the democratic role of the media is bound up with a debate
about how the media should be organized. Traditional liberal conceptions
were framed partly in order to legitimate the ‘deregulation’ of the press, and
its full establishment on free market lines (Curran, 1978). Calling into
question traditionalist thought thus casts doubt on the free market programme
that it was intended to legitimate. However, the process of going back to first
principles and reappraising the democratic role of the media also raises
questions about the adequacy of conventional public service alternatives to
the market.
This reappraisal concludes with a revised conception of the democratic role
of the media, and a proposal for a new way of organizing the media. These
may well be rejected in favour of better considered alternatives. Whatever
view is taken, one thing is clear. The literature on media and democracy needs
82 James Curran

a removal van to carry away unwanted lumber accumulated over centuries.

What should be removed, what should take its place, and how the intellectual
furniture should be rearranged is something that needs to be critically
addressed.

Habermas and the Public Sphere

A good starting-point for rethinking the democratic role of the media is

provided by a seminal study by Jurgen Habermas (1989), which has acquired
almost a cult following in the USA and northern Europe following its belated
translation.” In brief, Habermas argues that the development of early modern
capitalism brought into being an autonomous arena of public debate. The
economic independence provided by private property, the critical reflection
fostered by letters and novels, the flowering of discussion in coffee houses and
salons and, above all, the emergence of an independent, market-based press,
created a new public engaged in critical political discussion. From this was
forged a reason-based consensus which shaped the direction of the state.
Habermas traces the evolution of the “bourgeois public sphere’ — a public
space between the private domain and the state in which public opinion was
formed and ‘popular’ supervision of government was established — from the
seventeenth century through to the first half of the nineteenth century. There-
after, he argues, the public sphere came to be dominated by an expanded state
and organized economic interests. A new corporatist pattern of power rela-
tions was established in which organized interests bargained with each other
and with the state, while increasingly excluding the public. The media ceased
to be an agency of empowerment and rationality, and became a further means
by which the public was sidelined. Instead of providing a conduit for rational-
critical debate, the media manipulated mass opinion. It defined politics as a
spectacle, offered predigested, convenience thinking and conditioned the
public in the role of passive consumers.
Although Habermas was careful to argue that participation in the public
sphere, in its classical phase, was restricted to the propertied class, he has
come under attack for idealizing this period of history (Mortensen, 1977;
Hohendahl, 1979; Curran, 1991; Eley, 1992; Schudson, 1992). He has also
been criticized for his characterization of the media and the public sphere in
the subsequent period (Fraser, 1987; Dahlgren, 1991; Garnham, 1992).4 There
are, perhaps, good grounds for questioning the value of Habermas’s study as
historical scholarship. It offers nevertheless a powerful and arresting vision of
the role of the media in a democratic society, and in this sense its historical
status is irrelevent. From it can be extrapolated a model of a public sphere as a
neutral zone where access to relevant information affecting the public good is
widely available, where discussion is free of domination and where all those
participating in public debate do so on an equal basis. Within this public
sphere, people collectively determine through the processes of rational argu-
ment the way in which they want to see society develop, and this shapes in
turn the conduct of government policy. The media facilitates this process by
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 83
providing an arena of public debate, and by reconstituting private citizens as a
public body in the form of public opinion.
_ The lingering question left by Habermas is how can this model — suppo-
sedly realized by a restricted class (of mostly men) in the early nineteenth
century — be universalized during the era of mass politics in a highly
differentiated, organized capitalist society? The answer, it will be argued, is
that the public sphere cannot be re-established through a simple process of
enlargement, by enabling those who have been excluded to participate in it.
Rather, the public sphere and the role of the media in relation to it has to be
reconceptualized and reincarnated in a new form.
First, however, we will consider more conventional accounts of the demo-
- cratic role of the media. This will focus on the three key concepts in the
liberal canon — the media as public watchdog, public representative (‘fourth
estate’) and source of public information. These will be sceptically assessed
before setting out an alternative conception of the media’s democratic role,
and alternative blueprint of how this might be realized.

Media Watchdog

Classical liberal thought argues that the primary democratic role of the media
is to act as a public watchdog overseeing the state. This is usually defined as
revealing abuses in the exercise of state authority, although it is sometimes
extended to include facilitating a general debate about the functioning of
government.
This watchdog role is said to override in importance all other functions of
the media, and to dictate the form in which the media should be organized.
Only by anchoring the media to the free market is it possible to ensure the
media’s complete independence from government. Once the media becomes
subject to public regulation, it will lose its bite as a watchdog and may even be
transformed into a snarling Rottweiler in the service of the state.
This particular view seems to have become the cornerstone of a new
consensus in the USA. For instance Kelley and Donway, two American
political scientists of conservative sympathies, argue that any reform of the
media, however desirable, is unacceptable if it is ‘at the cost of the watchdog
function. And this is the inevitable cost. A press that is licensed, franchised or
regulated is subject to political pressures when it deals with issues affecting
the interests of those in power’ (Kelley and Donway, 1990: 97). This
argument is restated in a different form by a political scientist of centrist
views, Stephen Holmes: ‘Doesn’t every regulation converting the media into a
“neutral forum” lessen its capacity to act as a partisan gadfly, investigating
and criticizing government in an aggressive way?’ (Holmes, 1990: 51). Even
commentators with strongly reformist views appear to entertain the same
fears. ‘I cannot envision any kind of content regulation, however indirect’,
writes the media critic, Carl Stepp, ‘that wouldn’t project government into the
position of favouring or disfavouring some views and information over others.
Even so-called structural steps aimed at opening channels for freer expression
84 James Curran

would post government in the intolerable role of super-gatekeeper’ (Stepp,

1990: 194). : ,
These arguments paved the way for the increasing deregulation of Amer-
ican broadcasting. Television channels in the United States were ‘freed’ from
the obligation to provide a mixed schedule of programmes and from the
fairness doctrine requiring public affairs to be reported from contrasting
viewpoints. Rules restricting chain-ownership of TV stations were relaxed,
and the requirement on cable TV companies to carry over-the-air channels has
been dropped. Even the principle of licence renewal of broadcasting stations,
the coping-stone of what residual regulation remains, is being questioned.
What happened in the USA has begun to happen in Britain, though in the
latter case in the teeth of considerable opposition. As in the USA, it was
argued with great force that public regulation of broadcasting inhibits critical
surveillance of government (Adam Smith Institute, 1984; Veljanovski, 1989).
As Rupert Murdoch (1989: 9) succinctly put it, ‘public service broadcasters in
this country [Britain] have paid a price for their state-sponsored privileges.
That price has been their freedom.’ These and similar arguments contributed
to the introduction of the 1990 Broadcasting Act which authorized the
auctioning of TV and radio franchises (with some quality safeguards), the
expansion of the private broadcasting sector and the relaxation of content
controls on commercial TV and radio. But the basic infrastructure of public
service broadcasting — the BBC and regulatory agencies enforcing public
duties on private broadcasters — survived intact due to continuing political
and public support for public service broadcasting in Britain (Curran and
Seaton, 1996).
However, the free-market/public-watchdog argument has a powerful reso-
nance in Britain, as in the USA, because it is a key element of the ideology
that legitimates the printed press in both countries. Indeed, it is regularly
invoked and accepted as the grounds for opposing any additional regulation.
The Supreme Court in the USA even struck down in 1974 a press right-of-
reply law in Florida on the grounds that it would inhibit criticism of public
officials, chill robust political debate and infringe the publisher’s freedom of
expression upheld by the First Amendment (Barron, 1975). Similarly, the last
Royal Commission on the Press in Britain opposed any form of selective
newspaper subsidy because ‘it would involve in an obvious way the dangers
of government interference in the press’. ‘No public body’, it added, ‘should
ever be put in a position of discriminating like a censor between one applicant
and another’ since it could lead to state intimidation (Royal Commission on
the Press, 1977: 126).
Yet these arguments flatly contradict precepts that have been central,
historically, to the organization of broadcasting in both Britain and the
USA. Even now, the Independent Television Commission in Britain has
freedom to choose ‘like a censor between one applicant and another’ in
awarding a franchise (a freedom which it has used), and is not bound by
the highest bid. The right of reply to partisan attack was also authorized for a
time in American broadcasting, ironically with the support of the Supreme
on even though this was outlawed in the American press (Lichtenberg,

For a long time, this inconsistency was reluctantly accepted by free market
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 85
advocates on the grounds that broadcasting was a technically disabled
medium (Royal Commission on the Press, 1977: 9; cf. Horwitz, 1991). The
_ teceived wisdom was that television and radio were limited by the scarcity of
frequencies on the electro-magnetic spectrum, and had to be run consequently
in the public interest or, as it was argued in the USA, managed in a way that
accommodated the interests of those who had not been awarded a franchise.
This made them different from the press, it was reasoned, since the number of
press titles was not subject to physical constraint.
This pragmatic justification for public service broadcasting crumbled in the
1980s with the diffusion of new TV technology (Pool, 1983). By 1995, most
people in Britain and the USA had access, or potential access, to more
television channels than newspaper titles. A similar trend occurred in many
_ other countries. The door to broadcasting deregulation swung invitingly open
throughout much of the western world.

Private Watchdogs: Rhetoric and Reality

The traditional public-watchdog definition of the media, in the context of an

expanding broadcasting system, thus has a seemingly compelling logic. It
legitimates the case for free market reform of broadcasting, while justifying
the continued, unfettered capitalist organization of the press. There seems to
be, at first glance, much to commend this approach. Critical surveillance of
government is clearly an important aspect of the democratic functioning of the
media. In the USA, exposure of the Watergate cover-up during the Nixon
presidency or lesser-known exploits (outside their country) such as disclosure
of state involvement in the illegal sale of Bofors guns in Sweden or Nikifor-
ov’s exposure of local state corruption in the USSR, leading to his murder in
1989, are all heroic examples of the way in which the media performed a
public service by investigating and stopping malpractice by public officials.°
While the watchdog role of the media is important, however, it is perhaps
quixotic to argue that it should be paramount. This conventional view derives
from a period when the principal ‘media’ were highly politicized, small-
circulation newspapers, whereas most contemporary media are given over
mainly to entertainment. Even in the case of so-called news media, news
coverage generally accounts for only a small part of their total content,” and
only a proportion of this news is devoted to critical scrutiny of the state. In
effect, the received wisdom means defining the role of the media in terms of
what it does not do most of the time.
The traditional approach appears time-worn in another way. It defines the
watchdog role of the media as applying only to the state. This antiquated
formulation derives from a period when the state was unrepresentative,
corrupt and potentially despotic, and free speech and a free press were
viewed as a vital defence against the imminent threat of state absolutism
(e.g. Cato, 1720). This analysis came to be framed by a simplistic conception
of society in which conflict was thought to exist primarily between the
individual and the state, and between ignorance and enlightenment (Curran,
1978). This ignored the exercise of power through structures other than the
86 James Curran

state, and so paid no attention to the role of the press as a defence against
exploitation in the private sphere — most notably in the home and the
economy. Clearly, a broader definition of the watchdog role is needed. The
media should be seen as a source of redress against the abuse of all forms of
power over others.
However, as soon as this broader definition is adopted, it weakens the case
for the free market since market-based media are not generally independent of
all structures of power, both private and public. Indeed, as a consequence of
the take-over boom of the last three decades, a large number of media
enterprises are now tied to core sectors of finance and industrial capital.
For example, during the period between 1969 and 1986, nine multinational
conglomerates bought over 200 newspapers and magazines in Britain with a
total circulation of 46 million at the time of purchase (excluding publications
resold to each other) (Curran and Seaton, 1996). Similarly, much of the press
in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Canada and Sweden —
to mention only those countries for which evidence is readily to hand — have
been bought by or have major shareholdings in non-publishing corporations
(Mayer, 1993; Bagdikian, 1992; Chadwick, 1989; Farnsworth, 1989; Tunstall
and Palmer, 1991; Lorimer and McNulty, 1991; Hadenius and Weibull, 1986).
The trend towards deregulation has also resulted in television becoming
increasingly embedded in the corporate structure of big business. Diversified
conglomerates dominate the new TV industries based in Europe, and control
commercial television in Australia (Sanchez-Tabernero et al., 1993; Tunstall
and Palmer, 1991; Chadwick, 1989). A similar trend is developing in the USA
(Bagdikian, 1992). For example, in 1990 Japan’s Matsushita Electric Indus-
trial Company acquired MCA, a major Hollywood producer of TV pro-
grammes, following the pattern set by General Electric’s acquisition of the
US network, NBC, in 1986.
One of the consequences of this changing pattern of ownership is that media
enterprises have sometimes refrained from investigating critically the activ-
ities of the giant conglomerates to which they belong (Hollingsworth, 1986;
Bagdikian, 1992; Curran and Seaton, 1996). In exceptional cases, parent
companies have even stepped in to suppress criticism of their interests.
Thus Toshiba, one of Japan’s leading nuclear contractors, withdrew in 1988
a record attacking Japan’s nuclear programme which had been commissioned
by its Toshiba-EMI music subsidiary (Murdock, 1990). The free market
compromises rather than guarantees the editorial integrity of commercial
media, and impairs in particular its oversight of private corporate power.
More importantly, changes in the ownership of the media have affected
their relationship to government. One ‘school’ of researchers argues that
media conglomerates are, in effect, independent power centres which use
their political leverage to pursue corporate gain. Thus Chadwick (1989)
argues in an important study that a number of entrepreneurs formed a tactical
alliance with the Labour government in Australia in the late 1980s as a way of
securing official permission to consolidate their control over Australia’s
commercial TV and press. This resulted in an unprecedented number of
editorial endorsements for the Labour party in the 1987 election, as well as
opportunistic fence-sitting by some traditionally anti-Labour papers. Simi-
larly, Bagdikian also claims that media conglomerates turned a blind eye to
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 87
official corruption and failed programmes during the Reagan era in order ‘to
protect a political ally’ (Bagdikian, 1990: X). In a more detailed analysis,
Tunstall and Palmer (1991) argue that the policy of major media combines in
Europe can be explained partly in terms of their pursuit of ‘regulatory
favours’ (by which they mean principally the abolition or waiving of official
media regulation). By implication, media conglomerates are not independent
watchdogs serving the public interest but self-seeking, corporate mercenaries
using their muscle to promote private interests.
Another political economy tradition argues that the transformation of media
ownership is part of the emergence of an information-cultural complex with
close ties to government (Schiller, 1989; Herman and Chomsky, 1988). The
stress here is less on the individual interactions between media corporations
and government, and more on the way in which the integration of the media
into capitalism has encouraged it to endorse, sometimes critically, discourses
supportive of capital. As one notable study argues, ‘it is because of the control
of media institutions by multinational capital (big business) that the media
have been biased towards conservatism, thus furthering what they perceive as
their own economic interests’ (Kellner, 1990: 172). This approach contains a
number of internal variations — some more persuasive than others’ — and
rarely confronts directly the liberal conception of the media as a public
watchdog. But the thrust of this research, whether explicit or implicit, is
that conglomerate media are not a source of popular control over government
but merely one means by which dominant economic forces seek to exercise
informal influence over the state.
Critical scrutiny of government can also be blunted by political partisan-
ship. In free market theory, partisanship on the right is balanced by partisan-
ship on the left so that there is always a substantial press ready to expose
government failure, whichever party is in office. This theory begins to break
down when parties of the right are in government and the press, as in most of
Europe, is overwhelmingly right-wing. Although conflicts can occur between
right-wing papers and right-wing governments, the tendency is for criticism to
be reined in out of partisan and patriotic loyalty. In extreme cases, this can
result almost in the suspension of critical judgement. The intrepid watchdog
tradition did not find in Lord Matthews, for instance, a notable exponent. ‘I
would find myself in a dilemma’, he declared, ‘about whether to report a
British Watergate affair because of the national harm. I believe in batting
for Britain’ (cit. Hollingsworth, 1986: 31). At that time, Lord Matthews
controlled the third largest press group in Britain.
The assumption at the heart of traditional theory that the free market
nurtures fearless newshounds is thus open to question. This said, radical
accounts that stress the ‘incorporation’ of commercial media by big business
also need to be viewed critically. Their emphasis on the material transforma-
tion of the media is not always balanced by an analysis of countervailing
influences within media organizations that make for relative journalistic
independence. In reality, the need for audience credibility and political
legitimacy, the self-image and professional commitments of journalists, and
normative public support for journalistic independence are all important
influences militating against the subordination of commercial media to the
business and political interests of parent companies. This is well illustrated by
88 James Curran

the extraordinary battle that took place in the Observer, a British Sunday
newspaper, owned by the multinational conglomerate, Lonrho.
In April 1984, Lonrho’s chief executive, Tiny Rowland, told the Observer
editor, Donald Trelford, not to run a story about atrocities committed by the
Zimbabwe army in the dissident Matabele province. Publication of the report
threatened to damage Lonrho’s already strained relationship with the govern-
ment in a country that contributed some £15 million to group profits. Donald
Trelford defied his proprietor and published the story. He was backed
unanimously by his staff, and by the paper’s independent directors who had
been appointed at the time of Lonrho’s takeover of the Observer. In the
protracted row that followed (in which Lonrho allegedly cancelled advertis-
ing in its own paper), Trelford offered to stand down. This put the proprietor
in a difficult position. To accept Trelford’s resignation would undermine the
credibility of the paper, while to refuse would entrench the editor’s position.
For a time, Rowland toyed with the idea of selling the paper. In the end, he
settled for a face-saving exchange of letters and confirmed Trelford’s appoint-
ment. The sanction of publicity in effect prevented a powerful conglomerate
from manipulating a subsidiary company. However, it did not prevent Lonrho
from exerting pressure on the Observer on subsequent occasions, when senior
editorial resistance was not always so determined (Curran and Seaton, 1996).

Public Watchdogs: A Reassessment

Public service broadcasting organizations have also resisted editorial inter-

ference from governments for much the same reasons. Their audience cred-
ibility and strategic long-term interest, and the self-conception and self-
respect of their journalists, have all encouraged a defence of their auton-
omy. There is also in many liberal democracies general support within the
political elite for the principle of broadcasting independence, partly for
reasons of self-interest. Ministers know that one day they will need access
to broadcasting when they are voted out of office. Some broadcasting
organizations are also difficult to capture because power within them is
decentralized or because they are protected by an internal system of checks
and balances. But the ultimate defence of public service broadcasting auton-
omy is public support. On a number of occasions, in countries ranging from
Germany and Britain to Israel and Australia, public disapproval has stopped
politicians from asserting increased political control over broadcasting in a
way that directly parallels the saga at the Observer.®
Indeed, recent British experience points to a perplexing conclusion that
both partly supports and partly refutes the arguments advanced by free market
traditionalists. On the one hand, British broadcasting lost some of
its auton-
omy during the 1980s due to a sustained onslaught on its independ
ence by a
radical right-wing government headed by Margaret Thatcher (Barnett
and
Curry, 1994; Cockerell, 1989; Leapman, 1987: Schlesinger
et al., 1983).
Yet, despite this, it continued to expose government to more
sustained,
critical scrutiny than the predominantly right-wing national press
which for
much of the 1980s was strongly committed to the aims and
objectives of the
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 89
Thatcher administration. While there was escalating conflict between broad-
casters and government, the relationship between most of the national press
_ and government during the Thatcherite era was, despite occasional spats,
remarkably harmonious.”
This contrast is illustrated by the furore over an ITV documentary, Death
on the Rock, which suggested that a British army SAS unit had unlawfully
killed members of the IRA in Gibraltar, and that this was being concealed in
the official version of events. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe,
asked the commercial television regulatory authority, the IBA, to prevent
transmission of the programme on the grounds that it would prejudice the
official inquest that was due to take place. The IBA refused, and the pro-
gramme was transmitted on 28 April 1988. The Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher,
was reported to have feelings about the programme that ran ‘much deeper
than being furious’, and her displeasure was echoed in much of the press. ‘TV
Slur on the SAS’ was the Daily Star’s headline (29 April 1988). ‘Fury Over
SAS “Trial by TV”’, reported the Daily Mail (29 April), which also
published a TV review calling the programme ‘a woefully one-sided look
at the killings’. The Sunday Times ran several articles which impugned the
reliability of the programme’s main witness, and cast doubt on the program-
me’s claims.
This public flak failed to intimidate. Thames Television, the makers of the
programme, convened an enquiry headed by Lord Windlesham (a former
Conservative Northern Ireland Minister) which concluded that, ‘taken as a
whole “Death on the Rock” did not offend against the due impartiality
requirement of the IBA and the Broadcasting Act 1981’. Although making
some criticisms, this internal report hailed the programme as ‘trenchant’ and
its makers as ‘painstaking and persistent’ (Windlesham and Rampton, 1989:
143). The programme duly won several prizes including the BAFTA award,
the TV industry’s top prize, which symbolically affirmed the broadcasting
community’s rejection of government and Conservative newspaper criticisms.
As a final snub, the programme was screened again in May 1991 as part of a
celebratory season to mark the 35th anniversary of the investigative TV
programme series, This Week, in which ‘Death On the Rock’ had first
appeared. This incident reveals the way in which a complex reality can
deviate from the script written by traditionalist ideologues. State-linked
watchdogs can bark, while private watchdogs sleep.
Yet, often, both can remain somnolent. While the vigilance of the press can
be blunted by the economic interests and partisan loyalties of its controllers,
the vigilance of public service broadcasting can be undermined by covert
pressure from governments. Public service broadcasting offers a number of
levers that can be manipulated by politicians (Kuhn, 1995; Blumler, 1992;
Ostergaard, 1992; Browne, 1989; Etzioni-Halevy, 1987). Broadcasting autho-
rities can be ‘packed’ with government supporters; financial pressure can be
exerted by a refusal to increase public funding; public flak can be generated in
an attempt to drive a wedge between broadcasters and the public; informal
and formal representations can be made to promote self-censorship; and, most
effective of all, the future of broadcasting organizations can be threatened
through legislative reorganization. These different sanctions have acquired a
sharper edge as a consequence of rising broadcasting costs, increased TV
90 James Curran

competition and the legitimation of political opposition to public service

broadcasting.
However, threats to the autonomy of private and public media tend not to be
evenly balanced because they do not usually encounter the same degree of
resistance, Circumstances vary, of course, between different societies and at
different points in time. In general, however, the independent watchdog role
of the media is more liable to be subverted in the deregulated than in the
regulated sector, in liberal democracies with mature public broadcasting
systems. Owners of private media have greater legitimacy within their
organizations than do government ministers seeking to influence public
service broadcasting organizations. They are less likely to encounter obstruc-
tion when seeking to assert control, whereas government ministers are hedged
in by checks and balances in autonomous broadcasting systems developed in
order to prevent their interference. Public concern about the manipulation of
private media is also less well developed than it is in relation to public media,
and so provides a less adequate form of protection.

Settling of Accounts

For the sake of clarity, it may be helpful to bring together the different threads
of the argument that is being advanced. The acclaimed public watchdog role
of the media does not legitimate, as some neo-liberals proclaim, a free market
media system. This is partly because the public-watchdog role — although
important — cannot plausibly be said to characterize the functioning of most
contemporary mass communications since these are given over largely to
entertainment. More importantly, the traditional liberal argument is based
on two false premises. One is that the state is the main threat to the welfare
of society, whereas in reality exploitation and oppression emanate from a
variety of different agencies in society. The second fallacy is that the media
become ‘independent’ by being independent of the state. This ignores the way
in which private media are increasingly linked through private ownership to
corporate structures of power in a form that compromises their independence,
and impairs their critical surveillance on behalf of the public.
To this can be added the further objection that much discussion is bede-
villed by system-logic, by assertions that pay little attention to the empirical
sociology of the media. There are in fact countervailing influences in both
public and private media that can prevent their subordination to the state or
private interests. These countervailing influences are highly developed in
some public broadcasting systems. They are much less developed in the
unregulated private sector.
In short, the complex issues raised by the public-watchdog functioning of
the media cannot be resolved by a simple, unthinking, catechistic subscription
to the free market. What is needed are practical measures which will
strengthen the critical vigilance of the media rather than a complacent
endorsement of one system.
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 91

Consumer Representation

The public-watchdog perspective is essentially negative and defensive. It

usually defines the role of the media in terms of monitoring government,
protecting the public, preventing those with power from overstepping the
mark. It thus stops short of the more positive, Habermasian conception of
the media as an instrument of the popular will.
However, there is one strand within traditional liberal thought with affi-
nities to Habermas’s approach. This defines the role of the media as that of the
‘fourth estate’. Some Victorian commentators argued that newspapers were
subject to the equivalent of an election every time they went on sale, in
contrast to politicians who were elected only infrequently (Boyce, 1978).
Consequently, they claimed, the press was a fully representative institution,
and should be accepted as a partner in the process of government. As Thomas
Carlyle argued, the press should be deemed ‘a power, a branch of government,
with inalienable weight in law-making’ derived from the will of the people
(Carlyle, 1907: 164).
This argument was reformulated in the twentieth century in less assertive
terms around the concept of the sovereign consumer. The core premise is that
‘the broad shape and nature of the press is ultimately determined by no one
but its readers’ due to the hidden hand of the free market (Whale, 1977: 85).
Media-owners in a market-based system must give people what they want if
they are to stay in business, and this ensures that the media as a whole reflect
the views and values of the buying public and act as a public mouthpiece.
This particular argument has been given mythological force in traditional
histories of the press (e.g. Siebert et al., 1956). In the case of Britain, the
received account is that the press progressed through three main stages
(Christie, 1970; Aspinall, 1973; Koss, 1981, 1984). In the first phase, it was
subject to state censorship and functioned almost as an extension of the state.
In the second stage, it was dominated by the political parties and served as an
extension of the party system. In the third and final stage (dating from the
1940s), the press came to be managed by market-led pragmatists who sought
to maximize sales rather than further a political viewpoint. This allegedly
established the consumer as the ultimate controller of the press, and trans-
formed newspapers into representatives of the public rather than of organized
political interests.
A sophisticated variation of the consumer representation thesis is to be
found also in critical, revisionist American sociology. As exemplified by
Alvin Gouldner (1976), it acknowledges weaknesses in the traditional free
market argument but nonetheless endorses its central conclusion. Gouldner
draws attention to the existence of ‘huge, immensely capitalised and increas-
ingly centralised media’ and argues that, in general, ‘ownership generates a
set of limits patterning the media in directions supportive of the property
system’. Yet he goes on to make a stark distinction between the market-based
media system which he views as ultimately liberating, and public ownership
of the media which he equates with the Soviet model and ‘a catastrophic
regression of rationality’. The grounds for making this manichean distinction
are two-fold: public ownership leads, in his view, to the fusion of official and
92 James Curran

media definitions of reality, whereas the market liberates the media even from
those who run it. The mainspring of this liberation is supposedly the drive to
make a profit. It can propel ‘leading publishers to tolerate (and promote) a
counter-culture hostile to their own long-term property interests ... ..They
will and have sold an adversary culture that openly alienates masses of youth
from their parents and government because, and so long as, it is profitable’.
There is thus, according to Gouldner, ‘the essential bourgeois contradiction
between producing anything that sells, on the one side, and allowing only
what is supportive of existing institutions, on the other’. This is resolved in
favour of short-term gain so that ‘in the end, the system subverts itself
because there exists no protection for its own future that might rule out quick
turnover profits at the cost of the system as a whole’ (Gouldner, 1976: 157).
There is thus a solid corpus of literature, written by people from different
disciplines and from different theoretical perspectives, which advances
essentially the same argument: the free market produces a media system
which responds to and expresses the views of the people. Like all persuasive
mythologies, it contains an element of truth. Its overall conclusion is none-
theless profoundly misleading — for at least six different reasons.
Firstly, market dominance by oligopolies has reduced media diversity,
audience choice and public control. In most western countries, there has
been a long-term reduction in the number of competing newspapers, and an
increase in local monopoly and chain ownership (Hoyer, Hadenius and
Weibull, 1975; Rosse, 1980; Curran and Seaton, 1996). This has been
paralleled by a long-term consolidation of centralized control of magazine,
record, book, and film production (Locksley and Garnham, 1988; Garnham,
1990; Murdock, 1990; Bagdikian, 1992; Sanchez-Tabernero et al., 1993). The
picture in the case of TV is more mixed because oligopolistic control of
commercial TV has been prevented or mitigated in some countries by
regulatory controls.
The scale of this oligopolistic domination of the media can be illustrated by
the experience of Australia, Britain and the USA. In Australia, two men
(Packer and Murdoch) controlled, in 1989, 84 per cent of the sales of the
thirty best selling magazines; Murdoch controlled in 1988 a remarkable 63 per
cent of metropolitan daily circulation, 59 per cent of Sunday circulation and
55 per cent of suburban local circulation; and three entrepreneurs dominated
the commercial TV market (Chadwick, 1989). In Britain, the top five
companies in each media sector controlled, in the mid-1980s, 93 per cent
of national newspaper sales, 66 per cent of video rentals, 59 per cent of
record, cassette and CD sales, 53 per cent of local evening newspaper sales,
4S per cent of ITV transmissions, and 40 per cent of book sales (Curran and
Seaton, 1991). In the USA, four companies control about two-thirds of the TV
market; three publishers dominate the national news magazine market; and
fre the local press is controlled by chains (Bagdikian, 1992; Hoynes,

Free market apologists emphasize two things in relation to these trends.

They point out correctly that the movement towards market domination by a
few corporations in certain markets has not been continuous and uninterrupted
(Royal Commission on the Press, 1977; Burnett and Weber, 1988). Some also
point to the expansion of part of the media system and argue that this is
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 93
reviving competition. The growth of specialized magazines, computerized
newsletters, desktop publishing, local radio stations, on-line services and,
above all, TV channels are all cited as evidence of endogenous market
regeneration (Pool, 1983; Compaine, 1985; Dahlgren, 1991).
These are important qualifications; but what they overlook is three powerful
countervailing and interrelated trends that are resulting in increasing domina-
tion of the media as a whole in a national context, and increasing market
power in an international context. Since 1960, there has been a rapid accel-
eration of mergers and acquisitions of corporations in different media sectors,
producing major multimedia combines. The general trend towards privatiza-
tion of broadcasting, and the growth of the new TV industries, has also
enabled media conglomerates to expand into a sector where their growth
’ had been curtailed previously. There has also been a further shift towards
the integration of the global market in TV programmes, books and business
information (following trends already well established in the film and music
sectors), which has enabled some companies to extend their market reach.
These trends have coalesced to produce private concentrations of media
power that are unprecedented. The most far-flung is Murdoch’s News Cor-
poration which controls a newspaper empire stretching east-west from Boston
to Budapest and north-south from London to Queensland, an extended
magazine and book empire incorporating Harper Collins, and a TV and film
empire including Fox TV and Twentieth Century Fox in the USA, British Sky
Broadcasting in northern Europe, and Star TV in Asia. To this has been added
joint ventures with Telstra, the Australian telecommunications company and
MCI, the second largest, long-distance telephone operator in the US, for the
development of on-line and interactive services. Major European based
conglomerates include the Bertelsmann group which has a massive book-
TV-film-radio-magazine empire in Germany, including both the RTL Plus
television channel and Germany’s largest cable TV company, in addition to
the American book and record majors, Bantam and RCA, amongst other
foreign media interests; and Berlusconi’s Fininvest group which controls
the three main commercial TV channels, and extensive film and press
interests, in Italy in addition to television holdings in Germany (Telefunf ),
Spain (Telecinco) and Canada. These are matched by major conglomerates
like Time-Warner, International Thompson and Sony based respectively in
the USA, Canada and Japan. The enormous resources commanded by these
conglomerates, their large economies of scale, and extensive domination of
linked markets, has undermined the functioning of the market as a free and
open contest, a level playing field in which all participants have an equal
chance of success.
The second, related flaw in the consumer representation thesis is that the
rising capitalization of the media industries has restricted entry into the
market. In Britain, for example, it currently costs over £20 million to
establish a new national daily newspaper, over £30 million to establish a
new cable TV station, and over £500 million to establish a new satellite TV
business. It is still possible to enter more cheaply the marginal media sectors —
such as local free sheets, local radio stations and specialist magazines — but
these have much less influence by comparison with the commanding heights
of the communications industry. It is also possible to attempt to launch into the
94 James Curran

main deregulated media sectors with a relatively small capital outlay, and
even to maintain a nominal presence by operating on a very small budget with
manageable losses. But low investment often leads to low quality and high
price, a combination that usually marginalizes these ventures from the outset.
The heavy capitalization of the media industry has created, in effect, a zone
of influence in which dominant economic forces have a privileged position,
and to which other significant social forces are denied direct, unmediated
access. As Nicholas Garnham comments: ‘we would find it strange now if we
made voting rights dependent upon purchasing power or property rights and
yet access to the mass media, as both channels of information and fora of
debate, is largely controlled by just such power and property rights’ (Garn-
ham, 1986: 47).
It is in this context that free market celebration of the recent expansion of
some media sectors needs to be assessed critically. The belief is that more
media outlets has produced more diversity and choice. What this increasingly
fashionable argument ignores, however, is that prevailing market structures
constrain and impose limits on the ‘diversity’ generated by expansion. More
need not necessarily mean more of the same, as some left-wing critics
maintain. What it does mean is that choice is always pre-structured by the
conditions of competition. In a contemporary context, this often means a class
filter imposed through the high costs of market entry; an unequal relationship
between large and small competitors; oligopolistic market domination; and
the constraints imposed by catering for the mass market. The consequences of
this prestructuring can be briefly illuminated by recent changes in American
television and the British press.
In the USA, a large increase in the number of TV channels has expanded
cultural and genre diversity. The basic diet of the networks has been expanded
by counter-programming, independent stations and, above all, by cable TV
stations to make available a choice between cops and robber series, sitcoms,
chat shows, game shows, soaps, classic comedy TV shows, stand-up comics,
Hollywood film classics, art house movies from Europe, newish American
films, children’s cartoons, foreign-language programmes for ethnic minori-
ties, and much more besides. But what it has failed to achieve is a correspond-
ing increase in the ideological diversity of public affairs programming. The
burgeoning number of local independent stations provides, according to
Entman’s pioneering research, ‘little political information, let alone account-
ability news’ (Entman, 1989: 110). CNN has also introduced two new news
channels, which provide instantaneous coverage within much the same
ideological framework as the three news networks (CBS, NBC and ABC).
What none of the new commercial enterprises has done is to offer a leftish
‘take’ on the news. Indeed, the greatest political diversity is to be found
significantly in the current affairs output of PBS and a relative newcomer,
C-Span, both non-profit organizations outside the economic market, which are
undercapitalized and marginalized.
Similarly, the recent expansion of the British national press has led to more
consumer choice without expanding substantially its ideological range. The
introduction of cost-cutting new technology led to the launch of eight new
national papers between 1986 and 1990. However, market leaders forced up
costs by increasing paging and promotion in a deliberate attempt to squeeze
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 95
out competition. In the event, only five new nationals survived into the
1990s." Of these, the majority continued to make a loss, and not one was
aligned to the left. The chasm between editorial and public opinion in Britain
_ persisted. In the 1992 general election, the Conservative party gained the
pe of 70 per cent of national daily circulation but only 42 per cent of the
vote.
In short, distortions in the market require the media representation thesis to
be heavily qualified. When this thesis was first advanced, it had considerably
more validity than it has now. It really was the case in the pre-industrial phase
of the press that a wide spectrum of individuals or social groups could set up,
so to speak, their trestle table in the free market place of ideas. This produced
a choice between ideologically diverse papers — conditions in which the
- ‘public’ could exercise significant influence over the press and be represented
by it (Curran, 1977). This has long ceased to be the case even if traditional
free market arguments continue to be advanced as if nothing has changed.
The third flaw in the consumer representation thesis is that it ignores the
way in which the relationship between media and audiences has been
transformed since the nineteenth century. The audiences for ‘popular’ media
have become much larger and also more heterogeneous in terms of their
political and social composition: they no longer necessarily have a shared
set of beliefs or common interest that can be ‘represented’. The rise of
entertainment content in news media has also reduced the desire for political
reinforcement as a motivation for media consumption. A view of the media,
formed during a period when politicized newspapers served highly differen-
tiated audiences, no longer corresponds to the reality of the contemporary
media. The Sun, the biggest selling daily in Britain, illustrates the change that
has taken place. It devotes less than 15 per cent of its editorial content to
public affairs news and comment, and sells to a politically divided audience of
over 10 million readers. While it can be argued plausibly that the Sun
connects to structures of feeling among its readers (Holland, 1983), it
certainly does not represent them in a political sense. Thus only a minority
of its readers voted Conservative in the 1987 and 1992 general elections — the
choice insistently advocated by the paper (Harrop, 1988; MacArthur, 1992).
Fourthly, the revisionist claim that media controllers subordinate their
ideological commitments to the imperatives of the market is only partly
true. It is based on selective arguments that simplify and misrepresent a
complex situation. Thus, it is claimed that the dispersal of share ownership
is producing a divorce between ownership and control of the media; that the
new breed of media controllers are market-led pragmatists; and that the
media, in a competitive environment, must submit to the rule of the con-
sumer. In fact, a large number of communications conglomerates — including
very large and extended ones — are still controlled by a single shareholder or
family (Sanchez-Tabernero et al., 1993; Herman and Chomsky, 1988). A
significant number of media controllers are ideologically committed rather
than politically neutral businessmen (Curran and Seaton, 1996; Frenkel, 1994;
Tunstall and Palmer, 1991). Above all, the rise of entertainment and the
growth of oligopoly has increased the relative political autonomy of media
owners in relation to the market.
All three points are illustrated by Rupert Murdoch’s career (Munster, 1985;
96 James Curran

Leapman, 1987; Shawcross, 1993). He has generally controlled the media

enterprises he has invested in; his views have become increasingly right-wing,
particularly since the early 1970s; and, in advancing his beliefs, he has
skilfully negotiated the currents of the market rather than being Swept
passively along by them. Thus, on occasion, he has bowed to strong market
signals: he refrained, for example, from changing the character of the radical
New York magazine, Village Voice. At other times, he has trimmed when it
has seemed advantageous to do so: the Victoria Sun and the New South Wales
Herald both backed the right-wing Labour leader, Bob Hawke, in the 1987
election when it was in Murdoch’s corporate interest to allow editorial
flexibility. He also bent prudently to the wind when new technology facili-
tated the emergence of a new competitor, the London /ndependent: his
appointment of an independently minded Conservative journalist, Simon
Jenkins, as editor of the Times in 1990 was a belated recognition that the
Times’s Thatcherite politics was causing it to lose readers to the new paper.
Yet, whenever possible, he has pushed his papers to the right by hand-picking
editors with right-wing views and by bombarding inherited or caretaker
editors with aggressively worded right-wing advice (Evans, 1983; Giles,
1986). Indeed what has been most striking about these displays of ideological
commitment has been his willingness to move some of his papers — such as
the London Sun, Sunday Times and Times — to the radical right in opposition
to the views of the majority of its readers (Curran and Seaton, 1996). To see
Murdoch as a passive absorbent of market dictates is to adopt too mechanistic
and simplistic a view of the market; it also underestimates Murdoch’s ability
and the strength of his convictions.
Fifthly, the concept of sovereign consumer control ignores the variety of
influences which shape media content. The familiar image of the trader in the
market-place of ideas, which regularly recurs in free market rhetoric, ignores
the reality of highly bureaucratized media organizations, with fixed routines
and structures, whose journalists rely heavily on a restricted range of sources.
It simply overlooks, in other words, the voluminous sociological literature
which shows the varied ways in which audience pressures are selectively
interpreted, ‘refracted’ and even resisted within media organizations.'!
Sixthly, the idealized notion of market democracy ignores the central
financial role of advertising in commercial broadcasting and the press.
Critics of advertising tend to focus on the direct editorial influence exerted
by advertisers through the withholding of advertising support for ideological
reasons, and the pressure that this generates on media clients to accommodate
to or anticipate advertisers’ ideological concerns (Hoch, 1974; Barnouw,
1978; Bagdikian, 1992). The extent of this influence varies considerably
between different media, and is often strongly resisted by editorial staff
(Curran, 1986). Arguably, the more important way in which advertisers
shape the media is through more indirect processes. The structure of the
press is oriented more towards upscale than downscale audiences because
the former generates a larger advertising subsidy per reader (Baker, 1994;
Curran, 1986). This is true to a lesser extent of commercial television because
programmes select and deliver audiences with less precision than press
publications. However, advertising pressure does cause some programme
providers to court affluent viewers at the expense of low-income
viewers in
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 97
order to garner higher advertising receipts, most notably in the USA (Gitlin,
1994; D’Acci, 1994). Advertising thus causes economic inequalities in
society to be reproduced in the structure or audience orientation of some
~ media.
The tule of the individual consumer turns out, on close inspection, to be
subject to multiple limitations and distortions. There is also a more general
sense in which the traditional conception of the media as a public representa-
tive does not seem to fit the contemporary media. A view formed when most
media were partisan and ‘spoke for’ clearly defined constituencies seems less
appropriate to market-based news systems, as in the USA, which are pre-
dominantly bi-partisan and define themselves in terms of disseminating
‘information’.
The view of the media as tribunes speaking for particular constituencies
thus seems almost obsolete. Yet, it is still worth retaining a notion of the
media as a representative agency. The market also has a role to play in
making media organizations responsive to the public. To these themes we
shall return. It is sufficient to note here that conventional formulations about
the representative role of the media need to be rethought.

Informational Role

In addition to the concept of the media as a watchdog and representative,

commentators have also stressed its ‘informational’ role. This is usually
portrayed in terms of facilitating self-expression, promoting public rational-
ity and enabling collective self-determination. These different functions of the
media can only be fulfilled adequately, it is argued, through the processes of a
free market.
Thus, it is claimed that the free market allows anyone to publish an opinion
who wishes to. This ensures allegedly that all significant points of view are
aired, and that a wide range of information is made available from diverse and
antagonistic sources. This promotes good judgement and wise government.
Originally, this claim was advanced in an assertive form based on the
assumption that truth would always triumph over error in an unrestricted
debate. However, the decline of Enlightenment notions of rationalism, and
the naive empiricism that underpinned it, has caused this argument to be
reformulated in a more circumspect way. Typical of this more cautious
approach is the American jurist Oliver Holmes’s much-quoted contention
‘that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas —
that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted
in the competition of the market . . .’ (cit. Barron, 1975: 320). This argument
has been elaborated in a variety of ways. The free market mobilizes the
collective intellectual resources of the nation. It fosters public rationality by
enabling collective judgements to be made in the knowledge of alternative
courses of action; or, more simply, ‘a free marketplace of ideas has a self
righting tendency to correct errors and biases’ (Kelley and Donway, 1990:
90).
He market system is also celebrated as the best possible way of facilitating
98 James Curran

self-government. Free market media inform citizens from a variety of view-

points; they keep open the channels of communication between government
and governed, and between different groups in society; and they provide a
neutral zone for the formation of public opinion. In short, the processes of the
market are central to the exercise of popular sovereignty.
These hosannas have come increasingly under attack even within the camp
committed to the market system. One line of criticism has been that market
failure has limited individual freedom of expression, and consequently
prevented public debate from being adequately informed by diverse
sources. As the influential Hutchins Commission argued as long ago as
1947, after noting the development of media concentration and restricted
market entry: ‘the right of free public discussion has therefore lost its earlier
reality’ (Commission on Freedom of the Press, reprinted 1974). This then
prompted the argument that public rationality has been impaired, and collec-
tive direction has been weakened, because people with something useful to
say have not always been given a chance to say it. As the American political
theorist, Alexander Meiklejohn, put it: ‘self-government is nonsense unless
the “self”? which governs is able and determined to make its will effective’
(Meiklejohn, 1983: 276).
Critics also opened up another line of attack, arguing that the inherent
characteristics of the market deplete the informational role of the media. The
British equivalent of the Hutchins Commission — the 1947-49 Royal Commis-
sion on the Press — claimed that the press was failing to inform adequately the
people because it was a product of the market. ‘The failure of the Press to
keep pace with the requirements of society’, it concluded, ‘is attributable
largely to the plain fact that an industry that lives by the sale of its products
must give the public what the public will buy’ (RCP, 1949: 177). By
implication, the inadequacy of the press was merely a reflection of the
inadequacy of the public, printed large. This paternalistic judgement was
subsequently reworked in a form that alleged that the pressure to maximize
sales and ratings led to common denominator provision that underestimated
the abilities of the public (Hoggart, 1957; Thompson, 1974). This very British
debate was superseded by a less overtly moralistic analysis, on both sides of
the Atlantic, which highlighted some of the characteristics of news produced
within a market-oriented system: information that is simplified, condensed,
personalized, decontextualized, with a stress on action rather than process,
visualization rather than abstraction, stereotype rather than human complexity
(Newcomb, 1987; Inglis, 1990; Gitlin, 1994; Hallin, 1994).!? Since many of
these criticisms were predicated on the assumption that these deficiencies
were a by-product of processing news as a commodity for the mass market,
they were an attack, by implication, on the notion that market processes
safeguard the informational role of the media.

Professional Responsibility Model

At this point, it is worth following a short detour. Across the horizon loomed
at a convenient moment the figure of the media professional, with the perfect
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 99
timing of the American cavalry riding to the rescue. It is no coincidence that
both the Hutchins Commission and the Royal Commission of the Press
concluded at about the same time that media professionalism was the solu-
tion to the shortcomings that they diagnosed. Journalists were urged to adopt
the mantle of the professions. In this way, the media would be able to fulfill its
informational role and serve the public interest (Commission on Freedom of
the Press, 1974; RCP, 1949).
Their reports were followed by a series of ringing public endorsements of
professional responsibility. The cult of professionalism became a way of
reconciling market flaws with the traditional conception of the democratic
tole of the media. It asserted journalists’ commitment to higher goals —
neutrality, detachment, a commitment to truth. It involved the adoption of
certain procedures for verifying facts, drawing on different sources, present-
ing rival interpretations. In this way, the pluralism of opinion and information,
once secured through the clash of adversaries in the free market, could be
recreated through the ‘internal pluralism’ of monopolistic media. Market
pressures to sensationalize and trivialize the presentation of news could be
offset by a commitment to inform. The democratic role of the media could
thus be rehabilitated without structural reform. ;
The ideology of professional responsibility has found numerous celebrants
for a variety of reasons, not all noble.'* But at its core is a seductive idea:
professionalism means that the journalist’s first duty is to serve the public. It
proposes — certainly, as presented by its more radical advocates — that
journalists should act as a counterweight to forces, both internal and exter-
nal, that threaten the integrity of the media, including the controllers of media
combines, advertisers, publicists and government (Hallin, 1994). By empha-
sizing accuracy and facticity, media professionalism seems to be defining the
role of the media in a way that will assist people to make up their minds for
themselves. Professionalism is thus seemingly a philosophy of empowerment
rather than of control: professional self-interest appears, in this case, to
coincide with the public interest.’*
Professional commitments cannot exist in a vacuum, however. Journalists
operate within certain structures which influence — and can distort — their
definition of professionalism (Tuchman, 1978; Schlesinger, 1987; Tiffen,
1989; Bevins, 1990). The exercise of professional judgement also presup-
poses a high degree of autonomy. Although most American journalists stress
their operational freedom, the evidence suggest that their journalistic auton-
omy has declined since the early 1970s, particularly in large news organiza-
tions (Weaver and Wilhoit, 1986). Journalistic autonomy has also been
revoked or curbed by interventionist media managements elsewhere (Eric-
son, Baranek and Chan, 1987; Frenkel, 1994; Curran and Seaton, 1996). Put
simply, professionalism is not assured within media organizations which do
not have as their central goal the realization of professional norms. This is,
indeed, one of the arguments for public service broadcasting.
Professionalism is also vulnerable because it is not clear on what basis it is
justified. Journalism does not have the entry requirements, credentials and
self-regulatory controls normally associated with a profession. Journalists
have consequently an ambiguous status, and this can weaken their vocation.
A repeated criticism levelled against journalists is that they tend to accept too
100 James Curran

readily the definitions of events provided by the powerful (Hall et al., 1978;
Entman, 1989; Abramson, 1990). But this is inscribed within a particular set
of professional beliefs which defines implicitly the role of a journalist as a
subaltern one of mediating authoritatively sourced information. Another
version of professionalism stresses truth-seeking but this too is often inter-
preted in a restricted and defensive way. One truth-seeking strategy is the
attempted ‘scientization’ of news reporting: the focusing on technical, stra-
tegic and insider perspectives of politics in a way that enables journalists to
avoid being exposed as necessarily subjective participants in the political
process (Hallin, 1994). Reporting elections, for example, in terms of cam-
paign strategies and game plans, as a glorified horse race rather than as a
democratic inquest, enables the journalist to take refuge in a ‘neutral’ form of
interpretation. Another defensive strategy involves an almost mechanistic
reliance on conventional news values. This can lead to the manipulation of
the media by publicists skilled at generating news bites and photo-opportu-
nities, and exploiting the news codes operated by journalists (Gitlin, 1991).
A further problem is that professionalism is itself ambiguous. It means
different things to different people, and indeed different cultures. In the USA,
TV news items on the major networks tend to take the form of structured,
visually integrated, narrative texts whose meaning is relatively ‘closed’. In
Italy, by contrast — and, indeed, in much of Europe — TV news tends to be
more ‘open’, with more ‘talking heads’, in which greater prominence is given
to contrasting interpretations of events (Hallin and Mancini, 1984).'> This
divergence reflects the more dominant political and interpretive role of
political parties in many European countries compared with the USA, and
the more ratings-conscious commercialism of American TV. But it also
reflects a different definition of professionalism, predicated on a different
understanding of the place of broadcasters in society. In the USA, the accent
is On entertainment and disclosure — reporting news as a structured ‘story’
whose meaning is clearly signified by the reporter. In many European
countries, greater emphasis is given to the role of broadcaster as a factual
witness and passive mediator, who enables the viewer to have access to
competing interpretations of the world.!
In sum, the ideology of professionalism does not provide an adequate way
of realizing the democratic role of the media, although it is sometimes
presented in these terms by critical writers in the free market tradition. This
approach is misconceived partly because professional commitments need
structures to support them, and partly because the code of professionalism
is itself ambiguous. This ambiguity masks an unresolved debate about the
democratic role of the media.

Defects of Traditional Perspective

This debate is unresolved partly because there is no agreement about what

form the informational role of the media should take. Critics point out that
traditional conceptions tend to be framed in terms of individual-centred
understandings of the democratic process (Curran, 1991). The role of the
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 101
media is defined in terms of briefing the voter, affording a conduit of
communication between government and the citizen, and providing the basis
on which public opinion (conceived as the aggregate of individual opinion) is
formed.
: This perspective is incomplete because it harks back to an almost pre-
industrial conception of polity. In modern liberal democracies, individuals
seek to advance their interests, look for protection, and try to influence public
opinion and government through collective organizations such as political
parties, trade unions, business associations and the myriad structures of civil
society. These are the building blocks of the contemporary democratic
system. Traditional liberal theory has nothing to say about how the media
should relate to these, and enhance their democratic performance.
The second defect of the traditional approach is that it maintains an
artificial and untenable distinction between information and representation.
It does this by detaching information from its political and social context.
Thus, the traditional criterion for judging the successful functioning of the
informational role of the media is normally held to be one of two things: the
‘quality’ of their discourse or the number of media outlets which, as Horwitz
(1991) shows in an admirable essay, is increasingly the yardstick being
adopted in American jurisprudence.
Missing from this analysis is a recognition that ideas and systems of
representation are part of the discursive arsenal which competing groups
use to advance their interests. This point can be understood in a very simple
and rudimentary way in terms of political agendas. Political parties on the
right tend, in general, to emphasize law and order, defence and international
relations, because these are areas where they are often perceived by voters to
be strong. Parties on the left tend to emphasize welfare and employment,
because these are issues on which they tend to score highly. Rival political
parties consequently vie with each other at election time to get broadcasters to
make their ‘issues’ the dominant themes of election coverage. How broad-
casters respond to — and, in effect, arbitrate between — these rival agendas can
have a significant influence on the outcome of tight elections.’
A comparable but more complex process of contestation takes - place
between divergent social groups. Different ways of interpreting and making
sense of society, different linguistic codes and conceptual categories, different
chains of association and versions of ‘common sense’ privilege the interests of
some while disadvantaging others. The media’s informational roleis never
purely informational: it is also a way of arbitrating between the discursive
frameworks of organized groups in ways that can potentially affect the
distribution of resources and rewards in society.
The case for ideological diversity is thus not simply that it promotes a
rational debate based on an awareness of alternatives. It is also a way of
promoting social justice in which divergent social groups have the opportu-
nity to define their interests in their own terms and promote them in the public
domain. It is in this context that the role of the media in facilitating social
agreement should be understood. Traditionalists argue that the media should
mediate conflict through the determination of accurate information and
contrary opinion. This is an entirely reasonable proposition on the face of
things. However, it can mask, in reality, a process of manipulation in which
102 James Curran

one class or social coalition is able to naturalize and universalize its interests
because it dominates the channels of cultural production. The media may give
the appearance of distributing accurate information and facilitating a debate
based on conflicting argument. Indeed, it may actually be doing both these
things. However, by confining this debate to ‘legitimate’ areas of controversy,
and by grounding it on assumptions that do not challenge the structure of
social power, it may also be engineering a contrived form of social consent.
The third limitation of the classical liberal model — and, one that is often
alluded to — is that it overstates the rationality of public discourse. As Chafee
(1983: 294) puts it, ‘I can no longer think of open discussion as operating like
an electric mixer. . . . Run it a little while and truth will rise to the top with the
dregs of error going down to the bottom’. His reservations were based on
distortions in the distribution of information, the outpouring of information on
a scale that is impossible for any one individual to assimilate and, above all,
the subjective element in making judgements (cf. Peterson, 1956). This last
point has been highlighted by research emphasizing non-rational elements in
opinion formation, and by studies emphasizing the highly selective way in
which people assimilate communications (Graber, 1988; Neuman, Just and
Crigler, 1992). In reality, public discourse does not always follow the rational
pathways of the classic liberal model.
The fourth, and related, limitation is that entertainment is usually omitted
from conventional analysis of the media’s democratic functioning because it
does not conform to a classic liberal conception of rational exchange. But, in
fact, media entertainment is one means by which people engage at an intuitive
and expressive level in a public dialogue about the direction of society
(Curran, 1991). For example, how crime is represented in fiction — whether
it is portrayed in terms of innate evil or interpreted in a social context — offers
understandings that potentially influence attitudes to penal policy. More
generally, media fiction provides cognitive maps that structure and interpret
reality, and provide a commentary upon our common social processes. It is in
this sense an integral part of the media’s ‘informational’ role.
Entertainment is also excluded because it is assumed that the sole demo-
cratic purpose of the public debate staged by the media is to effect changes of
government policy and exercise democratic control over the state. This
implies too restricted a definition of its purpose, based on an unacceptable
distinction between public and private life that the feminist slogan, ‘politics is
personal’, rightly challenges. The normative debate conducted through media
fiction is an important means by which social norms guiding human interac-
tion are affirmed, adapted and revised (Newcomb and Hirsch, 1984).
The fifth defect of the traditional model is, of course, that it fails to
distinguish between the legal right to publish, and the economic opportunity
to do so. For reasons that have already been given, limitations on market entry
restrict individual freedom of expression. But it also restricts — and this is a
category that does not feature in traditional analysis — freedom of group
expression. Whole groups in society, not merely individuals, have restricted
access to the public sphere through the media. This has undermined, in turn,
self-government in the interests of all. It has limited the ability of sections of
the community to voice effectively their interests, their opinions, their view of
relative priorities. This has prevented other groups from responding to, indeed
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 103
even sometimes being aware of, these different definitions.!® The democratic
process for making collective judgements about the development of society
has thus been weakened because it has not been, in an adequate and attainable
sense, collective.

Alternative Perspective

Implicit or explicit in these criticisms are suggestions for rethinking the

informational role of the media. These can be briefly stated in summary form.
_The public dialogue staged by the media should give the public access to a
diversity of values and perspectives in entertainment as well as public affairs
coverage. By generating a plurality of understandings, the media should
enable individuals to reinterpret their social experience, relate this to alter-
native conceptions of society and human nature, and question the assumptions
and ideas of the dominant culture. It should also enable every one, on the basis
of diverse perspectives and sources, to decide for themselves how best to
safeguard and advance their welfare in collective as well as individual terms,
and weigh this in the balance in relation to alternative definitions of the wider,
public interest.
This will be emancipatory in a number of ways. It will give subordinate
classes and groups increased access to ideas and arguments opposed to those
that legitimate their subordination, and enable them to explore more fully
ways of changing the structure of society to their advantage. Media fiction
that enables people to explore imaginatively what it is like to be ‘other’, in
different circumstances and with different formative experiences, is also
likely to promote empathy and understanding, and assist in the creation of
alliances for social advance.
Another (and complementary) democratic function of the media system is
to act as an agency of representation. It should be organized in a way that
enables diverse social groups and organizations to express alternative view-
points. This goes beyond, however, simply disseminating diverse opinion in
the public domain. Part of the media system should function in a way that
invigorates civil society. It should assist collective organizations to mobilize
support; help them to operate as representative vehicles for the views of their
supporters; and aid them to register effective protests and develop and
promulgate alternatives. In other words, the representational role of the
media includes helping to promote the conditions in which alternative
viewpoints and perspectives are brought fully into play.
Diversity at both the level of expression and consumption are two sides of
the same coin. However, underlying the stress on diversity of expression is
also an implicit commitment to promoting participation in the democratic
structures of society as a means of enabling different groups to define and
articulate their interests in societies where differences and conflicts are often
repressed. It implies a distancing from the classical liberal model in which
private individuals, with an underlying harmony of interest, are brought into
communion with each other through mass communications in order to divine
and pursue their common purpose. This is a recipe for control from above,
104 James Curran

given the way in which elites tend to define the agendas and terms of
reference of mass communications in societies characterized by a low level
of democratic activity. _
The third democratic function of the media is to assist the realization of the
objectives of society through agreement or compromise between opposed
groups. The media should contribute to this process by facilitating demo-
cratic procedures for resolving conflict and defining collectively agreed aims.
For example, the media should inform the electorate about the political
choices involved in elections, and so help to constitute elections as defining
moments for collective decision about the direction of society. The media
should also facilitate the exercise of continuing public pressure on govern-
ment by giving due publicity to the self-organized groups of civil society. It
should also be recognized that the core media of society are also an important
mechanism for collective reconciliation. They have an obligation to ensure
that diverse groups participate in the dialogue they mediate as part of the
process of furthering equitable agreement or compromise.
However, one problem arising from this conception of a democratic media
system is that it will make the attainment of collective agreement more
difficult. In most societies, the media are linked to the hierarchy of power,
and tend to promote social integration and control. An approach that seeks, by
contrast, to destabilize this link, and allocate effective communications
resources to subordinate and dissident groups is liable to unleash fissiparous
forces in ways that are unpredictable. It could result in reinforcing class and
other forms of resistance to the social order. Equally, it could also lead to the
strengthening of solidarities based on ethnicity, religion and region at a time
when general societal ties appear to be weakening.
There needs, therefore, to be built into this conception of an alternative
communications system a conscious commitment to achieving some kind of
equilibrium between conflict and conciliation, fragmentation and unity. The
intention is to create spaces in which differently constituted groups can
communicate effectively with themselves in order to facilitate the self-
organization needed to advance their collective interests in society. At the
same time, these divergent groups need also to be brought into an arena of
common discourse where reciprocal debate can take place in order to facilitate
a peaceful compromise. Underlying this argument, indeed informing the
entire conception of this alternative approach, is a desire to replace tacit
acceptance of the social order based on social domination with an equitable
social settlement based on the effective articulation and conciliation of
conflicting interests.
_ What might this media system look like in terms of structure and organiza-
tion? What kinds of journalism would it foster? These questions beg further
questions in the sense that the design of any media system needs to take into
account the generation of pleasure and cultural provision, which are issues
that lie outside the terms of reference of this essay. Any prescription based
only on what serves the democratic needs of society can only be a partial input
to a larger debate. But, with this qualification in mind, what does a re-
evaluation of the democratic functioning of the media imply in terms of
concrete practice?
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 105

Towards a Working Model

The outline that follows may seem to American eyes detached from political
reality. Although it does not exist in any country as a functioning model,
however, it draws upon and composites features derived from the practice of
different European countries. Indeed, it is proposed in this form precisely
because it works with the grain of what is attainable.
The model can be viewed at a glance in Figure 5.1. It has a core sector,
constituted by general interest TV channels which reach a mass audience.
They provide the means by which divergent groups are able to communicate,
and also be exposed to, differing opinions, perspectives and values. Because
these channels still reach the majority of the public, they offer an opportunity
for different classes and groups to take part in the same public dialogue about
the direction of society. They provide scope, therefore, for different groups to
interact with one another and engage in a reciprocal discussion. They also
make widely available different understandings of society enabling indivi-
duals to explore where their self-interest lies, and relate this to rival defini-
tions of the common interest.
These mass TV channels also provide a sheet anchor in a highly
differentiated media system which is organized to accentuate difference. By
providing a common stock of shared experience, by conferring prominence on
communal symbols of identification, by transmitting public events that enable
society to see itself in an idealized way or which celebrate a shared value or
memory, they serve as a focal point of collective unity and reinforce ties of
social association in society (Peters, 1989; Scannell and Cardiff, 1991; Dayan
and Katz, 1992). They are important within this framework as agencies that
promote a culture of mutuality that facilitate agreement or compromise.
This core sector is fed by peripheral media sectors, three of which are
intended to facilitate the expression of dissenting and minority views. The

Private enterprise
sector

Social Public
Civic
market Service
sector
sector TV

Professional
sector

Fig. 5.1
106 James Curran

civic media sector consists of channels of communication linked to organized

groups and social networks. The professional media sector occupies a space
wholly independent of both the state and the market in which professional
communicators relate to the public on their own terms, with the minimum of
constraint. The social market sector sustains provision by groups with limited
financial resources. To this is added a conventional market sector which
relates to the public as consumers, and whose central rationale within the
media system is to act as a restraint on the over-entrenchment of minority
concerns to the exclusion of majority pleasures.
This highly differentiated media system, in which different sectors are
organized on different principles, is designed to facilitate the expression of
a plurality of perspectives. Publicly accountable in multiple ways, it 1s
intended to give rise to a media system that is broadly representative of the
society it serves. Above all, its architecture is designed to create spaces for the
communication of opposed viewpoints, and a common space for their media-
tion. Both the detail and thinking behind this outline are explored further
below in the hope that it will trigger further debate.

Core Media: Public Service Solutions

In principle, the best way to organize the core media sector is to entrust them
to public service organizations (whether in the form of publicly owned or
publicly regulated commercial organizations). Potentially, this offers the best
prospect of opening up broad social access to the airwaves, and enabling
viewers to plug into different views and perspectives. It also creates the
framework in which general interest channels find peak-time space for
news and current affairs, and are committed to wider social and cultural
objectives (such as making high-quality programmes). The system of pay-
ment for public service organizations also ensures that there are no second-
class citizens excluded by price from the general forum of public debate. A
deregulated commercial system will, by contrast, tend to restrict the range of
views and social interests represented on general interest channels, give lower
priority to public affairs coverage and subordinate wider objectives to
maximizing audiences.
However, the theory of public service broadcasting does not necessarily
correspond to reality. One problem is that government can undermine the
independence of public broadcasting institutions, and restrict the public
debate conducted through their channels. The travails of the French and
Greek broadcasting systems provide a particularly stark cautionary tale in
this respect, although government control is diminishing in the first case
(Kuhn, 1995; Dimitras, 1992). There are two classic ways of dealing with
this problem. One is the liberal corporatist model, perhaps best exemplified
by the German broadcasting system, in which representatives from different
social groups are appointed to broadcasting authorities and given real power.
This pluralistic system of control is buttressed by institutional and legal
guidelines, a constitutional guarantee both of freedom of expression and of
audience access to diverse information, and the devolution of power (Porter
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 107
and Hasselbach, 1991a; 1991b; Hoffman-Riem, 1992a; 1992b). The other
approach, exemplified by the British broadcasting system, is the civil service
model in which ‘public trustees’ for the nation are appointed to broadcasting
authorities, but in which broadcasters are given in reality a considerable
amount of freedom to interpret public service guidelines within depoliticized
institutions (Curran and Seaton, 1996; Tunstall, 1993; McNair, 1993).
The former incorporates diverse political pressures as a way of frustrating
government control, while the latter seeks to insulate broadcasting from
political pressure by emphasizing its independent neutrality. Of the two, argues
Etzioni-Halevy (1987) in a prescient study, the latter is the more brittle and
vulnerable if exposed to a sustained government onslaught. The British
broadcasting system maintained, as we have seen, a critical relationship to
government during a period characterized by an unprecedentedly aggressive
assault on its autonomy (Barnett and Curry, 1994). But this chastening
experience underlines the need to reinforce the autonomy of the British
broadcasting system by distancing it still further from government. One
insulating device is to limit government financial control by index-linking
the licence fee to the rise of national earnings; another is to remove the
government’s power of unmediated patronage by ‘franchising’ representative
organizations and broadcasting staff to elect or nominate people to broad-
casting authorities.
A second, more intractable, problem is that public service broadcasting
organizations tend to be unduly influenced by the political class (even if they
offer more ideologically ‘open’ and diverse systems of representation than
commercial TV in the United States). The German and British broadcasting
systems both exemplify this weakness. In the German case, the pluralistic
pattern of appointments to broadcasting councils is insufficiently representa-
tive. It needs to include fewer party nominees, and more representatives from
social, cultural and other organizations including ‘guestworkers’ and the new
social movements (such as feminists and environmentalists). In the case of
British broadcasting, the core concept of pluralistic representation is surpris-
ingly absent in the legal basis and official reports on broadcasting organiza-
tions and needs to be made an explicit objective of the broadcasting system.
This said, the finetuning of broadcast rules and structures, though desirable, is
unlikely to transform existing practice. This is because the nature of the public
dialogue conducted through public service TV relates to the wider public
debate taking place in society. The basic strategy that has been adopted is to
seek to pluralize public service broadcasting by reinvigorating the debate on
which it draws through the strengthening of sectionalist media.
The third problem that can beset public service broadcasting is unrespon-
siveness to popular demand. Here, the comparative record of public service
broadcasters varies considerably, and underlines the need for regulated
competition. Public service monopolies (as, until recently, in Sweden) and
predominantly anti-market, broadcasting systems controlled by organized
groups that are no longer representative (as in the Netherlands) experi-
enced a sharp loss of support once alternatives became available (McQuail,
1992; Nieuwenhuis, 1993; Ang, 1991; Hadenius, 1992). On the other hand,
those systems that incorporated regulated market competition early on, and
made historical adjustments to ratings pressures, proved much more resilient.
108 James Curran

Thus Britain, the first major European country to introduce regulated com-
mercial TV, has a popular public broadcasting system that, despite intense
competition from cable TV and Murdoch’s Sky satellite channels, still
accounted in mid-1995 for 92 per cent of viewers’ time. "
In the long term, the diffusion of new communicatio ns technology threatens
to disperse the TV audience and, consequently, to fragment the forum of
societal debate established through public service television. In the medium
term, it also threatens to destabilize the economy of national public broad-
casting systems by establishing a distribution system that bypasses national
protectionist legislation, and delivers internationally ‘syndicated’ pro-
grammes at a fraction of the cost of originating programmes for domestic
consumption. This could result in some public service broadcasting systems,
with falling audiences and revenues, relying on cheap imports. Beyond a
certain point, this would impair their ability to sustain collective self-expres-
sion in a national context (and one that largely corresponds to existing
democratic structures).
However, the imminent demise of traditional public service regimes is
greatly exaggerated. While cable, satellite, digitization and the development
of on-line and interactive services will eventually transform the media land-
scape, the pace of change both in terms of the trend towards the global
consumption of TV programmes and the public take-up of new TV services
is much less than commercially self-interested hype suggests.2? Moreover,
public service broadcasters are not powerless to defend themselves if they
have popular and political support, and circumstances seem to warrant their
defence. Cross-frontier communications systems are subject to internationally
agreed controls — in the context of Europe through the European Union and the
Council of Europe — and these can be revised to include programme import and
domestic investment quotas. But a satisfactory case for strengthening these
controls, at least in Europe, has yet to be made.

Civic Media Sector

The civic media sector is like an umbilical cord linking core media to the life
force of civil society. It offers a network of sources and contacts that journal-
ists can draw upon when reporting or analyzing a story. However, this is only
one way in which civic media enable organized groups to reach out to, and
engage with, a wider public. Some civic media, like the The Big Issue, a
skilfully edited magazine sold by the homeless that draws attention to the
housing and poverty crisis in Britain, has won a wider audience in the general
public. The other main function of the civic media sector is to provide an
internal channel of communication within groups and constituencies, and
facilitate their self-organization.
The civic media sector is constituted by three main tiers. The top tier
consists of media (such as party-controlled, general-interest newspapers and
local radio stations) which are linked to collective organizations but are
aimed, in Principle at least, at a general audience with the intention of
winning wider support. They are usually adversarial in approach, and provide
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 109
a way of sustaining and renewing a particular perspective of society that
reflects the commitments and priorities of an organized group. The second
tier consists of subcultural media (such as magazines for gays and lesbians)
which relate to a constituency rather than an organized group. They can,
nonetheless, have an important organizational role. They can foster a positive
collective identity, promote a sense of group unity and project goals that can
only be realized through collective action.2! The third tier consists of
organizational media (for example, a national trade union journal or a news-
letter of a local parents association) which serve as channels of communica-
tion between members of a group. These can provide a link between leaders,
activists and supporters, reinforce commitment to the organization, relay
information relevant to its functioning, and provide an internal forum for
developing new ideas and strategies.
The civic media sector is in trouble. The party political press has wilted in
many countries in the face of competition from entertainment oriented
tabloids (Hoyer, Hadenius and Weibull, 1975). Advertising has contributed
to a lopsided development of the specialist press by heavily subsidizing the
growth of publications that deliver a desired target market (such as doctors or
those interested in home improvements), while providing much less support
for media, such as political magazines, which do not conform to the market
categories desired by advertisers (Curran, 1986). The development of intra-
organizational media has been skewed also by the rapid growth of company
magazines and videos.
The civic media sector can be reinvigorated in two ways. One strategy is to
give social and political groups control over part of the minority broadcasting
system. This could include direct control over radio stations, time share and
access to the technical facilities of minority TV channels, and must-carry
rules for cable TV operators. In Malta, for example, two key blocs in society —
the Labour party and the Catholic Church — each have control of a radio
station.*”
The other (though not mutually exclusive) approach is to establish a public
agency, funded by an advertising tax, to assist the launch or development of
civic media. The agency would have all party representation, and would assist
those projects which would most contribute to the vigour of the civic media. It
could function as a modified version of the Swedish Press Subsidies Board
(Hulten, 1984).

Professional Media Sector

Journalists working for adversarial media linked to organized interests func-

tion partly as propagandists. Those working for traditional public service
organizations operate within certain constraints, they tend to adopt a
detached rather than committed stance, with a stress on mediating competing
truths rather than revealing the truth. Those working for profit-driven orga-
nizations often define professionalism in terms of market values. All these
different approaches contribute to the plurality of perspectives that a healthy
media system should promote. There is also a need for an additional voice —
110 James Curran

that of the independent, truth-seeking journalist — operating within an envir-

onment that encourages journalistic autonomy. bite
Establishing a professional sector also represents a way of establishing a
section of the media that speaks to the public in a different way. It can relate
to society not in terms of state-defined rules, as in the case of public service
broadcasting, nor in terms of the goals of organized groupings, as in the case
of the civic sector, nor in terms of audience ratings and sales, as with the
market sector, but on terms defined by professional communicators alone.
What voices emerge will depend on how journalists and programme-makers
respond to the opportunities given to them. But there is a vacuum that needs to
be filled: the revival of a radical, unaligned, populist style of truth-seeking in
fiction and its equivalent in journalism. During its heyday in late nineteenth-
century Europe and America, its effect was to expand the boundaries of social
conscience by highlighting the plight of the vulnerable, and of those who, due
to their lack of organization, were not in a strong position to assert a claim on
the rest of society.
The professional sector will not simply add to the diversity of the media
system. It also builds into it an important watchdog element. Public service
broadcasting is linked to the state; the market sector is dominated by big
business; the civic sector — or, at least, the most influential part of it — is
controlled by collectively organized interests. There is a need for a profes-
sional sector which is a bedrock of independence and which can be relied
upon to maintain a critical surveillance of all power centres in society, and
expose them to the play of public opinion.
An institutional environment should be created which gives programme-
makers the maximum degree of freedom. This could take the form of two
skeletal organizations — one controlling a minority TV channel, and the other
a minority radio channel — which would commission rather than make
programmes. This would insure that programmes were made mostly in
small, informal production companies. Members of boards running the two
channels could be elected by people working in the radio and TV industries.
Funding for the two channels could be supplemented by spectrum fees
charged annually on commercial TV and radio franchise holders as a way
of relieving economic pressure. The professional media sector would be free
of the guidelines that regulate the public service sector. The aim, in short, is to
establish ideal conditions in which creative and journalistic talent can serve
the community free of constraint.

Private Enterprise Sector

Competition encourages responsiveness to audience demand. The presence

of a private enterprise sector, driven by market criteria, provides a counter-
vailing influence to the other forces that shape the media system as a whole.
Thus, the core public service sector — though organized in terms of
competing organizations — prioritizes non-commercial goals. The civic
media sector 1s governed primarily by the concerns of the constituencies
to which it is linked. The professional sector elevates the norms of profes-
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 111
sional communicators. The private enterprise sector, by contrast, is geared to
maximizing audience demand. The tendency of private enterprise media to
privilege right-wing perspectives will also contribute to the diversity of the
media as a whole.
A private enterprise sector also strengthens, to some extent, the watchdog
role of the media. The conventional assumption that it is a wholly independent
check on the government is mistaken because the economic forces that control
commercial media can also have links to government. But a private enterprise
sector is vulnerable to government influence in a different way from organiza-
tions formally linked to the state — and, in this difference, there is a modest
measure of security.
A substantial private enterprise sector should have a major presence in the
press and perhaps the new TV industries. A deregulated commercial, over-
the-air TV sector should not be established, however, because it would
undermine the pluralism of the rest of the broadcasting system. It would
scoop advertising revenue needed to sustain alternatives. It would also
generate pressure on its rivals to converge towards the middle ground at the
expense of minority provision and minority perspectives.
There is, however, a strong case for intervening in the management of the
private enterprise sector by separating ownership from control. One way of
responding to the increasing concentration of media ownership is legally to
underwrite the freedom of editors and their equivalents in the editorial sphere,
and to introduce new rules for staff participation in their appointment. Senior
executives would still be forced to respond to market pressures, but they
would be free to do so in more diverse ways than under the present system
of increasingly centralized control.

Social Market Sector

A major deficiency of the market sector is that it no longer functions in the

way that it is supposed to in theory. Concentration of media ownership and
high market entry costs restrict competition, limit choice and reduce the
influence that consumers are able to bring to bear.
One response to this problem, exemplified by the Swedish press subsidies
system, is to modify the ground rules of competition. The Swedish approach
(and its equivalent in Norway) seeks to neutralize the causes of unequal
competition and concentration rather than attempt to treat unsuccessfully its
symptoms through inefficient anti-monopoly measures (Gustaffson, 1993a;
1993b). This has given rise to a subsidy which allocates graduated production
subsidies to secondary papers that lack the advertising and scale economy
advantages of market leaders. It has succeeded in maintaining editorial
diversity without leading to government control of the press (Gustaffson,
1993a; Picard, 1988; Strid and Weibull, 1988).
An alternative approach — and one that is more easily realizable in societies
that lack Sweden’s tenacious social democratic culture — is to establish a
social market sector as a way of regenerating the market. Its central purpose is
112 James Curran

to incubate new forms of competition, rooted in social forces underrepre-

sented in the market, as a way of extending real consumer choice and power.
This objective can be advanced in three ways. Innovatory forms of media
organization — such as self-managing enterprises, cooperatives and organiza-
tions with consumer or community representation — can be introduced and
supported in order to extend diversity of output. A successful example of this
is the establishment in Britain of Channel 4, a national television channel with
a remit to innovate and serve minorities, funded through advertising and a
guaranteed safety-net income from the main commercial TV network.”? The
Channel 4 model — a cross-subsidized centre of innovation that commissions
rather than produces programmes — could be introduced in other media
sectors, most notably radio.
Second, a public funding agency can be established to fund challenges to
the media conglomerates from groups with limited resources and a reasonable
prospect of success. Sectors where such an agency could have a considerable
impact is local radio, specialist book publishing, political journals, and
specialist audio-products where entry costs are still relatively low.
Third, tough anti-monopoly measures can be introduced to limit market
domination by the major conglomerates. This can take the form not merely of
setting ceilings for expansion but of curbing excessive cross-media concen-
tration through enforced divestment. If this is to result in a broadening of the
social base of media ownership, however, a public agency has to be in place to
assist staff-management buy-outs. Otherwise, anti-monopoly controls are
liable to result merely in the reshuffling of ownership between major players
in a form that accords with the new rules.

Retrospect

Implicit in this outline is a complex set of requirements for a democratic

media system. It should empower people by enabling them to explore where
their interest lies; it should foster sectional solidarities and assist the function-
ing of organizations necessary for the effective representation of collective
interests; it should sustain vigilant scrutiny of government and centres of
power; it should provide a source of protection and redress for weak and
unorganized interests; and it should create the conditions for real societal
agreement or compromise based on an open working through of differences
rather than a contrived consensus based on domination. This can be best
realized through the establishment of a core public service broadcasting
system, encircled by a private enterprise, social market, professional and
civic media sectors. These latter will strengthen the functioning of public
service broadcasting as an open system of dialogue, and give added impetus to
the collective, self-organized tradition of civil society. In short this represents
a reworking, in a contemporary context, of Habermas’s historical idyll with
which we started this essay.
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 113

Notes

1 My thanks to the staff and students at the Department of Communications,

Department of Communications, University of California, San Diego for helpful
suggestions incorporated into this essay.
2 ‘Liberal’ is a confusing word, meaning different things in Britain and the USA.
It is used here in its British historical sense, and refers to the body of thought
developed by liberals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For an account of
their thinking in nineteenth-century Britain, see Boyce (1978) and Curran (1978); and
for the eighteenth century, in both Britain and America, see Holmes (1990).
3 Recent studies of the media which have drawn heavily upon Habermas include,
among others, Dahlgren (1987); Elliott (1986); Garnham (1986); Hallin and Mancini
(1984); Scannell (1989); Skogerbo (1990); Keane (1991); Hallin (1994); Hoynes
(1994); and Stevenson (1995).
4 Indeed, Habermas himself revised implicitly his earlier, pessimistic assessment
by emphasizing subsequently audience adaptation and resistance to mediated mean-
ings. See Habermas (1984: 391 ff.) which confusingly was translated and published in
English before his first book (1989). See also Habermas (1992).
5 It should be noted, however, that exposures of state illegality occurred in state-
linked media in Sweden and the USSR, while broadcasting in the USA (then subject to
more regulation than now) also played a role in the Watergate saga. In reality,
investigative journalism is not confined to free market media.
6 Estimates for the proportion of public affairs content in contemporary media are
provided by Curran and Seaton (1996); Strid and Weibull (1988); and Neumann
(1986) cit. Abramson (1990).
7 A useful, evaluative survey of different approaches in the political economy
tradition is provided by Murdock (1982). A persuasively circumspect presentation of
the radical political economy approach is provided in the essay by Golding and
Murdock in this volume.
8 This is particularly well documented in Etzioni-Halevy’s (1987) comparative
study. For additional information about the British government’s failed attempt to
suppress a ‘Real Lives’ documentary about sectarianism in northern Ireland — with
striking parallels to the Observer saga — see also Leapman (1987) and Barnett and
Curry (1994).
9 In the 1990s, the relationship between the Conservative government and
Conservative press became more strained partly for factional reasons (with some
Conservative papers attacking the government from the right) and partly because of
the government’s loss of public support.
10 These were two soft-porn, depoliticized papers, Sport and Sunday Sport; two
centrist papers reaching a small, advertizing-rich elite audience, the Independent and
Independent on Sunday; and a tabloid daily, Today, which closed in 1995.
11 Michael Schudson’s essay in this volume provides a useful summary of this
literature. For a striking account of the way in which journalists can both resent and
‘resist audience pressure, see Gans (1979).
12 A good example of this approach is provided by Hallin (1994) who shows that
the average ‘sound bite’ on American network TV news declined from over forty
seconds in 1968 to under ten seconds in the 1980s.
13 For iconoclastic accounts of media professionalism, see in particular Schudson
(1978), Schiller (1981), Tuchman (1978) and Elliott (1978).
14 This leads logically to a demand either for industrial democracy (see Ascher-
son, 1978) or for legal protection of journalistic autonomy (see Baistow, 1985).
Though these arguments are seductive, they also raise a problem. Journalists tend
to share the same news values, and to hunt in packs and develop group judgements.
114 James Curran

The greater empowerment of journalists across all media could lead potentially,
therefore, to greater editorial uniformity. Partly for this reason, the proposal at the
end of this essay adopts a deliberately selective approach to underwriting journalistic
control. *
15 Hallin and Mancini’s penetrating essay relates to only one European country,
Italy, which has a distinctive TV system and political culture. There are affinities,
nevertheless, between TV news in Italy and other European countries.
16 This definition was made particularly explicit in Germany, following a wide
public debate about the role of the broadcaster. See Williams (1976).
17 For an example of the way in which media agenda setting and ‘priming’ can
affect election results, see Iyengar and Kinder (1987).
18 A minor but telling illustration of the way in which different groups can be
ignorant of what the other thinks, even though they live cheek by jowl in ostensibly
integrated communities, occurred when I conducted jointly two group discussions in
an East Anglia village for the Eastern Counties Newspapers Group. When asked what
most concerned them, the first group of working-class couples said that they were
worried about the lack of good job prospects for their children, the lack of leisure
facilities for the young, and the problem of social discipline among teenagers. The
second group of middle-class couples was mainly concerned about the environment
and the threat of increased urbanization in the area (which would generate a wider
range of jobs and more leisure facilities) and were convinced that the first group fully
shared their concerns. When informed that this was not the case, they were visibly
taken aback, with some arguing rightly that the local paper should have alerted them
to what other people in the community were feeling. This may seem to illustrate an
aspect of rural, socially stratified England. But other monopoly papers also fail to
provide an adequate channel of communication between social classes in their local
community. For example the Los Angeles Times, arguably one of the best daily papers
in the USA, with enormous resources at its disposal, was nevertheless quite extra-
ordinarily uninformative about what members of Los Angeles’s large working class
were thinking and feeling — and gave few indications that the city was due to have in
1992 one of the most serious riots in twentieth-century America.
19 Derived from BARB, June 1995.
20 The experience of the USA suggests that new TV services are not going to lead
to an immediate fragmentation of the mass audience. It has a mature, multi-channel
TV system in which the majority of households have cable TV. Yet four networks
control well over half the market. As for global homogenization, Sepstrup (1990)
shows how misleading are figures based on ‘international flows’ of programmes.
Although imported programmes account for a relatively high share of TV fiction,
and of the output of some small TV economies, many programmes are not traded
internationally and are originated locally.
_ 21 For the way in which media for sexual minorities can have an indirect but
important organizational role, see Gross (1989).
22 This approach has been developed also in Italy where three political parties
were given in effect control over three TV channels, and in the Netherlands where
different sectional groups control on a time-share basis two public channels. The
experience of both countries suggests that sectional control over core media reinforces
a subdivision of the general public sphere in a way that discourages reciprocal
dialogue between different social blocs in society. This problem is avoided if this
strategy is confined to minority broadcasting, with mass broadcasting organised on a
civil service or liberal corporatist model.
23 In the event, Channel 4 proved so financially successful that safety-net
arrangements led to transfer payments from the minority to mass TV channel — the
 Mass Media and Democracy Revisited 115
reverse of what was anticipated. But Channel 4’s success reveals what can be achieved
if broadcasters are given increased freedom within a financially secure environment.

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TUNSTALL, J., 1993: Television Producers, London: Routledge.
and PALMER, M., 1991: Media Moguls, London: Routledge.
VELJANOVSKI, C., 1989: ‘Competition in Broadcasting’, in C. Veljanovski (ed.) Freedom
in Broadcasting, London, Institute of Economic Affairs.
WEAVER, D. and WILHOIT, G. c., (eds), 1986: The American Journalist, Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press.
WHALE, J., 1977: The Politics of the Media, London: Fontana.
WILLIAMS, A., 1976: Broadcasting and Democracy in West Germany, Bradford: Uni-
versity of Bradford Press.
WINDLESHAM, L. and RAMPTON, R., 1989: The Windlesham/Rampton Report on Death on
the Rock, London: Faber and Faber.
6
Media Change and Social
Change: Linkages and
Junctures'
Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch

Powerful currents of change are sweeping the mass media at present as well as
the social systems in which they operate. These trends demand greater
consideration than they have yet received, designed to build a comprehensive
understanding of the linkages between the two.
In the past, communication scholars have tended to neglect the roles of the
mass media in social change. Although certain lines of enquiry have focused
on a number of specific developments,” these have not provided an overall
framework for the field, and sustained conceptual and cumulative empirical
attention to the underlying processes at work has been lacking. To illustrate,
in a symposium on ‘The Future of the Field’, published in the Journal of
Communication, only a quarter of 48 contributors dealt at any length with
changes in the media and their implications for society or vice versa (Levy
and Gurevitch, 1994). In their discussion of ‘What Communication Scientists
Do’ in the Handbook of Communication Science, Chaffee and Berger (1987)
devoted just two out of 20 pages to this topic.
Media scholarship has thus concentrated more on structure than process
(Dervin, 1991), and dynamic perspectives have been in short and rudimentary
supply. The need to redress this imbalance may be sharpened by recalling
Lasswell’s (1948) classic formula for charting the principal areas of commu-
nication research:

Who
Says What
In Which Channel
To Whom
With What Effect?

Today, all these elements are in seemingly ceaseless flux. Throughout the
world, the cast of leading communication players [who] is being comprehen-
sively reshuffled. Schedules, genres and message styles [what] are dramati-
 Media Change and Social Change 121
cally adapting to intensified competition. Channels are proliferating, of
course, while the structure, expectations, habits and predictability of audi-
ence behaviour [to whom] are undergoing many transformations. Meanwhile,
the previously distinct boundaries of media systems have themselves become
more open and porous. Major ongoing processes of change are simultaneously
— and interrelatedly — buffeting both the mass media and their surrounding
social systems.

Why the Neglect?

The marginality of attention to these processes in media scholarship can be

traced to certain biases in the two dominant paradigms of the postwar period.
In one, the social scientific model of enquiry, in which many North
American researchers were trained, progress tended to be equated with the
elaboration of evidence-based laws, generalizations or rules of communica-
tion behaviour. This naturally prioritized characteristics of the communication
process that transcended temporal conditions at the expense of any contin-
gencies that might be introduced by change in those conditions. It is true that
the role of message factors in attitude change was a key topic in this tradition.
Nevertheless, the bulk of this research was conducted as if the societal field on
which the persuasive battle was waged was more or less stable. In conse-
quence, Joseph Klapper, the authoritative reviewer of media effects research
of the period, concluded that ‘persuasive mass communication functions far
more frequently as an agent of reinforcement than as an agent of change’
(1960: 15). Even more telling as an indicator of belief in a universe of stable
social relations was his assertion that the so called ‘mediating factors’, through
which mass communication operated, were ‘such that they typically render
mass communication as a contributory agent in a process of reinforcing the
existing conditions’ (1960: 8).
Of course, Klapper’s summary of work in the 1940s and 1950s was not the
last word within this tradition. A ‘cognitive turn’, developed in the, 1970s,
disputed the dominance of reinforcement as the main outcome of exposure to
mass communication and postulated stronger than minimal effects of such
exposure, thereby heralding a ‘return to powerful mass media’ (Noelle-
Neumann, 1973). Such cognitive effects, however, were usually examined
in a discrete fashion. Rarely have scholars involved in this work gone on to
consider the possible implications of such effects for longer-term social and
political change. Indeed, one latterday version of powerful media impact —
Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory — reverted to the view that, in the main, such
effects were more supportive of the status quo than conducive to change.
In time, this paradigm was challenged by various schools of critical theory,
cultural studies and hermeneutics, which developed on European soil in the
1960s and 1970s and subsequently invaded the North American academy. As
Tuchman (1994: 278) put it when reflecting later on this outlook, the anti-
positivist researchers argued ‘that the media impeded significant social
change’ instead of promoting it. It is true that since the 1980s many scholars
in this camp have become increasingly aware of the complexity of assumed or
122 Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch

expected ideological influences and the variety of meanings that audience

members can derive from even the most hegemonic-seeming messages.
Nevertheless, they are still largely preoccupied with the question of whether
active meaning-making by audience members adds up to any significant
cultural powers of resistance and creativity (Fiske, 1987; Ang, 1990). The
effect can be to sideline enquiry into processes of media change amidst and in
harness with social change.
Admittedly, these generalizations do not apply in the same way to two other
major stances in the field: a ‘technocentric’ view that regards technological
change as the driving force and instigator of much social change; and the
postmodernist approach. The former presumes that new communication
technologies are ushering in a qualitatively different societal phase, that of
an ‘information society’ (Melody, 1990; Braman, 1994). Of course such
technologies are impinging significantly on almost all areas of social life,
such as work, leisure and the economy, as well as the organization of media
industries generally and of the media environment inside the home. Commu-
nication scholars should undoubtedly engage with much of this. It is less
certain, however, whether they should avowedly approach such tasks from an
‘information society’ perspective, given its inbuilt limitations: overemphasis
on the utilitarian and rationalistic functions of information at the expense of
the performative, ritualistic and entertainment functions of mass communica-
tion (Davis and Jasinski, 1994); a one-way view of the impact of commu-
nication tools on social relationships at the expense of an interactive one; a
more deterministic than problematic outlook on social development; and
relative inattention to some of the values that are most at stake in mass
media workings — e.g. values of creativity, citizenship, community and social
identity.
The other change-sensitive approach centres on the idea that developed
societies have entered a new, postmodern phase. Its presumed features have
been characterized differently by different writers: the problematization of
‘reality’ in favour of (media-based) representations; emphases on flimsiness,
instability, spectacle, heterogeneity in such representations; self-identity seen
as dependent on cultural rather than structural or ‘natural’ factors; loss of a
rooted sense of geographical.or even social space; the meaninglessness of the
question of meaning. Little of this, however, has been subjected to or
translated into evidence-based investigation. As Reimer (1994: 208) points
out:

Statements concerning postmodern individuals are normally based on analyses of

postmodern cultural works, or of postmodern environments, rather than on
analyses of people. Such statements are problematic in the same way as are
statements of media effects based on content analysis.

The postmodernists are thus open to the same criticism that was levelled at
critical theorists before they began to wrestle with audience members’ actual
readings of media texts — of making large claims about people’s responses to
present-day culture without bothering to check them out empirically. But a
prime intellectual difficulty posed by this approach lies not in its margin-
alization of change (as in the first two approaches discussed above), but rather
 Media Change and Social Change 123
in its notion of change and flux as all-pervasive. If all is change and change is
all, we are at risk of losing any conceptual or analytical mooring.

Conceptualizing the Linkages

Social systems and mass media systems are profoundly interdependent. It is

therefore important tq identify the main implications of change in both
directions: the impact of changes in the media on social relationships and
the impact of change in social conditions on media organization and
performance.
How in broad terms might these reciprocal processes of exchange, influence
and impact be conceived? Rosengren (1994a: 49) offers two useful points of
departure when noting that:
In all industrial and post-industrial societies mass media form very important
linkages:
1) Between the great societal subsystems (horizontal linkages between, say,
economy and polity, religion and science) and
2) Between the macro, meso and micro levels of society (vertical linkages).
Regarded vertically, the mass media are essentially mediating agencies (as
the term suggests), positioned between communication sources, from which
they draw spokespersons, creative talent and much of their raw material, and
the audiences for which they cater. In all their roles — cultural, political,
commercial, the provision of information and entertainment — they are
highly sensitive, then, to relevant trends in the surrounding society. Some
of these will be structural and material, e.g. demographic change, changes in
levels of education, economic conditions, standards of living and so on.
Because of their intermediate position, however, they are particularly
constrained both to work with the ideas and images that their principal
sources offer and to aim to chime with audience mentalities, interests and
expectations. As these change, there will be new perspectives and problems
to present as well as new requirements and tastes among audience members
to meet — in Nowak’s (1992: 193) words, ‘new things to communicate about
and ... among communicators, new ideas about what people want to hear
about (ideas that may be correct or incorrect)’. Media professionals’ percep-
tions of changing audience attitudes towards some of their communication
sources (say, politicians) may also matter. Put more generally, all this
suggests that in order to maintain the viability of their position in society
they must be closely attuned to the spirit of the times, reflecting the cultural
ethos of society and, indeed, at times serving as its leading edge (Gurevitch
and Blumler, 1993). ;
Regarded horizontally, the mass media provide channels through which
diverse groups strive to register and disseminate to the rest of society their
claims on resources, status, identity and power. As Turow (1991: 224-5) has
put it, mass communication is a ‘key vehicle through which the various...
individuals and organizations that make up society try to define themselves
and others’. This has prompted determined efforts by many interest and cause
groups to influence the symbolic contents of the mass media. Change in the
124 Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch

media sector can impinge on such group efforts in two ways. First, it may shift
the balance of media receptivity to and access for messages emanating from
the different quarters of society. Second, it may trigger publicity-strategy and
message-fashioning adaptations among groups concerned to optimize their
chances in the ongoing competition for image maintenance and social
advantage.

Mapping the Changes

The areas of change and the interrelationships between them can be grouped
into three sorts of development: changes within the media sector; trends of
social change; and sweeps of change relating the latter to the former.

Changes in the Communication System

Amongst the changes that are reshaping media systems in many countries, at
least five may be singled out for the scale of their impact and their social
consequences.
The first concerns the increasing salience of economic and market/com-
mercial factors in the structure and operations of the media generally
(especially though not only in broadcasting). Of course private media orga-
nizations have always had to optimize their income-expenditure balances in
complex and fluid markets for audiences and advertizers. In recent years,
however, such pressures have increased. Moves from national to transnational
operation are in train (e.g. the relentless expansion of Rupert Murdoch’s
global empire); as well as takeovers of media enterprises by non-media
conglomerates (e.g. in the USA, the transfer of ownership of NBC to the
General Electric Corporation and of ABC to Capital Cities); advancing media
concentration; and the conversion of newspapers into public companies,
increasing their answerability to investors and stock exchanges (Hirsch and
Thompson, 1995). Meanwhile, previously more market-sheltered public
broadcasting organizations have been privatized or been faced with powerful
commercial rivals. In Britain, for example, the BBC’s purposes, managerial
structure, financial accounting systems, programme strategies, relations to
audience expectations and concerns, and prospective roles in the expanding
international market-place have all been subject to comprehensive review and
reform (Blumler, 1995). Although this process does not necessarily foresha-
dow the disappearance of a distinctive public television sector or its complete
absorption into a commercial ethos, it is prompting profound adaptations to
new conditions among organizations that had previously aimed to fulfil a host
of social functions. In many countries, a concomitant of increased commer-
cialization has also been a relative depoliticization of the media, reflected in
less coverage of politics, reduced support for political institutions and actors
and the casting of a more critical eye on political policies and claims.
A second ongoing development is the advance of media abundance. Partly
this is due to the multiplication of television channels and radio stations —
made possible by cable and satellite technology (with a further boost pending
 Media Change and Social Change 125
from the digitization of all signals). Partly it reflects the proliferation of
communication equipment in people’s homes — multiple television and radio
sets, video-recorders, compact disc players, camcorders, computers and more
to come. A significant concomitant of this development is the intensification
of competition for audiences. This favours populist cultural forms and
appeals; qualities of content thought most likely to attract audience attention
and hold it; and heavy investments in promotion. It also reduces leeway for
pursuit of policy goals other than audience building, revenue earning and
long-term competitive positioning.
Third, the organization and flow of mass communications are being inter-
nationalized. Satellite technology has extended and speeded coverage of
events throughout the world. Media economics — escalating production costs
allied to limits on domestic revenues — has increased the importance of
foreign markets. New genres packaged for global sale (e.g. MTV, CNN)
have emerged (Ferguson, 1990). A few large media conglomerates are vying
for transnational supremacy. Many people have increasing access to non-
national sources of entertainment, information, play and sociability. Accord-
ing to McQuail (1992: 304), another significant implication of this develop-
ment is the possible emergence:

of an international ‘media culture’, which can be recognized by way of similar

professional standards worldwide, as well as in universal content forms, genres
and the actual substance of communication . . . not only. [in] radio (especially
music and news) and television, but also [in] newspapers, books and magazines,
where stories, authors, marketing strategies, fashions and trends are no longer
restricted by a particular language or national culture.

Fourth, increasing technical sophistication is affecting both the production

and reception of mass communication. The gathering, editing, and transmis-
sion of news has been transformed by videotape, satellite technology and
newsroom computers (Tunstall, 1992). Instant opinion polling is to chat
shows and discussion programmes what advanced camera work, action
replays and split screens are to sports coverage and musical shows. The
home life of audience members is correspondingly marked by a ‘techniciza-
tion of leisure’ — with more involvement in the relatively sophisticated and
developing range of devices. Although the gains for all in communication
power, efficiency and enhanced sensory experience are plain, there are some
dangers as well. Among communicators, traditional notions of creativity and
professional excellence may be overshadowed by technical standards of
proficiency. Among audience members, cultural and informational inequal-
ities may open up between those who have acquired the requisite technical
devices and skills and those who are left behind.
Finally, mass media audiences are fragmenting. There is a gradual decline in
the size of national audiences as distinct and specialist communication formats
develop in magazines, radio and television. More bounded demographic
groupings (housewives, adolescents, children, ethnic minorities), fans of
particular cultural forms (sports, pop music, movies), followers of particular
leisure interests (gardening, cooking, angling) and those who share particular
tastes (alternative comedy, jazz, etc.) are increasingly being addressed. How-
ever, the extent of this development should not be exaggerated. Even in the
126 Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch

United States, where multichannel television is far more advanced than else-
where, most people tune in to relatively few services most of the time, and the
four main networks tend to attract over half the viewing audience. Probably
most important for all providers, however, is their sense of facing a more
selective public whose favours can no longer be counted on but must con-
tinually be courted. As a BBC policy statement has summed up (1995: 3),
‘They are more discerning, more aware of their power and their rights as
consumers of broadcasting, less willing to be patronized or talked down to,
less ready to accept someone else’s definition of what they should enjoy.’ Such
developments, still evolving, may have profound social and cultural conse-
quences. Most important could be a gradual ‘de-massification’ of the audience,
eroding shared cultural experience and diminishing the integrative role and
powers of the mass media.

Social Trends
Change is not only refashioning media organizations, technologies, markets
and resources; it is also transforming the societal conditions of media
audiences. Without presuming to be comprehensive or exhaustive, the most
significant developments must include the following:
1 The breakdown of traditionally authoritative institutions that once
anchored many people’s identities and loyalties, such as political parties,
churches, trade unions, local communities, allied to diminished deference
to and increased scepticism about leaders and figures of authority.
2 A related weakening of traditional agencies of socialization and public
order, such as families and schools. The hold of the family on its younger
members has been weakened by many factors, such as the increase in the
divorce rate and the related increase in the number of single-parent
households; increase in the number of two working-parent homes; as
well as the negative economic consequences of the dissolution of conven-
tional households. A corollary is the shift of socializing powers to peer
groups and city streets.
3 The advance of individualistic, consumerist lifestyles, associated with
expectations of rising income and educational levels, aggressive commer-
cial advertizing and the ascendance of philosophies that cater to consump-
tion-oriented populations.
4 Increased mobility, not only geographical, occupational and social but
also psychic, with more identities to assume and more cultural perspec-
tives to meet.
5 An altered, albeit contested, status of certain groups — women, ethnic
minorities and young people.
6 A decline in moral certitude and consensus, blurring formerly more clear
boundaries of taste and acceptability, and provoking greater conflict over
the boundaries between the permissible and the forbidden. It brings to
mind a current joke about the changing situation in Russia suggesting that
in the days of the Soviet Union even that which was permissible was
banned, whereas in Russia today even that which is banned is permissible.
7 The onset in the civic sphere of relatively intractable problems, such as
 Media Change and Social Change 127
those of economic management, safeguarding the environment, escalating
demands and costs of social provision and rising rates of crime, drug
addiction and other manifestations of social breakdown.
These trends are shot through with paradoxes. They breed higher social
expectations but also more sombre social perspectives. They demand more
of authorities, whose abilities to cope have been reduced. They have created a
more communications-dependent society at the very moment when — due to the
forces of commercialization, proliferation of media outlets and globalization —
society’s regulatory powers and instruments over the major communications
media are weakening.

New Relations of Social Institutions to Media Institutions

Creation of a communications-dependent society has had wide-ranging social
implications, both structurally and culturally. In a nutshell, the publicity
system of many advanced democracies has become a power-brokering
sphere. A ‘media-centric’ model of political and pressure-group activity has
come to the fore, according to which media attention is a vital source of
potential influence and power, creating perceptions of key events, issues and
distributions of public support that policy-makers must heed. Politicians,
pressure groups and other would-be opinion-makers must therefore give
much higher priority to the publicity field, recognizing 1) that it is a
competitive arena, in which many rivals are also seeking footholds and 2)
that it is dominated by the standards of journalism to which their own media-
destined materials must conform. This in turn generates pressure to develop
selfconscious news-management strategies; constrains the kinds of appeals
and demands that will be ventilated; and may influence policy outcomes both
in anticipation, and in the wake, of public opinion developments.
Associated news management techniques tend to draw on several elements.
One is the alert opportunism that is quick to recognize hooks in news
originating elsewhere, onto which material favourable to a group’s ideas
and policies can be pegged. Another common feature may be labelled
‘adaptation’, including the creation of media events attractive to reporters;
the casting of verbal material into language that is terse, crisp and arresting;
releasing statements in the name of an already prominent leader or person-
ality; and issuing controversial challenges that other leaders and officials must
answer. In effect, groups may also offer journalists what Gandy (1982) has
called ‘information subsidies’, comprising all those devices they can adopt to
reduce the costs to reporters of obtaining newsworthy material. These include
press releases that tell the story as journalists would write it, arranging events
and conferences at times optimal for news organizations’ deadlines and
routines, and providing a digest of new information that cannot be obtained
elsewhere without effort. Such measures not only make a reporter’s job easier
and less costly; they also stand a chance of converting him or her into an
unwitting vehicle of group propaganda.
Overall, then, it seems that the public sphere is increasingly being perme-
ated by a ‘promotional culture’ (Wernick, 1991). More resources are being
devoted to media publicity. Higher status is accorded and more attention paid
128 Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch

to public relations gurus. Greater value and increased priority are conferred on
image-making skills and getting the appearance of things right.

Some Critical Junctures

Communication and media developments are linked to major social develop-

ments in myriad ways. In the following discussion, we focus on three specific
areas that illustrate different facets of the interaction between media and
social changes. These are: the role of communication in the projection of
politics; the part played by the mass media in the socialization of children;
and the impact of international communication on people’s evolving identities
and awareness of the wider world. We then raise a broader question about
audience orientations in the new social climate: how does accelerating social
change affect people’s needs and expectations of the major mass media?

Political Communication
This is a particularly dynamic area, beset on all sides by impulses of change.
Technological developments (such as the emergence of television in the
1950s and 1960s) present politicians with new opportunities for getting their
messages across, as well as posing new criteria of rhetorical effectiveness they
must strive to satisfy. Relationships between politicians and journalists are
continually evolving in ways that can significantly affect the substance and
tone of media reports. Because they are locked into a competitive struggle to
control the mass media agenda, they are driven to develop their own tactics of
control and to respond to the ‘other side’s’ next steps and ploys (Semetko et
al., 1991). Both sets of communicators are also vulnerable to ebbs and flows
in citizens’ partisan preferences, levels of political interest and ambivalence
toward political communication itself.
Moreover, it is where the power stakes are highest — namely in the combat
between political parties, especially (though not only) during election cam-
paigns — that the media-centric model of publicity has advanced furthest. Its
core is a thoroughgoing professionalization of political advocacy, manifested
in a number of ways: increased reliance on technical experts who supposedly
know the media ropes, and on publicity advisers, public relations specialists,
campaign management consultants and the like; wide diffusion among
politicians of a belief that the key to competitive success lies in superior
agenda-setting, or getting the main news outlets to give more prominent and
more positive attention to one’s own favoured issues than those of one’s
opponents; tactics of close message control, concentrating only on those
issues that may help one’s cause, never straying from the chosen theme of
the day, and bombarding journalists with a deluge of complaints to show that
they are being watched; and adoption of a ‘hardball’ publicity ethic, based on
the premise that the quickest and most effective way to act on the balance of
public opinion is to mount strongly negative attacks on one’s opponent.
Many ramifications of these developments may be mentioned. First, they
have prompted a fight-back among journalists, who have not taken the
 Media Change and Social Change 129
professionalized bombardment lying down, since they do not relish having
their news choices severely narrowed by those whose activities they are
supposed to report. Certain features of political coverage can thus be
regarded as attempts by journalists to re-establish control over their own
product. These include: fixation on process rather than substance, treating
politics more as a game than as a sphere of policy choices; frequent commis-
sioning and reporting of opinion polls; inordinately heavy coverage of any
blunders that the professionalized politicians may happen to commit; and
practices of ‘disdaining’ political news, covering events in a manner
designed to demonstrate the reporter’s distance from their propagandistic
purposes, and indicating that the event has been contrived and crafted as a
public relations effort to be taken with a grain of salt. The resulting combina-
tion of denigrated politicians and frustrated journalists has been a recipe for
the emergence of an adversarial climate that seems unprecedentedly fierce and
abiding — ‘a chronic state of partial war’ (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995).
Such a publicity process is not exactly rich in vitamins for citizenship. Its
fast-food offerings tend to: narrow the debate; make negative campaigning
more central; foster cynicism; and over-represent newsmaking as a field of
power struggle rather than a source of issue clarification. Also vulnerable are
faith in the authenticity of the political process and some of the essential
ingredients of attractive and meaningful communication: spontaneity; a bit of
unpredictability; a sense of adventure that could lead to discovery; a sense of
wrestling with reality instead of always trading smoothly in appearances and
perceptions. In all this, ‘a crisis of civic communication’ is in the making
(Entman, 1989; Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995).
Second, ‘populist’ voices, formats and styles seem to be playing a more
prominent part in political communication than ever before. This appears to
be an unstoppable trend, and where it is headed needs to be seriously and
judiciously studied.* It springs from deep-seated media developments and
political developments. Both competitive imperatives, and reactions against
the overly cosy ‘elitist insiderism’ of conventional political communications,
are encouraging media personnel to pay more heed to popular agendas,
perspectives and modes of address. Also involved is the proliferation of
media outlets, especially in radio, considerably increasing access to the
airwaves and spawning much chatty and spontaneous talk. But, whatever
the sources, there seems to be an upgrading of the public voice in political
communication. Instead of being positioned only to attend to and overhear the
views and arguments of others (politicians, journalists, pressure group spokes-
persons, experts), the experiences and opinions of ‘ordinary people’ are being
aired more often, and they are encouraged to discuss social and political
problems in a number of new formats. These include call-in programmes,
electronic town meetings, mock ‘People’s Parliaments’, extended interviews
with call-in segments and, especially, television and radio talk shows.
In the USA these developments have been dubbed ‘Talk Show Democracy’
and ‘New News’ and are being celebrated by some commentators as having
released discourse about civic issues from a constricting straitjacket.
Regarded in the light of democratic values, however, these new forms are
something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, they restore the ordinary citizen
as a significant point of reference for political communication and as properly
130 Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch

an active participant in public discussion. On the other hand, they often

project politics as popular culture, suffer from glitziness and shallowness
and may encourage people even more than before to perceive and evaluate
their leaders as celebrities — or villains — rather than as civic problem-solvers.
Their agendas cover a mixture of topics designed to build and maintain their
audiences, such as bizarre or exceptional behavioural and sexual matters,
together with extremist — sometimes anti-government, anti-establishment or
racist, homophobic, antisemitic — discourse, and away from anything more
structurally complex. They are seemingly poised between quite opposite
routes of ‘simplistic’ and ‘deliberative’ populism.
Third, media commentary on politics is increasingly suffused with refer-
ences to the public’s disenchantment with their leaders and institutions.
Sometimes such disillusionment is ascribed to politicians’ failings, some-
times to a worsening communication system itself. The news media are
thus continually projecting the systemically influential perception that the
respect of many voters for their political leaders and institutions has been
plummeting. Indeed, the media could be said to be constructing for audience
members how they are, and therefore should be, regarding their politicians
and institutions.
From the convergence of all these developments in the communication and
political fields, three broad trends seem to be emerging:
1. A retreat from the civic goals of journalism, in reaction to: a) commu-
nicators’ attempted news-management controls; b) perceived decline in
audience members’ levels of political interest; and c) economic pressures.
2 A destabilization of elites, due to: a) more negative news about them; b)
less ample and more ‘mediated’ access for them; c) more reliance on
populist communication forms with their implicit appeal to the superior
common sense of the common man/woman; and d) the more or less
routine framing of political stories in terms of audience disenchantment
with elites.
3 Some chipping away at the legitimacy of representative democracy in
favour of (surrogate) direct democracy.

Children and the New Media Environment

Both social change and media change are transforming the conditions in
which young people are socialized to cultural values and their roles in life.
On the one hand, power relations between the main socialization agencies are
changing: “The role of the primordial agents of socialisation — the family, the
peer group, and the working group — has probably been reduced’ (Rosengren,
1994b: 301). On the other hand, the newer media forms — cable and satellite
television, pre-recorded video films, video and computer games, interactive
media, CD Roms, Internet — are already part, or soon to become part, of
children’s and young people’s lives. Moreover, some of these forms appear to
invite different uses, more active choices and a greater involvement with the
available content than did the traditional media — though how far these
possibilities are acted on and by whom is largely uncharted terrain.
New departures are therefore needed in studying the role of communication
 Media Change and Social Change 131
in the socialization of children and adolescents. Most of what we know about
this process stems from research that was conducted in simpler conditions,
predating the emergence of a multimedia environment. That new environment
is especially significant for the socialization of younger people. Not only are
they confronted with the proliferation of new communication facilities at
early ages but their responses to them are speedier. As Rosengren (1994a:
72) has put it, ‘effects of changes in the media structure seem to reach young
people more rapidly than old people’.
It is to be hoped that enquiries into such effects may eventually clarify at
least one broad implication of the transition through which the mass media
and their younger consumers are passing. When television offered pro-
grammes on a limited number of channels, when much viewing was a widely
shared experience, and when the greater part of children’s viewing took place
in the family sitting room, certain standard ways of relating to and using the
medium emerged and took root. Comstock and Paik’s (1991: 18) authoritative
review of the literature shows that until recently three principles shaped many
children’s orientations to television: extent of viewing depended largely on
the amount of free time available; relatively little viewing was selectively
based on programme preferences; and viewing was often a low-involvement
activity with ‘much of television . . . consumed as emanating from the set
without much attaching of verbal labels or giving concrete thought to what is
transpiring’.
How are present media transformations affecting these previously
entrenched patterns? The relationship between the new media environment
and the old uses might be captured in one of three different models:
1 Absorption — where new media facilities are absorbed into and used
predominantly in the old ways.
2 Transformation — where the old patterns of media behaviour cease to
apply and new ones emerge.
3. Differentiation — where uses of certain facilities follow the old modes
while others reflect new ones; or some children maintain the old style,
while others cultivate new relations to the media.
Much insight into the interaction of social and communication change could
be gained by establishing how far and to whom these different models apply.

The Globalization of Communication

Probably no other facet of communication has been in such flux as its
geography. The world’s communication map is being redrawn incessantly.
National boundaries no longer define distinct communication systems, and
communication scholars face the difficult challenge of trying to get a con-
ceptual grip on an escalating, yet formless, sprawling and globe-shaking
process that may be impinging on people’s sense of their places in the world
and on the power of regimes to effect their wills within it. At least three major
issues are raised sharply by the development of globalized media. First, the
process of globalization poses challenges that exacerbate the problems of
institutional transformation experienced by media organizations in many
132 Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch

countries. Second, it raises political issues, having to do with the emergence

of a supra-national, cross-border flow of materials that by and large lies
beyond the control of governments around the world. Third, it raises issues
of culture and identity, having to do with the interaction between, and the
response of specific cultures to, the avalanche of informational and entertain-
ment materials made available through the global system.
How should these issues be addressed? As it happens, the globalization of
television, and especially of television news, offers an excellent site on which
to examine and compare the explanatory powers and relevance of a range of
theoretical approaches in mass communication. Among the potentially applic-
able perspectives, we might list the following.
1 Media/cultural imperialism — a theory that was much in vogue in the
1970s and early 1980s. Although it has been less frequently invoked in
recent years, its basic suppositions about the direction of the flow of
cultural products from western to developing societies and its potential
consequences may still offer useful hypotheses on the processes and
outcomes of globalized television.
2 The political economy theory of the media. The focus of that theory on the
structures of ownership and control of media organizations seems espe-
cially apposite in an era of increasing conglomeratization of the media and
prospective concentration of control in a small number of global media
and entertainment mega-corporations.
3 Theories of media professionalism. These could be applied to one of the
key questions here, namely the extent to which globalized communication
results in a shared professional culture among journalists around the
world. Do CNN or the BBC Television World Service serve as profes-
sional role models for television newspeople in other countries? Is a global
style being established for television news? Is any single, dominant
professional ideology being disseminated and absorbed across different
media systems?
4 Theories of encoding and the production of meaning — suggesting ways of
approaching analysis of the contents and meanings in news stories of the
‘same’ events broadcast in different countries with similar or different
cultures.
5 Audience reception analysis. The relevance of this approach to processes
of decoding and sense-making among audience members is clear, given
the potential diversity of meanings derived by television news viewers
situated in different cultures from exposure to globally transmitted news
stories.
6 Theories of technology and society — facilitating an analysis of the role of
technology in shaping the global communication system. Given the
significance of technology in this process, the key question has to do
with the interactive relationship between technological development and
innovation and the socio-political contexts that facilitate or hinder and
provide shape and direction for the development and incorporation of new
communication technologies.
7 Notions of ‘imagined communities’, as in Benedict Anderson’s (1983)
 Media Change and Social Change 133
idea that ‘nations’ and ‘nationality’ are constructs. Thus, Anderson argues
that the nation is defined as:
+ an imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently
limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them
or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their
communion. . . . The nation is imagined as limited, because even the largest
of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living beings, has finite, if elastic-
boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. It is imagined as sovereign
because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and
revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordered, hierarch-
ical dynastic realm. Finally, it is imagined as a community because, regard-
less of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the
nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.
(1983: 15-16)
The implications of this concept for the essentially semiotic nature of
seemingly immanent political categories, such as the nation, extend read-
ily and even more forcefully to any supra-national notions of community:
has transnational communication a potential for invoking amongst audi-
ence members a sense of affiliation with an ‘imagined global community’?
This list is suggestive of both the theoretical and the policy relevance of the
globalization of the media as a site on which to examine the broader issue of
the linkages between media developments and socio-political changes.

Sense-making in a ‘Postmodern’ Society

Finally, amidst the less engaged relationships of people to their institutions
that are said by postmodern writers to characterize many advanced societies
today, there lurk some unfamiliar but possibly quite important connections
between media changes and social change. If it is the case that in many areas
of society traditional values and allegiances are breaking down, if people are
less able to rely on inherited value systems and often have to fall back on their
individual perceptions and beliefs, if at the same time they are coming into
contact with a broader range of sometimes conflicting cultural perspectives, if
social change is accelerating and many problems on the political agenda seem
less amenable to conventional solutions, then a core question does seem to
arise: does social life in conditions of less assured values and less confidence
in institutions create any new public needs of the mass media, including what
people look for and would like to find in them?
In some ways this question, and attempts to answer it, are not new. For
example, a theoretical formulation developed by DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach
(1989) predicts that in conditions of uncertainty people will tend to become
more dependent on the media for information and interpretations to help them
find their way. They term this ‘media dependency theory’, and postulate that
‘individual and group media dependency relations become more intense when
the social environment is ambiguous, threatening and/or rapidly changing’
(315-16) — all conditions that do appear to be on the increase at present.
This underlines needs to foreground the perspectives that individual
134 Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch

audience members have on a more problematic social world and to explore

how the media available to them may help or hinder their efforts to steer a
meaningful course through it. Here again, certain established traditions of
media enquiry come to mind as relevant if appropriately adapted: the so-
called ‘uses and gratifications’ approach and audience reception analysis.
The former is relevant for its perspective on audience members as people
whose media behaviour is anchored in media-related needs, which they can
articulate and draw on to evaluate the usefulness of different forms of media
content. Findings of this approach have also regularly highlighted ‘surveil-
lance of the environment’ as a central element in many people’s media
gratification structures. As developed to date, however, this research tradition
lacks a sense of process. Its discourse about audience needs is relatively static
and tends to focus on more immediate expectations and satisfactions. Missing
from this work, then, is the idea that people may have to orient themselves to
an ever-changing, more ambiguous and sometimes puzzling environment.
How far has that become a part of people’s media-based expectations? If
so, how is it expressed? And how is media fare received and used to satisfy it?
Enlightenment on such matters might also be sought from an adaptation of
audience reception analysis, and the experience it offers of eliciting the
meanings that people derive from various media ‘texts’ (e.g. soap operas,
romance novels, current affairs programmes, etc.). In order to pursue the
questions raised above effectively, this tradition should be encouraged to
move on from its highly specific focus on specimens of individual texts
towards those understandings and interpretations that people derive from
broader combinations and flows of media materials.

A Final Word

The relationship of media change to social change is a large subject. Many

issues arise from it, and agendas could be drawn from it other than the one
outlined in this chapter. More important than its particular concerns is the
message that communication scholars should situate more of their work
within a considered perspective on the main developments that are reshaping
society and the mass media. If they do so, they will no longer be open to the
often-voiced charge of lacking policy relevance and a real-world role. At the
same time, they should be better placed to overcome the longstanding
isolation of media scholarship from the humanistic and social scientific
disciplines of cultures and societies.

Notes

_1 This chapter was adapted from an essay on future directions in mass commu-
nication research that the first author contributed in February 1995 to a programme
organized by the German Federal Ministry of Science and Technology and the Science
Centrere Berlin. He warmly acknowledges their su pport and is i grateful for th i
permission to publish this substantially revised version. : angel
 Media Change and Social Change 135
2 Dynamic perspectives are best developed in work on European mass media
systems (e.g. Siune and Truetzschler, 1992; Schulz, 1992); ethnographic studies of
households’ tesponses to new communication technologies (e.g. Silverstone and
Hirsch, 1992); analyses of political communication processes (e.g. Swanson and
Mancini, 1996; Patterson, 1993); Swedish research on cultural indicators (Roseng-
ren, 1988); and in ‘spiral of silence’ theory and research (Noelle-Neumann, 1984).
Jakubowicz (1995) provides a model for analyzing media change in the context of
social changes in the former communist countries of eastern Europe.
3 Anear-lone exception is the work of Denis McQuail with substantial if scattered
comments on changes in media and society in the 3rd edition of Mass Communication
Theory (1994) and a considered treatment in the concluding chapter of Media
Performance (1992).
4 Livingstone and Lunt (1994) have made a useful start along these lines.
5 Such a contribution may be expected from the results of a major cross-national
project of research into Children, Young People and the Television Screen in the
1990s that was being launched at the time of writing by a team of scholars at the
London School of Economics in conjunction with the UK Broadcasting Standards
Council.

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SECTION II

Media Production
a)
q|
The Sociology of News
Production Revisited
Michael Schudson

Social scientists who study the news speak a language that journalists mistrust
and misunderstand. They speak of ‘constructing the news’, of ‘making news’,
of the ‘social construction of reality’. ‘News is what newspapermen make it’,
according to one study (Gieber, 1964: 173). ‘News is the result of the methods
newsworkers employ’, according to another (Fishman, 1980: 14). News is
‘manufactured by journalists’ (Cohen and Young, 1973: 97) in the words of a
third. Even journalists who are critical of the daily practices of their collea-
gues and their own organizations find this talk offensive. Such language
propels journalists into a fierce defence of their work, on the familiar ground
that they just report the world as they see it, the facts, facts, and nothing but
the facts, and yes, there is occasional bias, sensationalism, or inaccuracy, but a
responsible journalist never fakes the news.
That is not what we said, the scholars respond. We did not say journalists
fake the news, we said journalists make the news:
To say that a news report is a story, no more, but no less, is not to demean news,
nor to accuse it of being fictitious. Rather, it alerts us that news, like all public
documents, is a constructed reality possessing its own internal validity.
(Tuchman, 1976: 97)

In the most elementary way, this is obvious. Journalists write the words that
turn up in the papers or on the screen as stories. Not government officials, not
cultural forces, not ‘reality’ magically transforming itself into alphabetic
signs, but flesh-and-blood journalists literally compose the stories we call
news. Journalists make the news. (Would you say, the journalist might
respond, that scientists ‘make’ science rather than ‘discover’ it or report it?
Yes, the conscientious scholar must answer, we would say precisely that, and
sociologists of science do say precisely that.)
This is not a point of view likely to make much headway with professional
journalists. ‘News and news programmes could almost be called random
reactions to random events’, a reporter told British sociologist Graham
Murdock. ‘Again and again, the main reason why they turn out as they do
142 Michael Schudson

is accident — accident of a kind which recurs so haphazardly as to defeat

statistical examination’ (1982: 163). The study of the generation of news aims
to find an order behind this sense of accident (and to understand as ideology
journalists’ failure to believe in such an order).
The sociology of the production of news goes back at least to Max Weber
(1921; 1946), who wrote of the social standing of the journalist as a political
person; Robert Park (1922; 1923), an ex-journalist himself, who wrote about
the US immigrant press and news itself as a form of knowledge; and Helen
MacGill Hughes (1940), who wrote an early study of human interest stories.
But the formal study of how news organizations produce news products dates
to studies in the early 1950s of ‘gatekeepers’.
Social psychologist Kurt Lewin coined the term ‘gatekeeper’ and several
social scientists (White, 1950; Gieber, 1964) applied it to journalism. David
Manning White studied a middle-aged wire editor at a small mid-western
newspaper. For one week, ‘Mr Gates’ (as White called him) made available to
the researcher every piece of wire copy, both those he rejected and those he
selected to print in the paper. He then wrote down a reason for rejection on
every story he turned down. Some of these reasons were not very illuminating
— ‘not enough space’. Others were technical or professional — ‘dull writing’ or
‘drags too much’. Still others were explicitly political — ‘propaganda’ or ‘he’s
too Red’. These last greatly influenced White’s interpretation of gatekeeping
although political reasons for rejection accounted for just 18 out of 423 cases.
Mr Gates admitted that he did not like President Harry Truman’s economic
policies, that he was anti-Catholic, and that these views affected his news
judgement. White concludes that ‘we see how highly subjective, how based
on the “gatekeeper’s” own set of experiences, attitudes and expectations the
communication of ‘news’ really is.’
If Mr Gates’ judgements can be attributed to personal subjectivity, we
should expect some variation among wire editors if a larger sample were
studied. Walter Gieber found otherwise in a 1956 study of 16 wire editors in
Wisconsin. All the editors selected news items in essentially the same way.
They were not doing politics in selecting the news. They were doing a rote
task. The typical editor was ‘concerned with goals of production, bureaucratic
routine and interpersonal relations within the newsroom’ (1964: 175).
Gieber’s analysis is a refutation, not an extension, of White’s.
The term ‘gatekeeper’ is still in use. It provides a handy metaphor for the
relation of news organizations to news products; but it leaves ‘information’
sociologically untouched. It minimizes the complexity of newsmaking. News
items are not simply selected but constructed. The gatekeeper metaphor fails
to describe this. It also ignores the feedback loops in which the agencies that
generate information for the press anticipate the criteria of the gatekeepers in
their efforts to get through the gate, like teenagers trying to figure out how
best to talk and look in order to get admitted to X-rated movies or to ‘pass’ as
adult at establishments that serve liquor. The whole industry of public
relations, which after the First World War emerged as a major intermediary
between government and business on the one hand, and journalism on the
other (Schudson, 1978) trades on its expertise in knowing how to construct
items that ‘pass’.
If the gatekeeper model is ultimately insufficient, what approaches might
 The Sociology of News Production Revisited 143
work better? Three perspectives on newsmaking are commonly employed.
The first is the view of political economy that relates the outcome of the news
process to the structure of the state and the economy and to the economic
foundation of the news organization. This view appears in its most theoreti-
lao aiaalate and self-critical form in British media studies (Murdock,

The second approach comes primarily out of sociology, especially the study
of social organization, occupations and professions, and the social construc-
tion of ideology. This perspective tries to understand how journalists’ efforts
on the job are constrained by organizational and occupational routines.
Third, a ‘cultural’ approach emphasizes the constraining force of broad
cultural traditions and symbolic systems, regardless of the structure of
economic organization or the character of occupational routines.
All three of these approaches have strengths and weaknesses I will discuss
here. All of them, even taken together, have so far fallen short of providing
adequate comparative and historical perspectives on news production.

The Political Economy of News

News is a form of culture. It is a structured genre or set of genres of public

meaning-making. This is not to suggest that it floats in some sort of symbolic
ether. It is a material product and there is a political economic dimension to
understanding the production, distribution, and appropriation of news (Garn-
ham, 1990: 10).
The value of a political economy perspective varies depending on what
aspect of ‘news’ it is that one wants to explain. Is it the conservative, system-
maintaining character of news? This is more often than not the feature of news
that political economy scholars focus on — but there are many other possibi-
lities. One of them is the very opposite — the press in liberal societies has
sometimes been characterized as adversarial or even nihilistic, system-attack-
ing or system-denigrating, government-toppling or crime-promoting. In other
cases, there are finer features of news that analysts want to understand. Why
does news seem to focus on individuals rather than systems and structures?
Why does news appear to be so heavily dependent on official sources? Or
analysts may focus on features of the literary character of news — why is there
a ‘summary lead’ rather than a chronological opening to a news story? Why
has the length of a television sound bite in American network news declined
over the past two decades? Why do city hall reporters summarize the high-
lights of official meetings rather than report the whole, often disorganized and
desultory proceeding — and what consequences are there to thereby ‘rationa-
lizing’ the portrait of the political process (Paletz et al., 1971)? Perhaps the
most complex question of ‘what to explain’ concerns whether one should find
distressing, and try to explain, the deviation of the media from ‘fair’ and
‘objective’ reporting or, instead should find disturbing and try to understand
how it is that ‘fair’, ‘objective’ reporting presents a portrait of the world in
tune with the view of dominant groups in society. Thus critics have objected
to the Glasgow Media Group’s studies for castigating television news bias
144 Michael Schudson

when the more important point may be that broadcast news programmes
‘achieve their ideological effectivity precisely through their observation of
the statutory requirements of balance and impartiality’ (Bennett, 1982: 306).
The link between the larger political economy of society and day-to-day
practices in journalism is, as Graham Murdock has observed, ‘oblique’
(Murdock, 1982: 158). The link between ownership of news organizations
and news coverage is not easy to determine. It is hard to tie patterns of
ownership to specific habits of reporting. Research on the consequences for
news content of chain ownership compared to independent ownership of
American newspapers has been either inconclusive or, as C. Edward Baker
puts it, ‘tepid, hardly motivating any strong critique of chain ownership or
prompting any significant policy interventions’ (Baker, 1994: 19).
Normally, news ‘coincides with’ and ‘reinforces’ the “definition of the
political situation evolved by the political elite’ (Murdock, 1982: 172). This
basic intuition seems incontestable but the greatest research interest lies in
determining its limits. Much of the movement toward institutional or organi-
zational-level analysis of the news emerged in the late 1960s because
‘instrumental’ perspectives from political economy did not seem to describe
the aggressive and critical investigative reporting of the day. A view that sees
large corporations and the media working hand-in-glove cannot explain why
corporations in the early 1970s should have been so incensed at how the
media covered politics, the environment, and business (Dreier, 1982). The
behaviour of the American press in questioning the Vietnam war and in
bringing down President Nixon may have emerged precisely because the
political elite was divided much more profoundly than it ordinarily is. Even
then, the press seems largely to have gone about its normal business of citing
official leaders — just at a time when officials were at odds with one another
(Hallin, 1986). The result was that the media amplified elite disagreements in
unsettling and unpredictable ways.
Explanations from political economy may be especially apt for understand-
ing the broadly different stances different news organizations or types of
organizations take toward audiences in the marketplace. Curran et al.
(1980) ask why elite and mass-oriented newspapers provide such different
fare when reader surveys find that different classes prefer to read similar
materials. Their explanation centres on the value to advertisers of advertising
in papers that attract a small, concentrated elite audience. The expense of
having an advertisement reach an ‘upscale’ audience is lower if a large share
of this audience can be reached through one publication — without having to
pay the cost of reaching thousands of extraneous readers.
Fewer and fewer corporations control more and more of the American news
media (Bagdikian, 1983). Major media conglomerates control more and more
of the world’s media. Where media are not controlled by corporations, they
are generally voices of the state. Under these circumstances, it would be a
shock to find the press a hotbed of radical thought. But, then, critical or radical
thought in any society at any time is exceptional. That there could be a
moment of critical upheaval in American society and in the American media
in the late 1960s raises doubts about any political economic perspective that
attributes power — or unity — of Orwellian proportion to the capitalist class.
The ‘velvet revolution’ in Eastern Europe in 1989 raises related doubts about
 The Sociology of News Production Revisited 145
attributions of unlimited power to the socialist state. The ability of a capitalist
class to manipulate opinion and create a closed system of discourse is limited;
ideology in contemporary capitalism is contested terrain. The ability of a
socialist bureaucracy to create a closed system has limits, too, although its
direct efforts to create one have often been stronger, have certainly been more
explicitly advanced, and have faced fewer legal or political impediments.
Nevertheless, a political economy perspective has sometimes tended toward
‘conspiracy theory’ or simple-minded notions that a ruling directorate of the
capitalist class dictates to editors and reporters what to run in their news-
papers. There is no reason political economy need take this turn but it
certainly has done so in the past. A kind of conspiracy model is apparent in
Edward S. Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1988).
This work offers a ‘propaganda model’ of the mass media, the view that the
media ‘serve to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the
state and private activity’ (1988: xi). For Herman and Chomsky, news serves
established power and, although they recognize some variability in the
American press, they do not locate any essential difference between the
role of leading news institutions in the USA and Pravda in the Soviet
Union. For them the propagandistic character of news follows necessarily
irom the fact that the news is produced by a concentrated industry of several
dozen profit-making corporations, an industry dependent on advertising for its
profits and government officials for its sources, intimidated by right-wing
pressure groups, and imbued with anti-communist ideology.
Because the political economic perspective has been adopted and developed
primarily by left-wing critics and analysts of the news media, it is not
surprising that it tends to paint the news media in liberal societies in the
tones of news media in authoritarian regimes. If differences are noted, an
equivalence is nonetheless asserted between the limits placed on news media
in authoritarian societies by state control and the constraints placed on the
press in liberal societies by market mechanisms. Both state and market can
limit free expression but this does not make their means or motives for doing
so the same. Public criticism of state policy is invariably easier in liberal
societies with privately owned news outlets than in authoritarian societies
with state or private ownership. In China, published criticism of the state has |
been tightly constrained; newspapers, it is said in China, ‘swat flies but don’t
beat tigers’ (Polumbaum 1994: 258). Reporters have some freedom to write
articles critical of high officials, but they must then circulate these as internal
documents not available in the public press (Grant, 1988).
The political economy perspective in Anglo-American media studies has
generally been insensitive to political and legal determinants of news produc-
tion; it has been far more ‘economic’ than ‘political’. Increasingly, this is
recognized as a serious deficiency. A lively discussion in western Europe now
finds great virtue, not just cooptation by the state, in the institutional mechan-
isms and cultural traditions of public service broadcasting (Garnham, 1990:
104-14). Increasingly, there are efforts to articulate a view of ‘civil society’
where the media can attain a degree of autonomy from both state and market —
and in this context public serving broadcasting is held up as a model (Keane,
1991): mae ake
This suggests that, within market societies, there are various institutional
146 Michael Schudson

forms and constitutional regimes for the press. Rosario de Mateo’s (1989)
sketch of the newspaper industry in Spain during the Franco regime, the
transition to democracy, and the full restoration of democracy makes it clear
that private, profit-making newspapers put ideological purity as their first
priority under Franco. After Franco, however, the same private, profit-mak-
ing press has emphasized profits first while providing more opportunity for
freedom of expression. Where state-operated media in authoritarian political
systems serve directly as agents of state social control, both public and
privately owned media in liberal societies carry out a wider variety of
roles, cheerleading the established order, alarming the citizenry about flaws
in that order, providing a civic forum for political debate, acting as a battle-
ground among contesting elites. Pnina Lahav and her colleagues have usefully
surveyed press law in seven democratic societies. Lahav concludes that in
countries like Sweden and the USA free expression is better protected than in
countries like the United Kingdom, France, and the Federal Republic of
Germany with ‘a more elitist attitude toward the press’ (Lahav, 1985: 4).
While there is serious ideological contestation in liberal democracies, how
does it take place? What institutional mechanisms or cultural traditions or
contradictions of power provide room for debate and revision? Daniel Hallin,
borrowing from the work of Jurgen Habermas, has argued that the opportunity
for the media to offer dissenting views and to publicize scandalous news —
arises in part because they must attend as much to their own legitimation as to
furthering the legitimation of the capitalist system as a whole (Hallin, 1985).
If they fail to attend to their own integrity and their own credibility with
audiences, they may in fact ‘simply become ineffective ideological institu-
tions’. This, it appears, is exactly what happened to official media in eastern
Europe; readers there were famous for recognizing that the only reading worth
doing is reading ‘between the lines’.
The relation of news organizations to new information technologies is a
feature of political economy that has occasioned more discussion in the news
business than research among scholars. The production process of news has
been transformed, both in print and broadcast; indeed, as newspapers embrace
both computer and telecommunications capabilities, the gap between broad-
cast and print newsrooms narrows. Where broadcasting always relied on print
media for information and ideas, increasingly print relies on broadcast as well,
and CNN is part of the taken-for-granted background noise in American
newsrooms.
Beginning in the 1970s, newspapers have seen the introduction of VDTs,
pagination (the electronic assembly of pages), on-line and database research,
remote transmission and delivery, digital photo transmission and storage. The
technologies are generally introduced to lower labour costs and to provide the
technical capability to make the newspaper more ‘user-friendly’, with more
interesting and attractive page design. The question for the sociology of news
is what influence, overall, any of this has on the news product. Anthony Smith
(1980) was probably the first to draw comprehensive attention to the issue but
his work has not been followed up with the same analytic skill. We know that
the new technology has moved elements of newspaper production from the
‘backshop’ to the newsroom, has increased the amount of time editors spend
on page make-up, and has improved spelling. But has it changed the news
 The Sociology of News Production Revisited 147
product in any more fundamental ways? Some observers suggest that the
ability of foreign correspondents to send copy home by satellite has led to
more and shorter stories on timely events rather than fewer, longer, more
analytic, and less time-bound work. This may decrease the quality of news
(Weaver and Wilhoit, 1991: 158-59) — but hard evidence on how new
technology affects the news, or even hypotheses about it, are limited.

The Social Organization of Newswork

In an influential essay, Harvey Molotch and Marilyn Lester (1974) created a

typology of news stories according to whether the news ‘occurrence’ is
planned or unplanned and whether the planners of the occurrence are or are
not also the promoters of it as news. If an event is planned and then promoted
as news by its planners, this is a ‘routine’ news item. If the event is planned
but promoted by someone different from the agent of the occurrence, it is a
“scandal’. If the event is unplanned and then promoted as news by someone
other than its hapless instigator, it is an ‘accident’.
This typology defines news by the way it comes to the awareness of a news
organization. In none of the three news types is the occurrence a spontaneous
event in the world that the news media discover on their own by surveying the
world scene. For Molotch and Lester, it is a mistake to try to compare news
accounts to ‘reality’ in the way journalism critics ordinarily do, labeling the
discrepancy ‘bias’. Instead, they seek out the purposes that create one reality
instead of another. The news provides a ‘reality’ that is ‘the political work by
which events are constituted by those who happen to currently hold power’
(1974: 111). Molotch and Lester reject what they call the ‘objectivity assump-
tion’ in journalism — not that the media are objective but that there is a real
world to be objective about. For Molotch and Lester, newspapers reflect not a
world ‘out there’ but ‘the practices of those who have the power to determine
the experience of others’ (1974: 54).
In what might these practices consist?
Mark Fishman conducted a participant-observation study of newspaper
work in a California newspaper with a daily circulation of 45,000 and a
full-time editorial staff of thirty-seven (Fishman, 1980). He finds that journal-
ists are highly attuned to bureaucratic organizations of government and that
‘the world is bureaucratically organized for journalists’ (1980: 51). That is,
the organization of ‘beats’ is such that reporters get the largest share of their
news from official government agencies. ‘The journalist’s view of the society
as bureaucratically structured is the very basis upon which the journalist is
able to detect events (1980: 51). One of the great advantages of dealing with
bureaucracies for the journalist is that the bureaucracies ‘provide for the
continuous detection of events’ (1980: 52). The bureaucrat provides a
reliable and steady source of news.
One study after another comes up with essentially the same observation,
and it matters not whether the study is at the national or local level — the story
of journalism, on a day-to-day basis, is the story of the interaction of reporters
and bureaucrats. Some claim officials have the upper hand (Gans, 1979: 116;
148 Michael Schudson

Cohen, 1963: 267). Some media critics, including many government officials,
say reporters do (Hess, 1984: 109). There is little doubt, however, that the
centre of news generation is the link between reporter and official, the
interaction of the representatives of the news bureaucracies and the govern-
ment bureaucracies. This is apparent in the actual daily practices of journal-
ists. ‘The only important tool of the reporter is his news sources and how he
uses them’, a reporter covering state government in the USA told Delmer
Dunne (1969: 41). Stephen Hess confirms this in his study of Washington
correspondents. He found reporters ‘use no documents in the preparation of
nearly three-quarters of their stories’ (Hess, 1981: 17-18). Hess does not
count press-releases as documents — these are, of course, another means of
communication directly from official to reporter. It is clear that the reporter-
official connection makes news an important tool of government and other
established authorities. Some recent work, accordingly, examines news pro-
duction from the viewpoint of the news source rather than the news organiza-
tion (Cook, 1989). The corollary of the power of the government source or
other well legitimated sources is that ‘resource-poor organizations’ have great
difficulty in getting news coverage (Goldenberg, 1975). If they are to be
covered, as Todd Gitlin’s study of SDS indicated, they must adjust to modes
of organizational interaction more like those of established organizations
(Gitlin, 1980).
There has been much more attention to reporter-official relations than to
reporter-editor relations, a second critical aspect of the social organization of
newswork. Despite some suggestive early work on the ways in which
reporters engage in self-censorship when they have an eye fixed on pleasing
an editor (Breed, 1955: 80), systematic sociological research has not been
especially successful in this domain. Certainly case studies of newswork
regularly note the effects — usually baleful — of editorial intervention
(Crouse, 1973: 186; Gitlin, 1980: 64-65; Hallin, 1986: 22). Frands Morten-
sen and Erik Svendsen (1980) pay explicit attention to various forms of self-
censorship in Danish newspapers. Generally, however, studies do not look at
the social relations of newswork from an editor’s view. This may have
something to do with rhetorical forms of understanding the news process
that social scientists have unconsciously borrowed from film and fiction
portrayals of journalism or it may have to do with the greater glamour of
and greater access of reporters compared to editors. In any event, most
research has focused on the gathering of news rather than on its writing,
rewriting, and ‘play’ in the press. There has been little work, for instance, on
the production of headlines, although informal observation suggests that
headlines often misrepresent stories in the direction of conventional thinking
or toward the editorial preferences of the newspaper.
This is particularly unfortunate when research suggests that it is in the play
of a story that real influence comes. Hallin (1986), Herman and Chomsky
(1988) and Lipstadt (1986) all argue that in the press of a liberal society like
the USA lots of news, including dissenting or adversarial information and
opinion, gets into the newspaper. The question is where that information
appears and how it is inflected. Hallin interestingly suggests there was a
‘reverse inverted pyramid’ of news in much reporting of the Vietnam war.
 The Sociology of News Production Revisited 149
The nearer the information was to the truth, the farther down in the story it
appeared (Hallin, 1986: 78).
elf one theoretical source for the sociology of news has been symbolic
interactionism or social constructionist views of society (as in the work of
Molotch and Lester, Tuchman and others), a complementary source has been
organizational or bureaucratic theory. If, on the one hand, the creation of news
1s seen as the social production of ‘reality’, on the other hand it is taken to be
the social manufacture of an organizational product, one that can be studied
like other manufactured goods. This iatter point of view is evident, for
instance, in Edward Jay Epstein’s early study (1973) that grew out of a
political science seminar at Harvard on organizational theory. That seminar
took its working assumption to be that members of organization ‘modified
their own personal values in accordance with the requisites of the organiza-
tion’ (1973: xiv). One should therefore study organizations, not individuals, to
analyze the ‘output’ they produced — in this case, news. Epstein’s study, based
on fieldwork at national network news programmes in 1968 and 1969,
emphasized organizational, economic, and technical requirements of televi-
sion news production in explaining the news product. Epstein’s study, like
many others, finds the technical constraints of television news particularly
notable. These, of course, have changed radically and rapidly in the past two
decades — a serious historical account of this technological revolution remains
to be written. A broadly comparative sociology of news would observe how
the absence of some technical and logistical features of news production taken
for granted in advanced economies limits news coverage in developing
nations. In Ghana, for instance, poor communication between cities and rural
areas, including the frequent breakdown of lorries carrying newspapers to the
countryside, has helped confine reporting to urban areas and issues (Twumasi,
1985).
Who are the journalists in news organizations who cover beats, interview
sources, rewrite press-releases from government bureaus, and occasionally
take the initiative in ferreting out hidden or complex stories? If the organiza-
tional theorists are generally correct, it does not matter who they are or where
they come from since they will be socialized quickly into the values and
routines of daily journalism. Initial evidence from a cross-national survey by
Colin Sparks and Slavko Splichal (1989) apparently supports this view:
despite different national cultures, despite different patterns of professional
education, and despite different labour patterns of journalists (some in strong
professional associations or unions, some not), the stated professional values
of the journalists surveyed do not differ greatly. The structural sources of
these professional values, however, may. In communist Poland, journalists
were strongly attached to professionalism, not out of occupational autonomy
but as a refuge from ‘the unpleasant push and pull of political forces’ (Curry,
1990: 207). Professionalism was a set of values and practices that protected
the Polish journalist from manipulation by the Communist Party, government
bureaucrats, and the sponsoring organization of each newspaper or journal.
Journalists at mainstream publications everywhere accommodate to the
political culture of the regime in which they operate. Still, ideals of journal-
istic professionalism may incline journalists toward acting to support freedom
of expression. In China, some journalists have developed a professional
150 Michael Schudson

devotion to freedom of expression and have been a pressure group for the
liberalization of press laws (Polumbaum, 1993). In Brazil under military rule
in the 1960s and 1970s, reporters grew adept at sabotaging the government's
efforts at censorship (Dassin, 1982: 173-76).
Professional values notwithstanding, some American scholars have sought
to ascertain the social backgrounds of media personnel as clues to the kind of
bias they will bring to their work. Studies by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley
Rothman and Linda S. Lichter (1986) made the case that news in the USA
has a liberal ‘bias’ because journalists at elite news organizations are
themselves liberal. Their survey of these journalists finds that many describe
themselves as liberals and tend to vote Democratic. This is a moderate
liberalism, at best: the group is more socially liberal (53 per cent say adultery
is not wrong) than economically liberal (only 13 per cent think government
should own big corporations). American elite journalists fully accept the
framework of capitalism although they wish for it a human face.
The Lichter, Rothman and Lichter approach offers no convincing evidence
that the news product reflects the personal views of journalists rather than the
views of the officials whose positions they are reporting (Gans, 1985).
American journalists in leading news institutions are generally very com-
mitted to their ideology of dispassion, their sense of professionalism, their
allegiance to fairness or objectivity as it has been professionally defined. They
have a professional commitment to shielding their work from their personal
political leanings. Moreover, their political leanings may be weak. Several
close observers find leading American journalists not so much liberal or
conservative as apolitical (Gans, 1979: 184; Hess, 1981: 115).
Critics and activists who advocate the hiring of more women and minorities -
in the newsroom share the emphasis in Lichter, Rothman and Lichter on the
personal values journalists bring to their jobs from their social backgrounds.
They hope to see new hiring practices transform the nature of the news
product itself to be more oriented to groups often subordinated or victimized
in society. Some anecdotal evidence (Mills, 1988) suggests that a changing
gender composition of the newsroom does influence news content, but other
reports suggest that definitions of news have not dramatically changed
(Beasley 1993: 129-30). In the USA there has probably been more concern
that the growing affluence of national journalists who report by fax and phone
and access databases from their computers will separate journalists from
direct contact with the poor or others who live in places unpleasant to visit
than there has been hope that a modest increase in the representation of
minorities and women in the newsroom will increase the connection of the
press to a broader constituency.
What is fundamental in organizational approaches, as opposed to the social
recruitment/personal values approach of Lichter, Rothman and Lichter, is the
emphasis on a) constraints imposed by organizations despite the private
intentions of the individual actors, and b) the inevitability of ‘social construc-
tion’ of reality in any social system. Both points are crucial. As for the first, it
should be noted that constraints come not only from the news organizations
reporters work for directly but from patterns of newsgathering that bring
reporters from different publications under the influence of one another. In
the USA, there is criticism of ‘pack journalism’, where reporters covering the
 The Sociology of News Production Revisited 151
same beat or same story tend to emphasize the same angle and to adopt the
Same view-point. In Japan, ‘reporters’ clubs’ are organizations of reporters
assigned to a particular ministry, and most basic news comes from reporters in
these clubs. Since most clubs are connected to government agencies, news
takes: on an official cast. The daily association of reporters at the clubs
contributes to a uniformity in the news pages; reporters are driven by what
is described as a ‘phobia’ about not writing what all the other reporters write
(Feldman, 1993: 98, 120-23; Lee, 1985; Thayer, 1975).
As for the second point, many (though not all) analysts from a social
organizational perspective abandon any strong claim that there is a ‘reality’
out there that journalists or journalistic organizations distort. News is not a
report on a factual world; news is ‘a depletable consumer product that must be
made fresh daily’ (Tuchman, 1978: 179). It is not a gathering of facts that
already exist; indeed, as Tuchman has argued, facts are defined organization-
ally — facts are ‘pertinent information gathered by professionally validated
methods specifying the relationship between what is known and how it is
known... . In news, verification of facts is both a political and a professional
accomplishment (1978: 82-83).

Cultural Approaches

In social organizational approaches, the fact that news is ‘constructed’

suggests that it is socially constructed, elaborated in the interaction of the
newsmaking players with one another. But the emphasis on the human
construction of news can be taken in another direction. Anthropologist
Marshall Sahlins has written in a different context that ‘an event is not just
a happening in the world; it is a relation between a certain happening and a
given symbolic system’ (1985: 153). Molotch and Lester, Tuchman, and
others who emphasize the ‘production of culture’ do not focus on the cultural
givens within which everyday interaction happens in the first place. These
cultural givens, while they may be uncovered by detailed historical analysis,
cannot be extrapolated from features of social organization at the moment of
study. They are a part of culture — a given symbolic system, within which and
in relation to which reporters and officials go about their duties.
Most understandings of the generation of news merge a ‘cultural’ view with
the social organizational view. It is, however, analytically distinct. Where the
organizational view finds interactional determinants of news in the relations
between people, the cultural view finds symbolic determinants of news in the
relations between ‘facts’ and symbols. A cultural account of news helps
explain generalized images and stereotypes in the news media — of predatory
stockbrokers just as much as hard-drinking factory workers — that transcend
structures of ownership or patterns of work relations. In Paul Hartmann’s and
Charles Husband’s analysis of British mass media coverage of racial conflict,
for instance, they note that ‘The British cultural tradition contains elements
derogatory to foreigners, particularly blacks. The media operate within the
culture and are obliged to use cultural symbols’ (1973: 274). Frank Pearce, in
examining media coverage of homosexuals in Britain (1973), takes as a
152 Michael Schudson

theoretical starting point anthropologist Mary Douglas’s view that all socie-
ties like to keep their cultural concepts clean and neat and are troubled by
‘anomalies’ that do not fit the preconceived categories of the culture. Homo-
sexuality is an anomaly in societies that take as fundamental the opposition
and relationship of male and female; thus homosexuals provide a culturally
charged topic for story-telling that seeks to preserve or reinforce the conven-
tional moral order of society — and its conceptual or symbolic foundation.
News stories about homosexuals, Pearce says, may be moral tales, ‘a negative
reference point ... an occasion to reinforce conventional moral values by
telling a moral tale. Through these means tensions in the social system can be
dealt with and “conventionalized” ’ (1973: 293).
If Mary Douglas is one theoretical reference point for Pearce, Sigmund
Freud is another (though unstated). Pearce cites R. D. Laing’s observation that
people enjoy reading the kind of material to be found in the sensational press
because it enables them vicariously to experience pleasurable feelings they
are otherwise forbidden to discuss or imagine. ‘These pleasurable sensations
that we have denied but not annihilated’, Pearce writes, ‘may be lived through
again by means of the sensational newspaper’ (1973: 291).
Incidentally, this sort of observation brings into the analysis the news
institutions’ sense of their audience, something relatively rare in the sociol-
ogy of news. Of course, there is a large literature in communication studies on
the ‘uses and gratifications’ audiences get from the mass media. But these
studies are rarely invoked by analysts to explain why we get the sort of news
we do. Is this an important omission? Perhaps not. Journalists typically know
very little about their audience. American journalists underestimate the size of
their working-class audience (Gans, 1979: 238-39). Soviet journalists over-
estimate the education level of their readers and underestimate the proportion
of women in their audience (Remington, 1988: 167). Herbert Gans found that
the reporters and editors he studied at news weeklies and network television
programmes ‘had little knowledge about the actual audience and rejected
feedback from it’. They typically assumed that ‘what interested them would
interest the audience’ (1979: 230). Neither American nor Soviet journalists
show much interest in learning more about their audiences. But journalists,
like other writers, address an ‘implied audience’ and it would be instructive
to know more about how this image of the reader is constructed in the
journalists’ minds.
A cultural account of news is also relevant to understanding journalists’
vague renderings of how they know ‘news’ when they see it. The central
categories of newsworkers themselves are ‘cultural’ more than structural.
Stuart Hall has tried to define the indefinable ‘news values’ or ‘news sense’
that journalists regularly talk about. He writes:
‘News values’ are one of the most opaque structures of meaning in modern
society. All ‘true journalists’ are supposed to possess it: few can or are willing
to identify and define it. Journalists speak of ‘the news’ as if events select
themselves. Further, they speak as if which is the ‘most significant’ news story,
and which ‘news angles’ are most salient are divinely inspired. Yet of the
miilions of events which occur every day in the world, only a tiny proportion
ever become visible as ‘potential news stories’: and of this proportion, only a
small fraction are actually produced as the day’s news in the news media. We
 The Sociology of News Production Revisited 153
appear to be dealing, then, with a ‘deep structure’ whose function as a selective
device 1s un-transparent even to those who professionally most know how to
operate it.
(1973: 181)

This seems to me exactly right, at least for western journalism. In the Soviet
Union, at least in the first instance, the matter was much simpler — ‘the party’s
conception of newsworthiness becomes the journalists’’ (Remington, 1988:
169), although there is evidence even in pre-Gorbachev days that Soviet
journalists held professional values distinct from party directives (Mills,
1981). Gaye Tuchman’s observation on American journalists parallels Hall’s
on the British when she writes that ‘news judgement is the sacred knowledge,
the secret ability of the newsman which differentiates him from other people’
Rios2: 612):
The cultural knowledge that constitutes ‘news judgement’ is too complex
and too implicit to label simply ‘ideology’ or the ‘common sense’ of a
hegemonic system. News judgement is not so unified, intentional and func-
tional a system as these terms suggest. Its presuppositions are in some respects
rooted much more deeply in human consciousness and can be found much
more widely distributed in human societies than capitalism or socialism or
industrialism or any other particular system of social organization and
domination can comprehend. Patriarchal and sexist outlooks, for instance,
may well be turned to the service of capitalism, but this does not make them
capitalist in origin nor does it mean that they fit capitalist structures especially
well.
A specific example may illustrate the many dimensions of this problem.
Why, Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge (1970) ask, are news stories so often
‘personified’? Why do reporters write of persons and not structures, of
individuals and not social forces? They cite a number of possible explana-
tions, some of which are ‘cultural’. There is cultural idealism — the western
view that individuals are masters of their own destiny responsible for their
acts through the free will they exercise. There is the nature of story-telling
itself, with the need in narrative to establish ‘identification’. There is also
what they call the ‘frequency-factor’ — that people act during a time-span that
fits the frequency of the news media (daily) better than do the actions of
‘structures’ that are much harder to connect with specific events in a 24-hour
cycle.
This last point is particularly interesting. Is it a ‘social structural’ or a
‘cultural’ phenomenon? In some respect, it is structural — if the media
operated monthly or annually rather than daily, perhaps they would speak
more often of social forces than of individuals. Indeed, examining journal-
ism’s ‘year-end reviews’ would very likely turn up more attention to social
trends and structural changes than can be found in the daily news. But, then, is
the fact that the press normally operates on a daily basis structural or cultural?
Is there some basic primacy to the daily cycle of the press, of business, of
government, of sleeping and waking, that makes the institutions of journalism
inescapably human and person-centred in scale?
Or might there be some more or less universal processes of human
perception that lead to an emphasis on the individual? Does this have less
154 Michael Schudson

to do with something peculiarly American or western or capitalistic than it

does with what psychologists refer to as the ‘fundamental attribution error’ in
human causal thinking — attributing to individuals in the foreground respon-
sibility for causation that might be better attributed to background situations or
large-scale trends or structures? That news definitions and news values differ
across cultures can be demonstrated by comparative research. For instance,
the Soviet media, like western media, operated on a daily cycle, but very little
of the news concerned happenings in the prior twenty-four hours (Mickiewicz,
1989: 30). Soviet news organizations operated according to long-range
political plans and stockpiled stories and editorials to meet political needs
(Remington, 1988: 116). The sense of immediacy taken by Western media to
be a requirement of news (and often taken by critics to be an ideologically
loaded weakness of journalism) is not, the Soviet case would suggest, an
invariant feature of bureaucratic organization, occupational routines, or a
universal diurnal human rhythm. It is rooted instead in a nation-specific
political culture.
So one need not adopt assumptions about universal properties of human
nature and human interest (although I think it would be foolish to dismiss
them out of hand) to acknowledge that there are aspects of news-generation
that go beyond what sociological analysis of news organizations is normally
prepared to handle. Richard Hoggart has written that the most important filter
through which news is constructed is ‘the cultural air we breathe, the whole
ideological atmosphere of our society, which tells us that some things can be
said and that others had best not be said’ (Bennett, 1982: 303). That ‘cultural
air’ is one that in part ruling groups and institutions create but it is in part one
in whose social context their own establishment takes place.
The cultural air has both a form and content. The content, the substance of
taken-for-granted values, has often been discussed. Gans (1979) describes the
core values of American journalism as ethnocentrism, altruistic democracy,
responsible capitalism, small-town pastoralism, individualism, and moderat-
ism. They are the unquestioned and generally unnoticed background assump-
tions through which the news is gathered and within which it is framed. If
these elements of content fit rather well conventional notions of ideology or
the common sense of a hegemonic system (Gans calls them ‘para-ideology’),
aspects of form operate at a level more remote from ideology as generally
understood.
_ By ‘form’, I refer to assumptions about narrative, story-telling, human
interest, and the conventions of photographic and linguistic presentation
that all of the news media produce. Weaver (1975) has shown some
systematic differences between the inverted-pyramid structure of print news
and the ‘thematic’ structure of television news; Schudson (1982) has argued
that the inverted-pyramid form is a peculiar development of late nineteenth-
century American journalism and one that implicitly authorized the journalist
as political expert and helped redefine politics itself as a subject appropriately
discussed by experts rather than partisans; Hallin and Mancini (1984) demon-
strate in a comparison of television news in Italy and the USA that formal
conventions of news reporting often attributed to the technology of television
by analysts or to ‘the nature of things’ by journalists in fact stem from features
of a country’s political culture. All of this work recognizes that news is a form
 The Sociology of News Production Revisited 155
of literature and that one key resource journalists work with is the cultural
tradition of story-telling and picture-making and sentence construction they
inherit, with a number of vital assumptions about the world built in.
If there is a general cultural air journalists breathe along with others in their
society, there is also a specifically journalistic cultural air tied to the occupa-
tional practices of journalists. The ‘routines’ of journalists are not only social,
emerging out of interactions among officials, reporters, and editors, but
literary, emerging out of interactions of writers with literary traditions.
More than that, journalists at work operate not only to maintain and repair
their social relations with sources and colleagues but their cultural image as
journalists in the eyes of a wider world. Robert Manoff shows how television
news reporters deploy experts in stories not so much to provide viewers with
information but to certify the journalist’s ‘effort, access, and superior knowl-
edge’ (1989: 69). Barbie Zelizer (1990) has demonstrated the ways that
reporters in American broadcast news visually and verbally establish their
own authority by suggesting their personal proximity to the events they cover.
Regardless of how the news was in fact ‘gathered’, it is presented in a style
that promotes an illusion of the journalists’ adherence to the journalistic norm
of proximity. The reality journalists manufacture provides not only a version
and vision of ‘the world’ but of ‘journalism’ itself.
Cultural form may also refer to language itself. Prognostications of a
‘global village’ unified by new globe-spanning satellite communications
founder on the persistent strength of local and regional language loyalties
and national identities. While CNN (Cable News Network) was by 1993
available in 140 countries, relatively small proportions of viewers regularly
tune in. Euronews, a five-language satellite-transmitted news channel begun
in 1994 and available to millions, similarly, if on a smaller scale, is already
experiencing the difficulties of one-world broadcasting in a multinational,
multicultural human scene (Parker, 1994).

Conclusions

The approaches to the study of news I have reviewed often ignore possibilities
for change in the nature of news. When William Rivers (1962) studied
Washington correspondents in 1960, a generation after Leo Rosten (1937)
had studied them, asking some of the same questions Rosten had asked, he
found reporters more free from directives from their home offices than they
had been in the 1930s. When Leon Sigal studied changes in the front pages of
the New York Times and the Washington Post, he found that from the 1950s to
the early 1970s news stories were more likely to be based on more than one
source and to include material gathered from (sometimes disaffected or
dissident) bureaucrats lower down in the organizational hierarchy. My own
research (Schudson, 1982) found that in the 1880s news stories of presidential
addresses did not try to summarize the key points of a speech, but that by 1910
a ‘summary lead’ was a standard form, an assertion, in a sense, of the
authority of the press to define the key political reality of the day. Anthony
Smith (1980) found major changes in the nature of newswork in British
156 Michael Schudson

journalism in his review of changes in journalistic values and practices.

Accounts of the Soviet press in its last days make it clear that Glasnost
rapidly and radically altered the content of the news; frank repofts of
accidents, disasters and political protests were printed that would never
have appeared in the past (Mickiewicz, 1988; Remington, 1988). In gen-
eral, historical studies of the press reveal significantly different patterns of
newsgathering and newswriting over time that are rarely referenced or
accounted for in contemporary media studies.
All three approaches reviewed here tend to be indifferent to comparative as
well as to historical studies. Comparative research is cumbersome, of course,
even in the age of word-processors and computer networking. More tellingly,
I think, media studies are genuinely linked to national political issues — they
are an academic meta-discourse on the daily defining of political reality. The
motive for research, then, is normally conceived in isolation from compara-
tive concerns. If this strengthens the immediate political relevance of media
studies, it weakens their longer-term value as social science.
All three approaches, even so, have greatly advanced our understanding of
the media by focusing on the specific institutions and the specific processes in
those institutions responsible for creating the cultural product we call news.
They have sought to abandon broad functionalist guidelines that understand
the media by positing some general social function the media serve (although
the political economy perspective is not yet free of a functionalist orienta-
tion). This, I think, has been to the good. Still, an implicit normative
functionalism has been smuggled into many studies: the idea that the news
media should serve society by informing the general population in ways that
arm them for vigilant citizenship. I am sympathetic to this as one goal the
news media in a democracy should try to serve but I do not think historically it
is a very good approximation of what role the news media have played —
anywhere. The news media have always been a more important forum for
communication among elites (and some elites more than others) than with the
general population. In the best of circumstances, the fact of a general audience
for the news media provides a regular opportunity for elites to be effectively
embarrassed, even disgraced, as Brent Fisse and John Braithwaite (1983)
show in their cross-national study of the impact of publicity on corporate
offenders. The combination of electoral democracy with a free press, econo-
mist Amartya Sen has argued, has prevented famines even when crops have
failed (Sen and Dreze 1989). But even here the ‘audience’ or the ‘public’ has
a kind of phantom existence that the sociological study of news production
has yet to consider in its theoretical formulations.

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8
Entertainment
Simon Frith

Introduction

‘Entertainment’ is a term that always seems to be used with a hint of disdain:

entertainment is always only entertainment. There are two implicit contrasts
involved here. One rests on an aesthetic judgement: entertainment (fun, of the
moment, trivial) is being contrasted to art (serious, transcendent, profound).
The other on a political judgement: entertainment (insignificant, escapist) is
being contrasted with news, with reality, with truth.
The media themselves — the press and broadcasting, at least — have
historically built such contrasts into their own organizational framework.
News rather than entertainment is the way to editorial or corporate power;
news rather than entertainment is the source of public influence. One effect of
this is the suggestion, widespread in Europe at least, that the ‘devaluation’ of
broadcasting caused by deregulation can be measured by the rise of entertain-
ment shows at the expense of news and documentaries. Press commentators,
too, tend to describe the decay of the tabloid press in terms of a shift from
news to entertainment values.
Any academic account of the media and entertainment must, then, take
account of the way in which ‘entertainment’ occupies an ideological place
within media structures, but there is a further difficulty here: the implicit
disdain for entertainment in conventional media argument is reinforced by an
even greater disdain for entertainment in conventional media sociology.
Academic researchers may be well aware, in the abstract, of the importance
of entertainment as a socio-cultural force, whether this is measured in the
economic terms of wealth creation, employment, investment, and so forth, or
in the anthropological terms of its importance for our everyday lives,
identities, and patterns of sociability. Media sociologists are equally well
aware, in research practice, that the boundaries between entertainment and
art or between entertainment and news are anyway difficult to draw. It
remains the case, however, that sociological research is still focused on the
 Entertainment 161

‘heavy’ rather than the light output of, say, television, and that there is still far
more systematic scholarly analysis of news values than of popular taste.
In my Sociology of Rock (Frith, 1978), I remarked that if sociologists could
not exactly ignore the record-players, tape-recorders and transistor radios
found (alongside the TV set) in most households in Britain and North
America by the end of the 1960s, they could still write thousands of articles
about mass communication as if music played no part in it. Records did begin
to be included in textbook lists of the mass media; but that was the only
mention they got. I don’t believe the situation has changed much since then.
Media sociology, at least in the Anglo-American tradition, is still focused on
the press and broadcasting (rather than on film, music or computer games);
and it still tends to treat newspapers and broadcasters primarily with reference
to ‘real’ issues — to political power, the democratic process, the public sphere.
It is not surprising, then, that the best analytic and research work on
entertainment in the last ten to fifteen years has come from different aca-
demic fields with different theoretical perspectives altogether. Feminist
scholars, for example, working within the theoretical frame of women’s
studies, pursued their interest in the everyday construction of gender values
and differences into pioneering studies of television entertainment (such as
soap operas) (Modleski, 1982; Hobson, 1982; Ang, 1985), cinema entertain-
ment (such as Hollywood melodramas) (Johnston, 1973; Gledhill, 1987;
Mulvey, 1989), and print entertainment (such as women’s magazines and
romantic fiction) (Radway, 1984; Winship, 1987). Cultural studies, mean-
while, defined its interest in media consumption — in subcultural style, the
politics of the everyday, the meaning of ‘the popular’ — against the ‘positivist’
approach of media and communication studies (Hebdige, 1979; Bennett,
1981; Bennett and Woollacott, 1987; Dyer, 1992); while it was out of the
film studies theorization of the mass media text (and interest in semiotics)
that the first applied studies of television entertainment (Fiske and Hartley,
1978; Fiske 1987), advertisements (Williamson, 1978), and even music videos
(Kaplan, 1987) emerged.
By the end of the 1980s academic media analysis thus reflected a-clear
political and methodological bifurcation. Sociologists and communications
theorists, using conventional empirical methods, still focused on issues of
economics, production, messages, effects; scholars in the overlapping fields of
cultural studies, women’s studies and film studies, using a variety of semiotic
methods and ‘ethnographies’, addressed new issues of consumption, meaning,
pleasure, identity. But, whatever the different material and analytic concerns,
these different approaches did employ the same model of communication (the
model I used, for example, in The Sociology of Rock), in which the media
process is divided into three: production (the site of debates about ownership,
influence and power); consumption (the site of debates about effects, taste,
and ‘resistance’); and meaning (the site of debates about ideology, ‘Amer-
icanization’, and national identity).
This model draws obviously enough on both the classic American mass
communication question of ‘who says what to whom’ (Schramm, 1954) and
the Frankfurt School’s account of the media as culture industries (Adorno,
1991), but as an approach to entertainment it has two problems. First, it
produces an over-bureaucratized account of production in which it is
162 Simon Frith

assumed that the culture industries are as economically ‘rational’ as any other
form of capitalist enterprise. In fact, the most remarkable aspect of the media
production of entertainment is the level of failure involved — the vast majority
of books published, music recorded, and films scripted do not recover their
costs (or even reach an audience), and any account of the economics of
entertainment has to take account of the effects of fashion, novelty and
boredom, matters that are not easily rationalized. It is perhaps worth noting
in this context that ‘youth’, an audience category which describes not simply a
stage of life but also a restless, fickle, obsessive attitude to media consump-
tion, is a key market target for all entertainment media, whether pop music,
the Hollywood film, the TV show or, indeed, the Sun newspaper.
The conventional media communication model produces, secondly, an
over-politicized account of consumption, in which the central debate treats
the consumer almost entirely in terms of discursive power, dominant and
oppositional values, the ‘cultural dope’ versus the resistant reader, rather than
by reference to, say, aesthetic judgements or sensual pleasures. The meaning
of entertainment is thus always ideological. If cultural studies has rescued
popular media pursuits from the condescension of sociology, it has done so by
suggesting that they are, really, politically, serious. ;
In this media model, in short, entertainment is studied (or dismissed) as a
form of political communication, involving power, influence and manipula-
tion. What worries me about this approach is that it makes no sense of
entertainment as a kind of sociability with a long human history. Entertain-
ment, something which (in the Chambers Dictionary definition) ‘holds the
attention pleasurably’, is not the product or result of the mass media, and even
today mediated entertainment must take its place in the flux of the everyday —
we hear as many good stories from friends as from professionals; we are as
likely to play games and music for ourselves as to pay to have other people
play them for us (Finnegan, 1989).
In this essay, then, I want to suggest an approach to the entertainment
industry which starts out from the problem of entertainment not as commu-
nication but as commodity. The question that interests me is how money is
made out of social activities and domestic pleasures that long predate the mass
media. Entertainment obviously is an industry now; the points originally made
by the Frankfurt School about the serial production of art, the standardization
of music and the ownership and exchange of culture are clearly still pertinent.
I want to examine them with a model (taken from the history of music, the
oldest form of entertainment) in which the key factors are not production,
consumption and meaning, but storage, retrieval and occasion.
Entertainment describes events and activities that pass the time, that are by
their nature fleeting, but to be commodified such events and activities have,
nevertheless, to be objectified. How is entertainment given material form as
property and for exchange? At the same time there has to be some social
agreement as to when such exchange is appropriate, when it will have the
desired social effects, How is entertainment as commodity exchange placed in
the everyday? With these questions in mind I will approach entertainment
from the perspective of technology (and storage and retrieval), on the one
hand, and leisure (and occasion), on the other.
 Entertainment 163

Technology

The starting point here has to be history. It is undeniable that the development
of mass mediated entertainment has been dependent on technological innova-
tions that have made the serial production of entertainment goods economic-
ally feasible. Printing thus made possible the book, newspaper and magazine
trade, just as twentieth-century entertainment is tied up with the use of
photography, the phonograph, the film camera and the wireless, the TV, the
video and the computer. In commonsense terms, indeed, the technology is the
entertainment: we talk of watching television, listening to records, going to
the cinema, playing computer games, and so on. It is, nevertheless, misleading
to assume that technology determines the form or content (or use or ideology)
of entertainment, for at least two reasons. On the one hand, inventors and
manufacturers have rarely anticipated the eventual use of their devices
(Edison, to give the most notorious example, originally marketed the phono-
graph as a kind of dictating machine and explicitly rejected the idea that it
might have entertainment value); on the other hand, the essential conserva-
tism of both producers and consumers means that technological advance is
almost always in the name of doing more efficiently or profitably or con-
veniently what is done already. This is one reason why artists, particularly
self-defined avant-garde artists, have been so unexpectedly important in the
technical shaping of mass entertainments like the cinema and recorded music:
they are the only people fully committed to using new means of symbolic
production experimentally.
From this perspective the ‘revolutionary’ impact of electronic technology
has been overstated. A visitor from the mid-nineteenth century might be
amazed by how we were entertained but would not be very surprised by
what entertained us: our sense of plot and drama, comedy and tragedy,
sensation and excitement, heroism and villainy, what we mean by a good
tune, a good story, has not changed much — there are as many aesthetic
continuities as there are technical differences between the nineteenth-century
penny paper and twentieth-century tabloid, the nineteenth-century stage
melodrama and the twentieth-century Hollywood film, the nineteenth-cen-
tury novel and the twentieth-century bestseller, the nineteenth-century street
ballad and the twentieth-century pop song.
Writing the history of entertainment in terms of storage and retrieval
clarifies the effect of technology on such issues of continuity and change, a
point I can best illustrate with the example of music. Music (an obviously
time-based medium: existing only as it is experienced) has been through three
broad storage stages. Initially it was ‘stored’ in the mind and body of a person
(and in his or her musical instrument). The first professional musical entertai-
ners were people paid to ‘retrieve’ music in their own performances (though
they no doubt soon had their own supporting entourage of agents and
promoters).
Following the invention of printing, music could, in a second stage, be
stored easily too in the form of notes, in the score. To be realized as music,
such notes still had to be played, but there were now new players in the
musical economy — composers and publishers as well as performers could
164 Simon Frith

make money out of this new storage device, the printed score or sheet music.
Musicians were still at the core of the music business, but the economic
opportunities had clearly expanded: the composers and publishers profited
now too from amateur performers, from the domestic use of musical instru-
ments (the market for which in turn expanded, giving piano manufacturers, for
example, a new impetus to apply industrial technology to mass production).
In the third stage, following the invention of the phonograph, music came to
be recorded, stored as sound on a ‘carrier’ which became in its evolving forms
(phonogram, record, cassette tape, compact disc) the basic musical commod-
ity. Again, though, this did not displace professional performers from the
centre of musical entertainment nor, in the end (a point to which I will return),
lessen the economic importance of music publishing. In terms of musical
form, indeed, one could say that it was precisely the development of recording
(and broadcasting) technology that enabled eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury concert-hall art to be sold in the twentieth century as the mass entertain-
ment now known, somewhat misleadingly, as ‘classical music’.
This framework is, I think, applicable to other media (for example in the
movement from story-teller to book-author to film-producer) and it certainly
helps us to understand the three central issues in the economics of entertain-
ment: talent, copyright, and the relationship of hardware and software.

Talent
All entertainment industries see themselves as talent industries: they define
their activities as discovering, nurturing and exploiting talent (and remain,
in this respect, imbued with the ideology of early nineteenth-century
Romanticism). A number of consequences flow from this.
First, all entertainment businesses are organized around the idea of stardom
(Dyer, 1979). The star is central to the entertainment market, most obviously
in the figures of the film and pop star (film projects have to be sold on the back
of their potential stars; record company profits depend on their star signings)
but equally importantly in publishing (through the build-up of a bestselling
author’s name, for example) and broadcasting (the first question asked of even
the most straightforward documentary proposal is thus ‘who will present it? ’).
One way in which news is seen (dismissively) to be becoming entertainment
is through this star effect - as newsreaders are paid more than news editors,
and as even the most serious broadsheets sell themselves on their ‘name’
columnists.
It follows, secondly, that competitive entertainment corporations are com-
mitted first of all to finding stars, nurturing them, making them happy. Hence
the importance in the music industry, for example, of contract lawyers (who
tend nowadays to occupy the most important executive positions — on the
model of Clive Davis at CBS and Arista) and artist managers (like David
Geffen), and the emergence of competitive bidding and the role of the agent in
publishing and sport. One aspect of this is that we have to understand the
economic logic of entertainment companies (their investment patterns, for
example) by reference to the exigencies of long-term star-making as well as to
those of recovering the immediate costs of a particular star vehicle. In the
 Entertainment 165

record industry, as Keith Negus has pointed out, this can mean in-house
tensions between an A&R department’s career strategies and the marketing
department’s attempts to maximize the sales of the product to hand (Negus,
1992). In publishing it has meant the rise of book ‘packaging’ and books
‘authored’ (but not necessarily written) by star sports players (Ian Botham),
politicians (Newt Gingrich), models (Naomi Campbell), or, indeed, serial
killers. In all media it has led to the increasing importance of merchandising
— product endorsement can produce as much income as direct sales, an image
on a T-shirt as much as a performance on stage or record. Merchandising is
nothing new — it was, for example, a way in which P. T. Barnum made money
from (and helped to promote) the Swedish soprano, Jenny Lind, in the USA in
the mid-nineteenth century (Barnum, 1967) — but it is notable that these days
the most successful ‘tie-in’ sales campaigns (aimed primarily at children) use
comic-book figures and cartoon characters, like Batman and the Lion King, or
techno-toys, like the Jurassic Park dinosaurs and the Mutant Ninja Turtles,
rather than film stars as such (Engelhardt, 1986).
The point I want to stress here is different, however. If the economics of
entertainment are organized around star quality and talent, whether this is
talent that makes one author formulaic and another a recurrent bestseller, one
person a TV presenter and another a TV personality, one woman an actress
and another a film star, one band a teenage group and another pop stars, such
talent — whatever it is that makes someone a star — is essentially mysterious.
Few stars have been made by the entertainment industry from scratch. Star
quality is, it seems, first discovered — or revealed — by the public, and only
then exploited by the business. There is, in short, something essentially
irrational at the core of commercial entertainment, and it is therefore mis-
leading to regard the ‘culture industry’ as a super-efficient regulator of public
tastes. It has to be seen, rather, as an industry organized around the fickleness
of the public. Entertainment companies necessarily carry a high level of failed
projects (nine out of ten records, for example), and necessarily tolerate the
eccentricity of their successful ‘artists’. What matters is to make as much
money as possible out of what does work, and in the end stars matter so much
to the entertainment industry because they are the only tangible evidence of
what the public does want.

Copyright
Copyright is the basis of property rights in the entertainment business and
therefore the basis of entertainment as a capitalist industry. In the music
industry, for example, songs are ‘properties’ (like books in the publishing
industry, films in the movie industry, and game-show formats in the TV
industry), properties in which companies own ‘baskets of rights (Frith,
1993). The owners of a music copyright (the writer and publisher) can thus
charge a fee for its use — whether as a recording or in live performance, on a
film soundtrack or as an advertising jingle, on the radio or in a shopping mall.
Two important points follow from this. First, the entertainment industries
are particularly dependent for their profitability on the laws which restrict the
uses to which a work may be put and define those which must be licensed by
166 Simon Frith

the copyright-holders. A recurring problem for the entertainment industry,

then, is how to rewrite copyright law to take account of changing circum-
stances. This problem is most obvious in technological terms: each new way
of using an image, song or story needs to be specifically restricted. In the case
of music, for example, the development of recording at the beginning of this
century raised the question of the rights of composers and publishers in the
broadcast or other public use of their songs on record; the rapid spread of
cassette players in the 1980s raised the question of the rights of record
companies in the domestic copying of their music; while the use of digital
technology in the 1990s has raised the question of who owns sounds.
Copyright laws have been duly amended to reflect changing technological
conditions, but it is by no means the case that different national legislatures
are agreed on what should be done. In Britain, for example, it was eventually
ruled that the 1911 Copyright Act gave record companies the right to restrict
the public use of recordings (just as song-publishers could restrict the public
performance of songs). In the USA this has never been accepted: to own a
record there is to have the right to do what one likes with it. Similarly, while
in the 1980s many European countries accepted the record industry argument
that home-taping should be formally ‘licensed’ (via a fee paid on the purchase
of a blank tape or a tape-recorder), this was rejected by the 1988 British
Copyright Act (and has certainly not been accepted in the USA, where a
similar battle was fought — and lost — by Hollywood studios against home-
taping on VCRs) (Lardner, 1987).
The difference between countries’ copyright rules has been a problem for
the entertainment business since its goods first crossed national boundaries,
and there is a long history of publishers, record companies and film studios
seeking to have copyright law standardized (and enforced) to their best
advantage internationally. Such campaigns began with European publishers’
nineteenth-century campaigns for US legislation to protect their authors from
piracy and continue with the USA’s current concern (in the Uruguay round of
the GATT treaty, for example) to protect music, film and computer software
from piracy in the Third World.
If changes in copyright laws, nationally and internationally, reflect the
effects of technology and exchange on cultural storage and retrieval, they
also determine the economic effects of cultural mediation. This is my second
point: the most significant source of income in the entertainment industry, that
is to say, is not the manufacture and exchange of goods to individual
customers for cash (though this is obviously important) but the fee income
from licensing the rights to various uses of the property (including the right to
put it on a carrier — a record, a tape — to be sold to the public on an individual
basis). The implications of this are more obvious in some industries than
others: until the development of the domestic VCR, for example, individual
consumers could not buy films (or TV programmes) as such; their ‘authors’
thus made their money licensing their use by cinemas or television stations.
Now, by contrast money can be made out of films in a variety of ways, not just
from rental to theatres or from deals with broadcasters, but also from
transmission on cable and satellite and from ‘selling through’ directly to
the public. Even those entertainment industries (like book publishing) which
seem to depend more exclusively on individual consumption are, in fact,
 Entertainment 167

making money out of a variety of licences. The financial return on a

bestselling novel, for example, is likely to be as great in terms of film and
television rights, serialization and condensation rights as from sales as such;
and the music industry almost certainly now makes as much money from
licensing its properties for mediated use (on radio and television and film
soundtrack; as the background noise of public places) as it does from
domestic CD sales (Frith, 1988). Hence the continuing economic importance
of music-publishers and the ‘back catalogue’: songs, like books, may be
exploited throughout their copyright period, as they are revived, repack-
aged, and articulated in new technological forms — so that classic rock
records get a new life as boxed-set CDs just as classic Hollywood films get
a new commercial life now as domestic videos.

Hardware/Software
One peculiarity of the twentieth-century entertainment industry is that it rests
on two different sorts of sales process: first, people have to be persuaded to
buy hardware, a permanent piece of domestic furniture (a gramophone. or
cassette or CD player; a radio or television set; a computer); second, they have
to be persuaded to buy software, to continue to purchase music, watch
programmes, rent videos and buy computer games to use on the machinery.
There is obviously a complementary process here: there is no point in buying
hardware unless there is software available to use on it; there is no point in
buying software without having the hardware in place.
This is obvious enough. What is less obvious, perhaps, is that the historical
relationship between hardware and software manufacturers keeps shifting and
is not necessarily harmonious. Hardware manufacturers, for example, can
expect to move from an initial high-risk, highly competitive market in which
even the largest technological investment may turn out to have been futile (as
with quadraphonic sound or the betamax video system), to a buoyant period in
which mass acceptance of a new device means an essentially monopolistic
position and huge profits, to a tailing-off in demand as the market is
exhausted. Software manufacturers, by contrast, respond to market condi-
tions, and when a new technology does take off have an ever-growing market
as the new goods (TV sets, CD players, home computers) move from the most
affluent consumers to the general public (this is obvious in the history of the
CD market, for example: record companies began by putting classical music
and jazz on CD before moving rapidly downmarket).
If hardware and software manufacturers thus occupy different business
cycles there are also fluctuations in the negotiation of what we might call
cultural power. Hardware manufacturers (who have historically come from
outside the established entertainment industry) need access to software rights
if their goods are to have consumer appeal. They are, in this respect, utterly
dependent on existing rights owners (and so Sony took over CBS to ensure
they had films and sounds available). This accounts for the essential con-
servatism of the entertainment business (‘new’ hardware simply makes more
easily accessible familiar software), and for the recurring tensions between
hardware manufacturers and software rights holders, who are initially apt to
168 Simon Frith

see any new way of exploiting rights as a threat to customary money-making

ways. .
This is the context in which we can observe two different corporate
strategies among entertainment companies. On the one hand, they may
seek to combine hardware and software interests, using the economic depen-
dence of each on the other — this has been the strategy of the Japanese
electronics companies Sony-CBS and Mitsushita (which took over MCA)
and the Dutch electronics company, Philips (through Polygram); on the other
hand, they may decide like Time-Warner, Rupert Murdoch’s News Interna-
tional, or the German Bertelsmann group to be publishers, exploiting their
software interests through the ownership or control of all possible means of
transmission, such that the same property (Batman, say) can be simulta-
neously sold as a comic book, a paperback, a film and a video, a record
and a visual image, each different sort of ‘carrier’ working to promote all the
others (Pearson and Uricchio, 1991).

Leisure

I come now to the question of when entertainment is appropriate. In broad

terms we associate entertainment with leisure, with non-work times, with
relaxation and play, though in practice this boundary has become blurred as
music is used, for example, as part of the soundtrack of the workplace, and
given the increasing economic importance of consumer service industries in
which one person’s leisure is another person’s work. Entertainment, that is to
say, must be judged socially appropriate as a matter of both time and space.
From this perspective two aspects of mass media entertainment stand out.
There is, first, what we might call the routinization of the special event. If
entertainment was once marked as a special moment — a festival or rite, a
wedding or birthday — such ‘specialness’ is now a part of the everyday: the
evening, the weekend, the break; all ‘spare’ time is now an opportunity for
entertainment, whether skimming a paper or watching TV in the morning,
listening to a Walkman or car radio on the way to work, or reading a
magazine or paperback in the lunch hour. Entertainment was once defined
by the social situation that produced it; now it defines a quality of experience,
a kind of pleasure or relaxation that may be available in any place at any time.
It follows, second, that there is now no clear distinction between public and
domestic entertainment, between personal and social rituals. For most people
public entertainment is in fact mostly experienced in the home (as we listen to
the radio or CD player, watch TV, read the newspaper; as theatrical and sports
and musical events from around the world are on offer day and night in the
corner of the living room). The history of musical entertainment thus seems
marked, at least technologically, by a drive towards privatization. The early
Victorian pub piano became the late Victorian domestic piano which became
(via the player piano) the family phonogram then radiogram which became in
turn the portable record-player and the transistor radio and thus eventually the
Walkman. There is something of the same development in film entertainment:
 Entertainment 169

films are more likely to be watched in the home than in the cinema now, and
not even there by the family as a whole.
What is going on here is a shift in the meaning of entertainment from a
description of a particular sort of social experience to the articulation of a
certain kind of individual market choice: the magazine market (a title for
every taste; a niche for every member of the family) has become the model for
radio and television, for cinema as video, for music as the CD catalogue. The
point here is not that entertainment has ceased to be a sociable affair, but that
the ‘society’ involved is a ‘taste public’, a fan club or a cult, an aspect of the
entertainment fantasy itself.
The implications of this can best be discussed under two headings: media-
tion and taste.

Mediation
Just as record companies refer to primary and secondary musical rights
(distinguishing between the primary right to put a song on record and sell it
to the public and the secondary right to exploit that record as a source. of
entertainment in itself) so I want to distinguish between primary and second-
ary entertainment. Many entertainment goods, that is, are not provided
directly for the public itself but for people who seek-to entertain the public
— cinema exhibitors, television companies, radio programmers. Such second-
ary ‘entertainment’ is thus framed by pre-readings of the market and by
instrumental interests, as radio and TV stations, for instance, use musical
artefacts to attract certain sorts of viewer/listener for certain sorts of adver-
tiser. (Newspaper and magazine publishing has long depended economically
on titles attracting advertisers rather than readers as such; or, rather, on titles
attracting the readers the advertisers want.)
Analysts of the television thus talk of the ‘audience commodity’ (Ang,
1991): ‘entertainment’ in this context does not describe the sort of work sold
to an audience, but the sort of audience sold to an advertiser, an audience at
leisure, having a good time. But the point I want to stress here is different:
Karl Marx once noted that the successful capitalist manufacturer did not just
make goods for a market but, just as importantly, created a market for his
goods. This is particularly necessary for entertainment goods, the demand for
which is both essentially irrational (a matter of taste and fad and fancy) and
competitive (not just in terms of other leisure goods but also by reference to
other uses of leisure time). In consequence, the promotion of entertainment
goods, building their audience, is just as important — and costly — a part of the
entertainment industry as their production in the first place. The promotional
budget for Hollywood films thus matches production costs; the promotional
budget for a new album release matches recording costs.
This has two effects that are worth noting. First, marketing departments
have become increasingly important in terms of corporate power and influ-
ence. Their task is not to devise the best means of selling whatever books or
sounds or films the editorial or ‘creative’ departments come up with but,
rather, to ensure that whatever is created is, indeed, marketable. No signing
is made, no package approved, no studio go-ahead given without considera-
170 Simon Frith

tion of its potential market. It follows, second, that the entertainment business
is obsessed with audience research, with sales figures and sales charts, with
viewing patterns and reactions. Entertainments come to us, in other words,
imbricated with theories of what we want.

Taste

For the industry, public taste means ‘taste publics’, patterns of leisure interest
and activity that can be mapped onto other social characteristics — age and
gender, class and ethnicity, sexuality and occupation, spending power.
‘Taste’, an ideological gesture at the liberal myth of free individual market
choice, is redescribed in terms of demographics, sociographics, niche market-
ing. In this model what the public wants is effectively determined by who the
public are, and this assumption remains essential to the day-to-day practices
of the entertainment business even though, on the one hand, the public does
not want most of what is offered to it and, on the other, the biggest profits tend
to come from books and films and records which create their own, unexpected
audiences, which ‘cross over’ (thus creating a new taste map, a new blueprint
for formulaic production).
From a sociological perspective the interesting issue here is not so much
taste as taste formation (Bourdieu, 1984). Rather than treating the social
structure as the site on which cultural goods must be sold, sociologists treat
entertainment as the site in which the dynamics of social relations are enacted:
it is through the expression of taste that we articulate sameness and difference,
subjective and social identity. It is not so much that because people have
certain (socially determined) tastes they choose certain leisure goods and
activities, but that in choosing these goods and activities they reveal and
define their tastes, and hence their sense of their social position. Cultural
capital can only be accumulated (and realized) in cultural exchange, and from
this perspective (most systematically developed in analyses of youth subcul-
tures (Hebdige, 1978; McRobbie, 1991) taste is the key to the formation of
social groups and alliances.
Entertainment, to put this another way, is valuable primarily as a source of
symbolic goods (and a setting for symbolic activity) which can be made over,
and, if from an academic point of view such audience activity can be
celebrated as in some sense ‘subversive’ of dominant ideology, from an
industry point of view what people make of leisure goods matters less than
that they routinely consume them. Entertainment corporations are happy to
take their cut of gangsta rap, Kung Fu movies, comic cults, and Madonna
videos. One further point can be made here: analysts of all sorts are apt to use
the raw data of leisure consumption (sales figures and box office returns) as
measures of popular taste and value: to watch a film or TV show is taken to be
to like and somehow ‘agree’ with it. This is, of course, to make a nonsense of
the everyday experience of entertainment in which much of what we consume
is, indeed, ‘disappointing’. Consumption is not the same thing as discrimina-
tion, and one of the more foolish consequences of the spurious distinction
between art and entertainment (or between high and low culture) is the
 Entertainment 171

Suggestion that to be entertained is to suspend all moral or aesthetic

judgement.
This is to raise questions about the value of entertainments and entertainers
which take us away from problems of media analysis to problems of aesthetic
analysis which I have dealt with elsewhere (Frith, 1996). Here I want to
conclude by focusing instead on the political issues raised by the organiza-
tion of entertainment as an industry. One striking aspect of the entertainment
business, for example, is the resonance of the idea of ‘independence’ —
whether this is defined against state organizations, as in the case of ‘inde-
pendent’ radio or TV, or against major corporations, as in the case of
‘independent’ film or record production. There is clearly some confusion
here between institutional and ideological terms: a technical description
(how a company works in terms of production and distribution; its size) is
taken to describe what it produces (adventurous, radical films, programmes
and music; the unstandardized). This argument (most obvious in the music
business where ‘indie’ has become a genre label) does not stand up to much
scrutiny, not least because independent entertainment companies depend
ultimately on fitting market niches unoccupied by the major companies and
are thus, if anything, more likely to produce to formula, more likely to think in
terms of ‘taste publics’. The paradox here, in fact, is that in as far as
independent production companies are radical and adventurous it is in their
de facto role as the R&D departments of the major corporations, which use
them (often with their own substantial investment) to test new acts and forms
and markets, moving in on success through their domination of the means of
distribution. This brings us to the problem of globalization.

Globalization

From the very earliest days of the international entertainment industry — with
the rise of Tin Pan Alley at the end of the nineteenth century, for example —
there has been a recurrent fear of ‘Americanization’, whether articulated in
defence of existing European culture (a defence still mounted by the French
during the most recent GATT negotiations) or as an attack from the Third
World against ‘cultural imperialism’, and today more than ever it is easy
enough to envisage a media future in which MTV is on every TV screen, a
Hollywood film in every movie theatre, Disneyland on every continent,
Mariah Carey on every radio station, and Penthouse in every newsagent.
How seriously should we take this picture? ; |
Applying the model of storage and retrieval described above, it is easy
enough to describe the trade in twentieth-century entertainments in terms of
technological logic. As sounds, for example, came to be stored in wax
grooves, so the inventors and manufacturers of recording devices spread first
hardware then software (at a price) around the world. No music making or
listening community was unaffected, and a pioneer recording man like Fred
Gaisberg, pushing his way stolidly across Europe and Asia, establishing local
recording industry after local recording industry at the behestof his master’s
voice back in the USA, can be seen as a cross between a missionary and a
172 Simon Frith

merchant capitalist, exchanging recording technology for exotic sounds to

record, establishing a new kind of musical map, a flow of sound for local
pressing and distribution. ;
It is equally easy to misread this story, however, and music thus becomes a
useful case study for the globalizatio n thesis. The point 1s not that a new
technology produced a new world culture, but, rather, that music’s own
essential mobility enabled the new technology to flourish — and shaped the
way it worked. There are a number of reasons why music, by its nature,
crosses boundaries. On the one hand, its value and use is less dependent on
language than print media (or, for that matter, film and television); on the
other hand, people and peoples can take their music with them when they
themselves move. Music, that is, defines migration: in nearly all societies,
north and south, east and west, the most popular sounds come from the social
margins (the Americanization of global pop is thus better labelled African-
Americanization); for nearly all transported ethnic and cultural communities
music is the central expression of their continued national identity, is the
enacted form of the sociability that binds communities in their understandings
of sameness and difference.
From this perspective it is clear that the development of a technologically
driven recording industry did not transform some previously pure ‘national’
music (the pop version of the cultural imperialism thesis). Rather, it was the
peculiar qualities of music — a cultural form unconstrained by national
boundaries, mobile in time and place, source of our most intense emotional
experience of both social and individual identities — that allowed the record
industry to take off, as an industry that was from the beginning not really
organized or regulated as a national industry.
This point has only been reinforced by the digital revolution, by the
simultaneous emergence in the 1980s of ‘world music’ and the ‘global
market’. If the history of music has always been the history of sounds moving
across national boundaries, and if the recording industry was an international
industry from the start, nevertheless there is widely perceived to have been
something newly global about the reorganization of the music industry
following the record sales crises of the late 1970s (and the impact of the
Live Aid telecast). I just want to draw attention to three aspects of this here.
First, multinational corporate control of music now clearly describes the
control of distribution — hence the declining relevance of the old model of
cultural imperialism, in which Anglo-American music (as well as capital) was
taken to dominate the world: globally successful sounds may now come from
anywhere, and what matters for the world’s major leisure corporations (of
which only Time-Warner is ‘American’) is that they own the rights to all
possible uses of such sounds, and that they can coordinate their exploitation
across all music media, all music ‘carriers’, all media systems. The develop-
ment of ‘global music’ is, in this respect, an aspect of the development of
global television via cable and satellite and of deregulated radio broadcasting;
more simply, it reflects the global spread of consumption, of shopping and
leisure’ and advertising, all musical activities. The great growth in market
demand for music in the last decade has come more obviously from the media
than from the consumer.
It follows, second, that the concept of a ‘local’ pop market is increasingly
 Entertainment 173

problematic not just in the sense that all localities are now awash with global
sounds, whether coming from radio and television, or from shopping mall and
discos, but also because local musicians now perceive their potential listeners
in global terms. What, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, was primarily a
fantasy for Anglophone groups — making it in America or Japan — is now an
ambition built-in to what it means to be ‘a musician’, whether in Holland or
Honduras, Australia or Angola. If all musical communities are now crossed by
global forces, all local musicians now dream (however vainly) of global
success (Robinson, 1991).
Third, digital technology certainly has made all sounds, whatever their
source, more easily available to record producers wherever they are. ‘Music
on record’, like many other current cultural goods (films and television
programmes, books and magazines) is thus a multi-national product, lit-
erally. No longer the record of an event, a music made in one space at one
time, it has become a way of internationally coordinating information. What
we finally hear is a work constructed from a variety of parts (a bass drum here
— London; a steel guitar there — Nashville; back-up voices there — Soweto).
From this perspective, ‘global music’ describes a sound — an aesthetic — as
well as a sales process.
From the industry point of view the central impetus of globalization has
oeen less that everyone in the world should be listening to the same music
than that every country in the world should have the same copyright laws and
should enforce them, and in terms of corporate structure globalization thus
describes a process more complex than it may first seem. If it has meant the
takeover of the more successful local ‘independent’ recording and music-
publishing companies by the majors in their bid to own all potentially
profitable musical rights (there are few significant independent record com-
panies left in Europe, for example), this has meant less a more systematic
imposition of American stars on European audiences than new sorts of A&R
competition within music corporations, competition between nationally or
regionally defined divisions, each responsible for uncovering their own talent
and turning it from local to global success. The new focus on distribution and
promotion as the core activity of the multinational music industry, together
with a technology that allows globally marketable sounds to be produced
just about anywhere, means that production as such can still be remarkably
small scale — the creative basis of the music business (writers, musicians,
engineers, production companies) is, on the whole, not of direct interest to
the majors (this anyway tends to be the most unstable, high-turnover end of
the business, and small, local companies are, as I have already suggested,
useful structurally just in terms of research and development).
Where ‘global’ factors come into play is in music marketing, in the
mediation of music’s meanings on radio and television, by advertisers and
journalists, and it is here that the term ‘globalization’ has a greater resonance,
in describing the integration of entertainment activities across both media and
national boundaries. What is at issue here, I think, is not whether or not all
peoples are watching the same films or listening to the same records (or whether
these films and records are American) but whether or not all are involved in the
same sort of activity. The ‘globalization’ of leisure, in other words, describes
not the success of international marketing but the effect of broad social
174 Simon Frith

changes in the organization of work and family life. It is because of these

changes that entertainment goods become internationally marketable not vice
versa.

The Politics of Entertainment

This is the context in which a number of governments have sought to develop

national cultural policies. These have taken a variety of forms, but I will
classify them loosely under three headings.

Protecting/Promoting National Entertainment Industries

The emphasis here may be on state subsidy for local producers, on state
support for international marketing, or on protection against cultural
imports. The problem with all such policies is the assumption that the
international leisure market is made up of competing national industries
(under the dominance of the biggest, the USA). In fact, the culture industries
are not organised nationally, and, while there is evidence that state support
does have a positive effect on the international career of local artists and
performers, there is little indication that this has helped maintain national
culture industries as such — internationally successful Danish or Australian or
Canadian stars or goods or formats are simply signed to multinational labels
and studios (this is a necessary aspect of their success).
Just by entering the game of international leisure marketing, then, one has
to abandon the nation as the playing field. (One aspect of this is that policies
designed to promote ‘national’ films or music or TV shows tend to mean the
national production of versions of Anglo-American pop, of the Hollywood
film or TV show.) Hence a second sort of policy, as follows.

Protecting/Promoting a National Culture

Policies here usually revolve around the subsidy of particular sorts of
performer and performance, performance and performers who might other-
wise be redundant commercially, though one could also point to the use of
language regulations — by the French, for example. The problem here is how a
national culture is to be defined. Most so-called ‘folk’ forms, for instance, are
simply frozen moments in the history of hybrid sounds and drama, and folk
policy more often involves the invention of tradition (for political or tourist or
‘heritage’ reasons) than any commitment to the culture’s continuing vitality
and change (one needs only look to the break-up of Yugoslavia and the
sudden emergence of previously unheard national folk traditions to make
this point).
Leisure-as-national-culture policies tend to define entertainment formally,
whether in terms of aesthetic value or distinctive styles, neither of which are,
in fact, necessarily national qualities. An alternative approach 1s to ensure that
people have the resources and opportunities to express themselves (their
national situation) in whatever manner seems appropriate and to be seen
 Entertainment 175

and heard (which means having some guaranteed access to the media). Policy
here means the following.

Protecting/Promoting National Cultural Resources and Spaces

Governments have thus got involved in supporting theatres and studios,
broadcasters and publishers, in providing training and entrepreneurial
advice, and if such policy remains hands-off it is probably effective. The
difficulty (especially when choices have to be made) is to disentangle
aesthetic and market judgements as to who should be supported, a problem
exacerbated by the fact that nationally supported cinema, music or literature is
often highly critical of (or uninterested in) ‘the nation’.

I would draw two conclusions from such political activity. First, entertain-
ment is clearly essential to identity if that is defined in terms of ethnicity or
sociability or personality (as a matter of self-defining tastes). It does not,
though, seem to have much to do with national identity, precisely because its
value is as a way of crossing borders, whether literally or ideally.
Second, fears of globalization (or Americanization) should be treated for
what they are: anxieties about the effects of market forces, and in terms of
entertainment these are not easy to read. It is difficult, for example, to explain
the rise of rap as entertainment in the USA in the 1980s in terms of corporate
policy and media control, or its spread around the world in terms of American
foreign policy, and the global influence of reggae seems to have been despite
rather than because of the policies of either international record companies or
the Jamaican government. I still have a sense that the music industry is
organized to exploit, belatedly, musical ideas that come from elsewhere,
rather than to develop such ideas for itself, and music is thus still a mass
medium in which unofficial voices may regularly be heard. There are obvious
reasons for this — music is for educational reasons more accessible than print;
for technological reasons more accessible than film or television. There is
something else involved here, too, a more general point: precisely because
entertainment is not taken seriously by the media or academic establishment,
it can be by everyone else.

References

ADORNO, T. W., 1991: The Culture Industry. Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London:
Routledge. 5 =
ANG, L, 1985: Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination.
London: Methuen.
1991: Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge.
BARNUM, P. T., 1967: The Struggles and Triumphs of P. T. Barnum Told By Himself
[1882]. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
BENNETT, T. (ed.), 1981: Popular Television and Film, A Reader. London: BFI.
BENNETT, T. and WOOLLACcoTr, J., 1987: Bond and Beyond. The Political Career of a
Popular Hero. London: Macmillan.
176 Simon Frith

BOURDIEU, P., 1984: Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London
and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
DYER, R., 1979: Stars. London: BFI. .
1992: Only Entertainment. London: Routledge.
ENGELHARDT, T., 1986: ‘Children’s Television. The Shortcake Strategy’ in Todd Gitlin
(ed.), Watching Television. New York: Pantheon.
FINNEGAN, R., 1989: The Hidden Musicians. Music-Making in an English Town. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
FISKE, J., 1987: Television Culture. London: Methuen.
FISKE, J. and HARTLEY, J., 1978: Reading Television. London: Methuen.
FRITH, S., 1978: The Sociology of Rock. London: Constable.
1988: ‘Picking Up the Pieces’ in Simon Frith (ed.), Facing the Music. New
York: Pantheon.
(ed.), 1993: Music and Copyright. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
1996: Performing Rites. The Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
GLEDHILL, C. (ed.), 1987: Home is Where the Heart Is. Studies in Melodrama and the
Woman’s Film. London: BFI.
HEBDIGE, D., 1979: Subculture. The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
HOBSON, D., 1982: Crossroads. The Drama of a Soap Opera. London: Methuen.
JOHNSTON, C., 1973: Notes on Women’s Cinema. London: SEFT.
KAPLAN, E. A., 1987: Rocking Around the Clock. Music Television, Postmodernism a
Consumer Culture. New York and London: Methuen.
LARDNER, J., 1987: Fast Forward. Hollywood, the Japanese, and the VCR Wars. New
York: Norton.
MCROBBIE, A., 1991: Feminism and Youth Culture: from Jackie to Just Seventeen.
London: Macmillan.
MODLESKI, T., 1982: Loving with a Vengeance. Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women.
Hamden, CN: Archon Books.
MULVEY, L., 1989: Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan.
NEGUS, K., 1992: Producing Pop. Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry.
London: Edward Arnold.
PEARSON, R. and URICCHIO, W., 1991: The Many Lives of Batman. New York/London:
Routledge/BFI.
RADWAY, J., 1984: Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
ROBINSON, D.C. et al., 1991: Music at the Margins. Popular Music and Global Cultural
Diversity. Nebury Park CA and London: Sage.
SCHRAMM, W. (ed.), 1954: The Process and Effects of Mass Communication. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press.
WILLIAMSON, J., 1978: Decoding Advertisements. Ideology and Meaning in Advertising.
London: Boyars.
WINSHIP, J., 1987: Inside Women’s Magazines. London: Pandora.
 9
The Global and the Local in
International Communications
Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi

Introduction

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical

technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we
had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric
technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global
embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned . .
As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village.
(Marshall McLuhan, 1964, 11-12)

A Third World in every First World

A Third World in every Third World
And vice-versa
(Trinh Minh-ha, 1987)

Contemporary rhetoric suggests that we live in a unitary world in which space

and time have collapsed and the experience of distance imploded for ever.
The antagonistic blocs of East and West are giving way to international
markets, moneys and media. Germany is unified. A new and expanding
‘Europe’ looms. The centrifugal force of ‘globalization’ is the catchphrase
of the 1990s. Yet at the very same time, in the same but different world, the
centripetal forces of old and new tribalisms and nationalisms are at work and
ethnic struggles are breaking out all over. Armenians confront Azarbaijanis,
Serbs fight Croats, Hutu and Tutsi kill each other; Hindu-Moslem relations in
India and Black-Jewish relations in the USA are strained; Jews and Moslems,
Turks and Somalis worry about racism across Europe; and Sarajevo, Grozny,
Kigali become part of the international lexicon of tragedy and terror. Far from
the ‘loss of the subject’, identity seems to lie at the heart of politics in the late
twentieth century.
Giddens (1990: 64) defines globalization as ‘the intensification of world-
wide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local
happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’.
For Giddens, what he calls ‘time-space distanciation’ (p. 64), a theme
178 Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi

developed at length in Harvey (1989), helps to create “complex relations

between local involvements (circumstances of co-presence) and interaction
across distance (connections of presence and absence). In this stretching
process of relations, there are numerous modes of connection between
different regions and contexts. Appadurai (1990) has described five such
‘scapes’ of interaction as the ethnoscape, the technoscape, the infoscape,
the financescape and the mediascape — which are interconnected, even over-
lapping.
Much theoretical debate centres on how the current situation should be
conceived and labelled. Some argue that there is a discernibly ‘new’ kind of
economic-cultural structure to be called ‘post-modernity’ (Harvey, 1989)
while others argue that the evident changes of the last fifteen years simply
reflect the supreme development and natural extension of global capitalism
and prefer to call this structure ‘late capitalism’ (Jameson, 1990) or ‘high
modernity’ (Giddens, 1990). What is significant throughout these debates is
that the role of communication and information have been finally and
generally recognized as crucial elements in the new world order. Yet the
role and shape of communications in the 1990s is by no means very fixed or
very clear, and neither are our theoretical models for explaining/exploring
communications on an international scale. The rapidity and complexity of
change in the media environment during this decade seems to require a newer
set of terms and vantage points than are offered by older perspectives, which
often seem frozen in a bygone era. This chapter explores the dynamic tension
between the global and local levels of analysis, as suggested by Giddens, as a
provocative and useful construct which can help us uncover the deeply
contradictory dynamics of the current moment. In the twin yet opposing
processes of globalization versus localization, media play a central role and
reveal the tensions between the macro and micro levels of socio-economic
structures, cultures, and development dynamics.

A Brief Reprise of Older Models in International

Communication:

Since the 1960s, the field of International Communication has been dominated
by three intellectual paradigms: that of ‘communications and development’,
that of ‘cultural imperialism’ and currently by a revisionist ‘cultural plural-
ism’ which is still searching for a coherent theoretical shape. It will be argued
here that this third construct is itself full of contradictions, and that the
‘global/local’ model at least has the merits of putting ‘contradiction’ at the
core of its construct. A brief reprise of these models is useful, both as
intellectual history and to understand the different theoretical bases and
implications of the models for current understanding.
‘Communications and Development’ emerged out of developmentalist
thinking in the early 1960s. After the Second World War, the emergence of
independent national political systems such as India, Algeria, Ghana, out of
the grip of varied European colonialisms, spawned debates among Western
academics about the nature of ‘development’ and the obstacles within such
 The Global and Local in International Communications 179

newly-independent nations to development. Some arguments focused on the

lack of capital for investment, prompting such practical solutions as the World
Bank and interest-bearing loans, under which results many developing nations
are still groaning. Other arguments examined the lack of entrepreneurial
vision and trained manpower, spawning education exchanges and training
programs. The arguments developed by Daniel Lerner (1958) and Wilbur
Schramm (1964) focused instead on the Weberian/Parsonian ‘mentalities’
or conjeries of attitudes that were supportive or obstructive to change. They
suggested that the traditional values of the developing world were the central
obstacles to political participation and economic activity, the two key ele-
ments of the development process. The ‘solution’ for their analysis was the
promotion of the use of communications media to alter attitudes and values,
embodied in ‘media indicators’ (minimum numbers of cinema seats, radio and
television receivers, and copies of daily newspapers as a ratio of population
necessary for development), which were adopted by UNESCO and widely
touted in the developing world. This perspective has been roundly criticized
for its ethnocentrism, its ahistoricity, its linearity, for conceiving of develop-
ment in an evolutionary, endogenist fashion and for solutions which actually
reinforced dependency rather than helping to overcome it. ,
The ‘dependency’ paradigm, developing initially in Latin America and
vuilding on older critiques of imperialism (Gunder-Frank, 1964) instead
recognized the global structures and interrelationships conditioning the
‘development’ of the Third World, particularly the multiple and diverse
legacies of colonialism. It was particularly critical of the post-independence
economic dynamics which kept Third World states in economic hock to the
ex-imperial powers, and argued that ‘development’ could not be mere
mimicry of Western structures but had to be conceived as an autonomous,
self-chosen path that built on the rich/ancient cultures of the Third World.
From within this broad, critical framework, the specific model of ‘cultural
imperialism’ argued that, far from aiding Third World nations to develop, the
international flows of technology transfer and media hardware coupled with
the ‘software’ flows of cultural products actually strengthened dependency
and prevented true development. The great merit of the models of ‘cultural
imperialism’ (Schiller, 1976; Mattelart, 1979) and ‘media imperialism’
(Boyd-Barrett, 1977) was their recognition of global dynamics and relation-
ships, taking their cue from much older models of imperialism, and the
suggested linkages between foreign policy interests, capitalist expansion
and media infrastructures and contents. This theoretical model spawned a
wide variety of empirical studies which documented the imbalanced flow of
media products — from news (Galtung and Ruge, 1965) to films (Guback and
Varis, 1982) to television programming (Varis, 1974/1984) — as well as the
export of organizational structures (Katz and Wedell, 1977) and professional
values (Golding, 1977) from the developed to the Third World. Behind its
structuralist analysis and the descriptive mapping of international commu-
nications dynamics, a central assumption was that western cultural values
(often conflated to ‘American’ values) such as consumerism and individual-
ism, expressed implicitly in a variety of media genreas well as directly
through advertising, were being exported to and decisively altering Third
World cultural milieux. Fears of ‘cultural homogenization’ and ‘cultural
180 Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi

synchronization’ (Hamelink, 1983) were voiced, and arguments made for

Third World ‘cultural disassociation’ along the lines of Samir Amin’s
‘delinking’ from the global capitalist system as the only way toward auton-
omous development and protection of indigenous cultures. Criticism of this
position have been made from quite divergent historical perspectives. One
argument, looking back in time, suggests that the very term ‘cultural imperi-
alism’ tends to obscure the many deep and diverse cultural effects of
imperialism itself, including the export of religion, educational systems and
values, European languages, and administrative practices, all of which have
long ago and irretrievably altered the cultural milieux of the colonized
(Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1996). Such an argument questions the utility of
terms such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘indigeneity’ within a lengthy history of
cultural contact, absorption and recreation, and suggests that a cultural
debate which focuses mainly on modern media neglects other much older
and deeper structures which may embody ‘foreign’ values but may also be the
pillars cf modernity.
Another strand of critique, looking forward to the new realities of the
1990s, suggests that, like the earlier arguments for ‘communications and
development’, the ‘cultural imperialism’ model was based on a situation of
comparative global media scarcity, limited global media players and embryo-
nic media systems in much of the Third World. The speed-up of history,
evidenced in the rapidity of changes in many areas of social life, is especially
evident in the global spread of communication and information technologies
and the advent of many new and diverse media actors over the past decade or
so. In the 1990s, it is clear that the international media environment is far
more complex than that suggested by the ‘cultural imperialism’ model whose
depiction of a hegemonic media pied piper leading the global media mice
appears frozen in the realities of the 1970s, now a bygone era.
Empirically there is a more complex syncopation of voices and a more
complicated media environment in which western media domination has
given way to multiple actors and flows of media products. More nations of
the south are producing and exporting media materials, including film from
India and Egypt, television programming from Mexico and Brazil. For
example, TV Globo, the major Brazilian network, exports telenovelas to
128 countries, including Cuba, China, the former Soviet Union, East Ger-
many, earning export dollars for Brazil, and its productions outnumber those
of any other station in the world (Tracey, 1988). Indeed the flow of televisual
materials from Brazil to Portugal is one example of how contemporary
cultural flows reverse the historic roles of imperialism, while Latin American
telenovelas on Spanish television channels in the USA has been called
‘reverse cultural imperialism’ (Antola and Rogers, 1984). In another region
and medium, the Indian film industry has an international reputation as the
most productive — more than nine hundred films in 1985 — with an extensive
export market (Dissanayeke, 1988). India has also managed to keep a some-
what dualistic yet productive tension between high art film and a popular
cinema, creating movies that reflect and reinforce different elements of
India’s rich cultural past as well as indigenizing invasive foreign elements
into a distinctive Indian style (Binford, 1988). Television, too, has been
successful at translating ancient Indian culture into popular contemporary
 The Global and Local in International Communications 181

televisual fare, the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, clearing urban streets and
creating a huge demand for additional episodes over the fifty originally
planned (Chatterji, 1989). These Third World producers have become not
only national producers but international exporters of cultural products, a
process which revisionists claim has altered any one-way flow of western
material and the ‘hegemonic’ model of cultural imperialism (McNeely and
Soysal, 1989). These ‘global pluralists’ adopt an optimistic voice regarding
the diversity of media producers and locales and the many loops of cultural
flows that have merged (Tracey, 1988; Boyd, 1984). But the very rapidity of
change on the international media scene makes it hard to discern long-term
trends. The ‘global cultural pluralists’ are correct to note the coming of age of
many Third World media producers and the localization of some media
production. Yet at the same time even stronger tendencies toward greater
globalization and conglomeratization can be discerned, which I will document
shortly.
There is also a conceptual challenge to the ‘cultural imperialism’ model,
stemming from new modes of analyzing media effects which question the
‘international hypodermic needle’ assumption proferred by the ‘hegemonic’
mode]. Arguments about ‘the active audience’ and ‘polysemy’ (e.g. Fiske,
1987) inserted into international communications debate suggest that diverse
audiences bring their own interpretive frameworks and sets of meaning to
media texts, thus resisting, reinterpreting and reinventing any foreign ‘hege-
monic’ cultural products, the details of which we will again explore later. The
‘global cultural pluralism’ model seems to suggest many independent and
happy producers, somewhat evacuating issues of dominance, cultural appro-
priation and media effects. I think we need a fourth perspective, one that
essentially recognizes and does justice to the dynamic tension between the
global and the local, as suggested by Giddens, and the shifting terrains that
they encompass. After Trinh Minh Ha (1987), I will call this outlook ‘the global
in the local, the local in the global’ and use the rest of the chapter to explore
some of the evident contradictions and tensions between these two poles in
different contexts. .
We could divide globalization in the media sphere into four separable
elements: the globalization of media forms, of media firms, of media flows
and of media effects. I will examine them in turn.

1 Globalization of Media Forms

It is claimed that more and more of the world is wired as a global audience
with access to electronic media. The ‘success’ of the spread of media
distribution and reception systems is in evidence — by the end of the 1980s
radio signals were globally available and transistors had overcome lack of
infrastructure, while nationally based television services had been established
in all but the smallest and poorest of African and Asian countries. Globally,
the number of television receivers rose from 192 million in 1965 to 873
million in 1992. There are antennae in the Amazon jungle. China is the third
largest producer of television receivers. Beyond RTV reception, video
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players/recorders (vers) have potential global reach (Alvarado, 1988; see also
Boyd et al., 1989). Thus, at least in terms of national involvement in
electronic media production and distribution of public access to communica-
tions infrastructure, there has been significant development over the past three
decades.
However, distribution is still extremely unequal. The global ‘average’ of
160 television receivers per 1000 population actually ranges from a high of
800 per thousand in North America to a low of 23 per thousand in the non-
Arab states of Africa. The global trend is in place, yet by no means
‘achieved’. Global still does not mean universal.

2 Globalization of Media Firms

Central to any discussion of globalization has been the rise of global markets
and the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) in adapting to, producing
for and profiting from that. The media sphere has long had its global firms,
which tend to become bigger and more powerful as the century winds to. an
end (Bagdikian, 1990). Media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, Silvio
Berlusconi and Henry Luce with the Warner Brothers have created corporate
structures that span continents, combine holdings in broadcast, print and film
production and also control distribution facilities such as satellites and cable
networks. As an example, the merger in March, 1989, between Henry Luce
and Harry and Jack Warner made Times Warner the largest media corporation
in the world. It had an assessed value of $18 billion, a workforce approaching
340,000, a corporate base in the USA, with subsidiaries in Australia, Asia,
Europe and Latin America (Time Warner Inc., 1990). Revenues were over
$10 billion during 1989 from activities in magazine and book publishing,
music recording and publishing, film and video and cable television. Time
Warner is thus a prime example of a growing global corporate structure which
is highly vertically integrated — controlling the production process from the
conception of a film idea to the building in which it will be shown, for
example — and diversifying horizontally to have stakes in other related leisure
and information holdings. By Time Warner’s own analysis, vertical integra-
tion has numerous benefits, including ‘creative synergies’ and economies of
scope and scale; ‘optimal levels of promotion’ which prevents separate
companies having a ‘ “‘free ride” on the promotional activities of others’;
enables companies to ‘be responsive to the desires of consumers’; and allows
companies to accept greater financial risk than firms which operate in
individual industry segments, thus being able to support projects of question-
able commercial value. Access to global markets essentially reinforces and
multiplies the economies of scale.
Time Warner’s own materials readily describes the company as ‘a vertically
integrated global entity’ (Time Warner, 1990: 47). Indeed, large corporations
have not been slow to recognize the positive public value attached to the
notion of ‘globalization’ as a unifying process of recognition of a common
humanity, and coolly to adopt it for their own purposes. Thus, as part of its
own self-marketing, on Earth Day — April 22, 1990 — a day devoted to global
184 Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi

awareness and ecological concern, Time Warner launched a new logo and a
new motto: ‘The World is Our Audience’. In similar fashion, Sony justifies its
development of American-based holdings by appropriating a famous radical
grassroots slogan ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’ for its own purposes. Thus
Sony USA writes ‘It is Sony’s philosophy that global corporations have a
responsibility to participate actively in the countries in which they operate, a
philosophy of “global localization”. This means thinking globally while
acting locally — being sensitive to local requirements, cultures, traditions
and attitudes’ (Sony USA, 1990: 1). (Note that Sony employs 100,000
worldwide, enjoys an annual consolidated sales of about $16.3 billion, and
has its stock sold on exchanges in ten countries.) These global giants clearly
see themselves as part of a current phenomenon and are quick to point out the
increasingly international activities of competitors.
Some try to debate the extent of this process of consolidating a few
vertically integrated global media giants and their power to control the
creation, production and distribution of worldwide information and commu-
nication. Thus, Murdoch’s News Corporation argues against the notion that
the emergent pattern is of ‘international media holdings by relatively few
media forms’, by arguing that ‘multinational media companies have emerged
but they are too numerous to be characterized as “few” ’ (NTIA, 1990: 5). But
this appears nothing more than a quibble; of the thousands of corporations

Table 9.2 Selected major information and communication groupings. Total

media turnover — Top 15 Corporations out of 78 listed by UNESCO, 1989.

Group Country Ranking- Media Press, Radio, Period

media sales publishing, TV,
recording motion
(%) pictures
(%)

Capital Cities/ABC USA 1 4440 23 ne.

Time USA 2 4193 61 39
Bertelsmann Germany 3 3689 54 18 June 87
News Corp Australia 4 3453 58 32 June 88
Warner USA 5 3404 49 51
Communications
General Electric USA 6 3165 25
Gannett USA 7 3079 88 12
Times Mirror USA 8 2994 85 11
Gulf + Western USA 9 2904 54 63
Yomiuri Group Japan 10 2848 63 23 86
CBS USA A 2762 100
ARD Germany 12 2614 100
NHK Japan 13 2541 100 March 88
Advance USA 14 2397 92 8
Publications
MCA USA 15 2052 8 92
a Se Sey ele Se eae Se ee
NB Of the
Third World. 78 firms listed by UNESCO in the complet
plete table not one was based iin the
 The Global and Local in International Communications 185

active in the media business worldwide, this group of global media moguls is
clearly no more than a handful. While accurate and extensive comparative
data is still hard to find, a UNESCO-compiled table for seventy-eight firms
listed for their total 1987 media turnover (including press and publishing,
television, radio and cinema) shows that only seven had turnover of more than
three billion dollars, with 15 having turnover of more than 2 billion dollars
(UNESCO, 1989: 104).
Of the seventy-eight firms listed in the complete table, not one was based in
the Third World. Forty-eight were US or Japanese, while the rest were
western European, Canadian or Australian. Already in 1988, the combined
revenue of five such giants (Bertelsmann AG; News Corp; Hachette; and pre-
merger Time inc. and Warner) was estimated at $45 billion, or 18 per cent of
the $250 billion worldwide information industry (see Table 9.2).
Many of these corporations are American, and for many sectors of the
American culture industries international sales are now a crucial source of
income. In 1989 foreign revenues accounted for 38 per cent of total revenues
for the American motion picture industry and helped to keep the value gap
between imported film and film exports at $3 billion dollars. Ted Turner’s
Cable News Network is received by the Kremlin and the Islamic Republic,
and Baywatch enjoys an international audience.
Yet clearly in the 1990s not all this global expansion is conducted by
American or European-based firms, the usual assumption of the ‘cultural
imperial’ thesis. There is considerable inter-capitalist rivalry, and foreign
interests have discovered both the lucrative domestic US market, still the
single largest in the world, and the global resonance of American popular
culture. A few recent examples would be the globalization of Hollywood,
involving the purchase of Columbia Pictures and Tri-Star Pictures by Sony,
the Japanese giant which had already bought Columbia Records in 1988 (the
context for the Sony America slogan discussed above); the purchase of MGM/
United Artists by Pathe SA, an Italian company; the purchase of 20th Century
Fox by Rupert Murdoch’s Australian-based News Corporation, and in Novem-
ber 1990, the purchase of MCA Inc, which includes Universal Studios, Universal
Pictures and MCA Records by the Japanese firm Matsushita.
The dynamic of foreign firms buying US media outlets extends well beyond
film-making into many other media: Murdoch’s News Corporation owns
newspapers in Boston and San Antonio, Harper Row books, and Triangle
Publications which publishes TV Guide, the largest circulation magazine in
the USA; International Thomson Group, based in Canada, owns 116 daily
newspapers in the USA; the British-based Maxwell Communications owns
Macmillan Books; Bertelsmann AG, the German giant, owns RCA and Arista
Records, while the Dutch firm N. V. Philips owns Polygram, Island and A&M
Records. ;
The increasing complexity and transnationalization of global media mar-
kets were the focus of a study by the National Telecommunications and
Information Administration (NTIA), a section of the US Department of
Commerce in Washington, DC. Entitled Comprehensive Study on the Globa-
lization of Mass Media Firms, in February 1990 it invited input in order to
‘better formulate US communications policy in a rapidly changing informa-
tion environment’ (NTIA, 1990). Culling through the responses, it rapidly
186 Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi

becomes clear that the US-based media/culture corporations are concerned

essentially with two phenomena that affect their access to international media
markets. The first is the newly defined and instituted European cultural policy
which they interpret as a set of trade barriers to the free flow of American
cultural products. The second is the problem of media piracy, significantly but
not solely in the Third World. Yet it is abundantly clear that Europe 1s viewed
as the most promising media market, with very little interest paid to or in
media development in the Third World, other than chagrin at the media free
ride that many Third World societies have enjoyed. Thus these frequently
cited examples of media ‘globalization’ actually reveal its very limited
coverage. These processes involve corporate actors of the north, interested
in northern media products and audiences, with marginal amounts of the
production or circulation occurring among the peoples of the south. It seems
quite evident that the production and promotion strategies of these global
media firms would do little to alleviate the global imbalance in media
availability, and rather exacerbate the global imbalances between the media
rich and the media poor.

3 Global Media Flows

Globalization has often been applied to the spread of western mediated

products across the globe, from which few places seem immune. There is
much anecdotal evidence of the use of western cultural products, sometimes
in somewhat improbable and erstwhile ‘remote’ places. Ouderkirk (1989)
describes trekking up the highest Guatemalan mountains in search of some
remote and authentic Qeche Indians and hearing some stirring music which as
she approached turned out to be old Beatles tapes! Pico Iyer’s (1989) travelo-
gue talks about ‘video nights in Kathmandu’ and elsewhere in Asia, encounter-
ing ‘Ike and Tuna Turner’ sandwiches in the heart of the People’s Republic of
China, Burmese musicians playing songs by the Doors, as well as countless
Asian remakes of Rambo movies. The film Bye Bye Brasil amusingly reflects
on the public abandonment of traditional performing arts for television as it
spread into the hinterland of Brazil. Visits to the Islamic Republic of Iran
revealed considerable use of American videos such as Robocop and Maximum
Overdrive and audiotapes of Madonna and Michael Jackson, all brought in via
the black market from Dubai (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi, 1994).
As already mentioned, much early work supportive of the ‘cultural imperi-
alism’ hypothesis provided descriptive mappings of unequal global flows, and
much international debate in the 1970s—80s focused on this notion, as an
indicator of global domination and threat to indigenous cultural survival. This
culminated in the UNESCO Mass Media Declaration, the report of the
Macbride Commission and the formulation of a tenet of the New Interna-
tional Information Order as moving from a merely ‘free’ flow to a ‘free and
balanced’ flow of communication (although no adequate empirical measures
of such balance have ever been devised).
 The Global and Local in International Communications 187

Trade Barriers and Piracy: Local Strategies vis & vis the Global
Two different strategies have been devised to deal with the imbalanced flow:
trade barriers to cultural imports and piracy. Limits on the amount of imported
programming and vetting of imported materials exist in Brazil, India, Iran and
elsewhere in the Third World. But it was Europe’s move toward an albeit
voluntary continental policy for 1992 that worried transnational corporations.
Time Warner argued that it faced formidable trade barriers, ‘some of which
are clothed in the garb of ‘“‘cultural’’ measures ostensibly designed to protect
the cultural sovereignty and artistic heritage of the country in question’. (Time
Warner, 1990: 48). The corporation proclaimed a certain sensitivity:
“Although we must be sensitive to the cultural environment and needs of
every locale in which we operate, trade barriers can only be justified to the
limited extent that they are truly necessary to protect indigenous cultures that
would otherwise be overwhelmed by the cultural products of other countries’
but in the very next paragraph the tone changed: ‘The cultural issue is
appearing with alarming frequency in the international marketplace, and
must be roundly rejected’ (Time Warner, 1990: 48). Its main concern, shared
by other media multinationals, was the European initiative in the Television
without Frontiers directive which suggested a 50 per cent quota on imported
programming by October 1992 where possible (although this is non-binding)
and defines a ‘European’ television company, one where the production and
control of production is in an EU state or as a majority of the total cost of
production is borne by a producer or co-producer from the EU states or those
states privy to the Council of Europe convention. Thus even the possibility of
transnationals developing coproductions with Europeans is limited to a
minority financial and creative capacity, a trade limitation in Time Warner’s
eyes. There are also European Union initiatives to promote the EU audio-
visual industry and cultural uniqueness of member states as well as the
development and standardization of hardware such as HDTV. France's
impressive ability to get film included in the remit of the GATT talks is
well known; though cultural importation remains a point of controversy
within the EU. While Koreans were chastized for putting live snakes in
cinemas showing US-made films, and Brazil and Egypt were noted for
developing policies promoting homemade cultural production, from the
statements of Time Warner and other corporations it was evident that essen-
tially they saw Europe as the problem, not the Third World. The former
presented an already well-developed media market with a substantial popula-
tion possessing considerable disposable income, a market to which US-based
firms want ready access. Thus a closer examination of corporate ‘globaliza-
tion’ strategies reveals highly preferred locales and areas of acute disinterest,
depending on the already existing level of insertion of the populations within
global capitalism.
The Third World was problematic to transnationals mainly because of its
video piracy, an ingeniously literal understanding of the ‘free flow’ concept. It
is apparent that the still limited and unregulated media markets of the Third
World are not especially attractive to transnational culture brokers, which
perhaps ironically gives Third World media systems a chance to produce for
themselves and escape the western cultural net, a force majeure for delinking.
188 Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi

Media Localization

At the same time as these dynamics of globalization have been established, an

opposing tendency is concurrently at work, as a consequence of, and often in
reaction to, the former; that is the dynamic of localized production and the
indigenization of cultural products already referred to above. The evidence
about such trends is patchy and somewhat contradictory. Varis (1984) in his
two studies of television flows in 1973 and 1984 concluded that few national
systems had made major transitions to self-reliance in television program-
ming. Yet more recent research comparing Europe with Asia by Sepstrup and
Goonasekera (UNESCO, 1994) reveals some interesting trends. Of the nine
countries studied, two Asian countries — India and Korea — revealed the
highest amounts of domestically produced television, about 92 per cent of
their respective televised programming (Sweden 81 per cent, Netherlands 78
per cent, Hungary 70 per cent, the Philippines produces 67 per cent, Bulgaria
61 per cent), while Italy (58 per cent), and Australia (46 per cent) had the
lowest proportions of domestically produced programming. But Latin Amer-
ican researchers argue that, despite the proliferation of media, television
programming has become more North American; that 99 per cent of the
films shown on Brazilian television are American, and that cheap packages
of old movies and TV shows are ‘dumped’ and thus flood the Latin American
media scene (Osava, 1990). Oliveira argues that Brazilian homemade televi-
sion is even more commercial than American programming with ‘merchan-
dizing’ of products a central part of telenovela content, encouraging a
consumerist way of life of which the USA is the most advanced example
(Oliveira, 1990). The same can be said of Peruvian media. India’s film
industry is being severely challenged by the spread of vers and video
piracy, the importation of western movies and the closure of cinemas as
running costs rise and audiences dwindle (Mohan, 1990). Cross-fertilization
between western cinema and television — predominantly American and British
— with the popular Indian cinema is creating more ‘hybrid’ cultural forms, like
a new film genre wryly described as the ‘curry eastern’ (Jain, 1990).
Some evidence suggests that when a choice is available domestic produc-
tion is preferred over imported. Telenovelas garner larger audiences than
imported American soaps not only in Brazil but elsewhere in Latin America
(Antola and Rogers, 1984). But evidence from Sepstrup and Goonasekera’s
research (UNESCO, 1994) shows a more complicated picture: Indian audi-
ences are the most loyal to domestic programming (99 per cent of daily
viewing) while audiences in the two eastern European countries chose the
largest daiiy proportion of foreign programming (Hungary 47 per cent and
Bulgaria 42 per cent). Presumably a mix of demographic variables such as
gender, education, urban dwelling, linguistic background, coupled with
different patterns of work, leisure and actual programming schedules, may
all play a role in accounting for the diet of programmes viewers actually chose
when offered a mixed menu of foreign and domestic materials. This makes
generalizations about audience behaviour difficult, and suggests much work
remains to be done regarding audience preference structures. Fears of hybri-
dization and creolization exist, that the ‘authenticity’ of a culture is damaged
and undermined in its contact with western culture industries and its adoption
 The Global and Local in International Communications 189

of genres foreign to domestic cultural tradition. Some counter that the Latin
telenovela is a truly indigenous and independent genre (Straubhaar, 1981),
building on internal cultural forms and breaking with the mimicry of western
genre. Tunstall in The Media are American (1977) pointed out that the
importation of media systems to the Third World included not only media
hardware but also western forms and genres, which he suggested would lead
to precisely such ‘hybrid’ concoctions. But Oliveira (1990) argues that this
‘indigenization’ of media often seems to enhance not diversity but domination
by domestic corporate concerns. But, we must ask, what is this pristine image
of culture that lurks behind this argument? Human history is a history of
cultural contact, influence and recombination, as is in evidence in language,
music, visual arts, philosophical systems; perhaps media flows merely rein-
force our mongrel statuses.
More to the point, evidence suggests that the ‘newer’ model of cultural
indigenization may have been severely overstated and certainly presented in
far too naive a manner. Much of this so-called indigenous production is
created by large corporations, and deeply infused with consumption values,
one of the basic critiques of the ‘cultural imperialism’ perspective. Another
point of direct relevance to the ‘localism’ claim is that the level of this media
production is at the level of the nation, either through state-supported or
national corporate networks. Thus in such arguments the ‘local’ is really
the ‘national’, while the truly local (subcultural, grassroots, etc) is ignored.
This ‘national’ culture may privilege urban lifestyles over rural, may barely
represent minority languages and tastes, even disallowing such diversity in the
name of ‘national unity’; it may produce mediated culture within a narrowly
defined ideological framework that fits the politics of the regime of the day.
The case of Iran suggests that tradition required defending at the moment that
it was already challenged, so Islam as ‘cultural identity’ was constructed to
oppose the Shah and the influx of foreign cultural values and products, only to
be used after the revolution as an ideological weapon against all political
opponents (Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1991). National agendas are not coinci-
dental with truly ‘local’ agendas, and real concerns arise as to whether
‘national’ media cultures adequately represent ethnic, religious, political
and other kinds of diversity. In international relations, the ‘national’ level
may be local vis a vis the global level, but in domestic relations the ‘national’
is itself a site of struggle, with a variety of ‘local’ identities and voices in
contention.

Cultural Products in the Global Economy

The new revisionism also seems to have exaggerated the size/amount of this
‘localized’ production, which is perhaps of financial significance for national
economies in the Third World, but is barely yet reflected in international
statistics. There are immense difficulties involved in cross-national calcula-
tions and comparisons of media, information and cultural production and flow
statistics. UNESCO has made a major effort to compile international data in
World Communication Report published in 1989. Taking this information for
the moment at face value, it provides important indicators of the extent of the
190 Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi

changes the ‘global pluralists’ suggest. For example, information on ‘total

turnover for information and communication’ for selected major information
and communications groupings which includes equipment, services, and
cultural products, clearly shows the continuing dominance of US and Japa-
nese firms (see Table 9.3).
These comprise 67 per cent of the top 25 companies, 66 per cent of top 50
companies and 67 per cent of the top 100 companies; European firms, by
contrast, comprise 28 per cent of top 25, and 26 per cent of the top 50 (with
Canada the only other nation included), and 26 per cent of the top 100
companies. Other Commonwealth countries begin to appear in the second
50, while Korea and Brazilian companies appear at positions 83, 91 and 94.
Of 304 organizations listed by UNESCO in a ranked table of major informa-
tion and communication groupings, Globo placed 301. Thus the example of
Rede Globo and Brazilian cultural production as a counter to ‘cultural
imperialism’ as a net exporter of cultural products is cut to size. Simply
summarized, corporations based in the USA, Japan and western Europe
dominate.
If hardware and software areas are parcelled out, does the picture look any
different? Not significantly. The table for ‘total media turnover’ for major
information and communication groupings provides a remarkably similar
picture to the above.
Half of the first 25 companies, of the first 50, and of the total of 78
companies for which statistics are presented, are US companies (see Table
9.2). No Third World media corporation penetrates this ‘top 78’. Now, of
course, such figures represent the total dollar value of communications output,
and say nothing specific about export dollar values, but they do dampen the
optimistic hailing of major Third World cultural producers. While the map of
global cultural flows is more complex in the 1990s, it is not as yet fundamen-
tally realigned. But what about the question of ‘effects’?

4 Global Media Effects?

Media effects is one of the most disputed areas of domestic media research so
there is no reason to expect any greater unanimity about effects at the
international level. The ‘cultural imperialism’ thesis did tend to suggest a
‘hypodermic needle’ model of international effects, ‘American’ values being
injected into Third World hearts and minds. Recent work, building on
reception theory and models of the active audience, is giving a more nuanced
view of international effects as mediated by pre-existing cultural frameworks
and interpretative schema. Thus, despite their book’s title (The Export of
Meaning), Leibes and Katz (1990) argue that meaning is not exported in
western television programming but created by different cultural sectors of
the audience in relation to their already formed cultural attitudes and
political perceptions. Others (Beltran, Oliveira) argue that it is not so
much national American values that are exported but rather more general-
ized capitalist consumption values (which, of course, America best epito-
mizes) reinforced by advertising and prevailing development orientations.
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192 Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi

For them, globalization portends homogenization which, while useful for

milk, produces a culture that tastes bland and is not even good for you!
What is often omitted from discussions on effects, are the deeper shifts in
cultural orientations and patterns of sociability, in modes of perception and
information-processing, that the advent of media create everywhere, albeit in
different forms relative to the pre-existing local culture; that is to say it is the
very ‘fact of television’, as Cavell (1982) calls it, in our social lives, not so
much its content, that is most often overlooked.
The arrival of media in Third World settings is finally being examined by
anthropologists (although there is never an index listing for ‘media’ or
‘television’ in a cultural anthropology textbook, despite the fact that most
Third World societies are now mediated in some way) and communications
researchers. Ethnographic studies are beginning to show the rich play between
the pre-existing culture and the new quasi-international culture and the shifts
in social relations that the latter may foster. In an ethnographic study
conducted in various sites across Brazil, Kottak (1990) explored how televi-
sion alters patterns of sociability, usage of time, creates conflicts within the
family and alters the gender balance, themes also explored in the comparative
work on family use of television compiled by Lull (1988). Kottak suggests the
need to investigate media impact over time, finding in Brazil an early
mesmerization with the television set with a later development of selectivity
and critical distance, negative attitudes toward television increasing with
higher income and years of exposure. Political context and dramatic events
also impinge on media usage: global news viewing was high during the Gulf
War, while domestic attention to international channels grew during the
Iranian revolution (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi, 1994) and in
China under martial law (Lull, 1991). News carried by international media
channels can open up the range of information and interpretation available to
audiences, be a major irritant to governments, challenge state censorship and
perhaps help democratic movements.
Other ethnographic work suggests the slippery boundaries of the ‘global’
and ‘local’. Abu-Lughod (1989) has studied the impact of what she calls
‘technologies of public culture’ on the Awlad ’Ali, the Western Desert
Bedouin in Egypt. Although these Bedouin have been quite marginal to
mainstream Egyptian culture, they were by no means culturally or politically
untouched before these technologies arrived; indeed, they often made their
money from selling post-war scrap metal and from smuggling goods between
pre-Qaddafi Libya and Egypt. Abu-Lughod examines the impact of tape-
players, radios and television on Awlad ’Ali life, saying that their use does
not eliminate sociability but in fact brings people together for long periods of
time. Such use does realign social relationships, mixing the sexes and
tempering age differences at home, while video shows in local cafes kept
young men away from the home and gave them greater exposure to media. In
line with reception theory, she argues too that these technologies do not
destroy distinctive cultures because ‘it is not just that people themselves
seem to embrace the technologies and actively use them for their own
purposes, but that they select, incorporate and redeploy what comes their
way’ (p. 8) although she notes that so far at least the amount of truly foreign
programming available is extremely limited. If anything, new technologies
 The Global and Local in International Communications 193
such as cassettes have helped to revitalize Bedouin identity as distinct from
Egyptian culture through recordings of poetry and song. The urban middle-
class Egyptian lifestyles revealed on soap operas present a different set of
options to Bedouin women, especially the possibility of marrying for love and
living independently of the extended family, so that the dominant Egyptian
mediated culture is used as a language of resistance against the authority of
tribal elders. Also embedded in such programming are consumer values, for
electronic durables as well as products for a newly sexualized femininity,
drawing the Bedouin further into the Egyptian political economy. Yet at the
same time, in a contradictory manner, Egyptian radio and television carries
more transnational messages about Islam, which is gaining in popularity, and
' which provides an antidote both to capitalist urban Egyptian values as well as
the local Bedouin identity (Abu-Lughod 1989: 11; 1993).
Hannah Davis (1989) describes life in a small Moroccan agricultural town
of 50,000 people and notes how ‘symbols from different worlds overlap: a
picture of the king of Morocco hangs next to a poster of the Beatles. The
sounds of a religious festival outside ... mingle with the televised cheering
of soccer fans ... in the morning we watch a holy man curing a boy, then
stop off at the fair where we see a woman doing motorcycle stunts; in the
evening we watch an Indian fairy tale or a Brazilian soap opera or an Egyptian
romance’ (p. 13). She remarks ‘it is not the contrast between the elements that
is striking; it is the lack of contrast, the clever and taken-for-granted integra-
tion’ (p. 12). As in much of the Middle East, public space is male space, and
thus it is the women who gather round the television and vcr at night,
watching Egyptian, Indian and ‘French’ — here the generic term used for
western — films. Egyptian films were romances that reduced the women to
tears, while the western films elicited ‘gasps of surprise, horrified hiding of
the eyes, fascination or prurience’, with American sexual shamelessness being
both admired and feared, imitated and denigrated. The transcultural mix of
symbols is apparent when one young girl organizes a traditional religious
feast yet defiantly appears wearing a denim skirt and earrings; thus, such
symbols may be used in personal struggles to ‘define, test or transform the
boundaries’ of local lives (p. 17).
Such examples reveal the complex (re)negotiation of identity(ies) vis a vis
the ‘dominant’ and the ‘foreign’ cultures, both of which shift in focus
depending on the specific locale of the actor. The above examples pose a
number of different pairs of relations in which the site of the ‘local’ and the
image of the ‘global’ are differently defined: rural/urban; Bedouin/Egyptian,
Moroccan/Egyptian; Bedouin/French; Moroccan/American and so forth. This
work reveals again the post-modern ‘bricolage’ of assorted cultural icons
from different locations and time periods which circulate inside the non-
industrialized world, yet invites no simple reading of the effects of these
encounters. Iran is again a useful example of the way in which cultural icons can
become deeply invested with one set of ideological connotations in one moment
of political struggle, and invested with completely the opposite connotations at
a subsequent but differently defined political moment. Thus religious lan-
guage, traditional symbolism and mythology were popularly (re-)adopted as
part of the revolutionary struggle against the Shah, but with the new
repression of the Islamic Republic a popular cultural underground began
194 Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi

to produce hard liquor and circulate western videos as part of anew resistance
(Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi, 1994). Thus a ‘sign’ of resistance —
the veil, for example — at one point in time can become a ‘sign’ of oppression
at another. The details of such anthropological/ethnographic work extend the
‘localist? focus, and show the complexity and range of reactions to and uses of
contemporary global cultural encounters. They warn us against generalized
assumptions about media/cultural effects, that the ‘foreign’ may emanate from
the urban capital, a western country other than the USA and perhaps even
from a Third World media producer of very different cultural background but
whose depictions of social life in the process of development can reverberate
across the south.
One other basic shift that the global flow of mediated products and the
establishment of culture industries in the Third World creates is that docu-
mented by Horkheimer and Adorno toward consumption of mass-produced
culture. That is culture, from being local lived experience, becomes media
product, with the implicit danger that what is not reflected on television no
longer has cultural worth. One last neglected ‘effect’ is important to consider.
It has been argued that media development in the west has moved through a
set of ‘stages’ during which one form of communication and its preferred
modality of discourse has been dominant. These have been described by Ong
(1982) as orality, chirography/typography and the period of the dominance of
electronic media which he labels ‘secondary orality’. Yet in the Third World
there is evidence that the middle stage, at least as measured by mass literacy
and circulation of printed materials, may be ‘jumped’, with societies moving
directly from a predominantly oral culture directly into the ‘secondary orality’
of electronic media. We have paid little attention to this new and different
kind of cultural formation. The ‘communications and development’ model
tended to collapse history, suggesting the development of newspapers, cine-
mas, radio and television all at once, while the ‘cultural imperialism’ model
has given most attention to electronic media. Yet if print is connected to the
development of rational logical thinking (Ong), to the development of modern
ideologies not linked to church or aristocracy (Gouldner), and the growth of a
public sphere, open debate and active citizenry (Habermas), then the limited if
non-existent development of this mode of communication in developing
countries has profound political and social consequences which have barely
been acknowledged.

Change in the 1990s

Over the past few years, new tendencies have developed and older ones have
become exaggerated.

Greater but not Equal Access

The greatest changes in the media environment have occurred in Asia, as a
result of both national (Freedom Forum, 1993) and transnational activities
(Chan, 1994a). Recent figures (Screen Digest, April 1994) suggest that nine
 The Global and Local in International Communications 195
Asian countries from Pakistan to China have between them 62 terrestrial
television channels, 18 of which were launched since 1990. In Hong Kong,
Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan over 90 per cent of homes have television;
China and the Philippines have over 50 per cent penetration, although India
and Pakistan still have only around 20 per cent of homes with television.
Asia has become part of the ‘global village’. Since most economic forecasts
anticipate a massive growth in the Asian middle class, an estimated 250
million people in India alone (Guardian, March 25, 1995), the further media
penetration of households, increased satellite programming and increased
advertising seem likely. In 1994—95 there were over 15 international confer-
ences held in Asia about various aspects of broadcasting and telecommunica-
tions in the continent, just one indication of the increasing importance of the
continent for these industries.
But the media impact is unequal. There are huge disparities between
countries, and there are equally great disparities between rural and urban
communities within countries. For example, in Indonesia, the fifth most
populous country in the world, urban dwellers are 30 per cent of population
but own 65 per cent of the televisions; only 23 per cent of rural areas have TV,
and the bulk of those are black and white sets. Yet the calculations are that the
middle class is 3 per cent of population, which still gives advertisers over 5
million people to target (Multichannel News International, March 1995), so a
fifth commercial TV channel began in January 1995 with Soeharto family
members playing a key role in the commercial media game.
There remains significant global inequality of access to print, to radio and
to television — though these are no longer simply regional disparities. Table
9.4 shows the global inequalities in numbers of newspapers, books and
amount of newsprint consumed. Illiteracy is increasingly recognized as the
biggest barrier to development, with a strongly skewed gender pattern
(Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1994). Research on the relationship (if any) between
access to electronic media and patterns of literacy is needed; perhaps instead
of arguing against television we should concentrate more on the value of
literacy. The inequality in access to telephony is shocking, while provision of
such services are of far more direct social utility than developments in
broadcasting. Nor does the presence of television imply the availability of
other indicators of development; for example, it is estimated that over 50 per
cent of households in China have television, while only 1 per cent has running
hot water.
The other geographic area where there has been a dramatic change in the
media environment is the Middle East. The Gulf War brought 24-hour
American news coverage to the region, found eager audiences and created
pressure for change in the regional media industries. This, coupled with a
postwar economic boom, has fostered a more open media environment
(Warwick, 1995). 1994 saw the launch of no less than 20 satellite-delivered
television channels in the region (Media International, 1995) including
Egyptian Satellite Channel (ETC), ORBIT, MBC, and five channels of ART
from Saudi Arabia. Video penetration is also estimated at over 90 per cent in
many countries.
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(e|doed (jeyideo = (ajdoed (jeqideo (a|doed (aj\doed (ejdoed (%)saasn (uosiod (uOosied {ajdoed (e|doed
O01 40d) Jed OOL 40d) Jed) O00L 000‘00L O0L4ed = Asesq) Jed) Jed) 0OL4ed) QOL Jed)
Se}N1YeA sejynuiw) seuoyd peysod jad suo} 4ed) seidos) peejsiBay =seouep seouep SUOISIA soipey
40,0 seo -8]81 $ie}97 O14}eW) peysiiqnd sieded -ueye -uaye -9/8)
euoud Pewnsuoos sajjl} YoOog = -sMeau winesnui eweuld
-8/8} seded Aueq jenuuy jenuuy
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Bunuld
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 The Global and Local in International Communications 197

Continued Growth of Media Conglomerates: the Conquest of Heaven

PA, renewed frenzy of US-centered media mergers was seen in 1995. For a
while in August, the Walt Disney take-over of Capital Cities/ABC gave that
conglomerate the status of the world’s largest media entertainment corpora-
tion. But that was rapidly eclipsed in the autumn when Time-Warner regained
its position as the world’s giant by merging with Turner Broadcasting, the
owners of CNN. Other mergers and joint ventures include: Microsoft with
NBC; Westinghouse with CBS; Seagram with MCA. The search for ‘synergy’
is creating ever fewer giant media corporations, the new mega-moguls or
multicoloured behemoths.
God’s biggest current problem is not being in geostationary orbit. The
celestial spheres have been purchased and occupied by satellites, the techno-
logical form that has done most to revolutionize global broadcasting and
telecommunications and create a borderless world, at least for images and
information if not for the movement of peoples. STAR beams over Asia;
ORBIT over the Middle East; SKY and ASTRA over Europe. The transnational
media moguls have shifted from ignoring the south to recognition of the
potential spending power of Third World middle classes, hence the expan-
sion of satellite provision, fast-changing takeovers and buyouts of media
companies, and the testing of new formats (Index on Censorship, 1994;
Rusbridger, 1994; Shawcross, 1995). STAR TV (launched by Hutchison
Whampoa but purchased by Murdoch in 1992) had already by 1995 reached
54 million homes with a footprint that stretches from Israel and the UAE to
China, Hong Kong and Korea. CNN, BBC WORLD, and MTV have all found
satellite distributors and southern audiences.
However the new mogul invaders are beginning to be met with more
resistance than their old eponymous counterparts.
‘Domesticating’ Output
As has already been mentioned, local or regional programming is often far
more popular than western programming. ZEE TV, developed by the Indian
trading group Essel and broadcasting in Hindi, rapidly became more popular
than Murdoch’s STAR and the state-sponsored and dull Doordashan. In 1993
Murdoch bought a 49 per cent share in the company, MTV left, and, acknowl-
edging the need to ‘indigenize’ programming, STAR has developed a Hindi
music channel, Channel V.
Thus even the major media players have come to realize the need for
‘cultural sensitivity’ and to recognize the different taste cultures within
regions. So far this often tends toward a ‘Cinema Paradiso’ approach to
programme content, cutting out the anticipated ‘naughty bits’ while conve-
niently forgetting that entire programmes are deeply imbued with non-local
values and attitudes regarding family life, relations across the generations,
gender roles, lifestyle, even political participation.
Reverse Flows
In early 1995 ZEE TV took over the satellite television company TV Asia in
the UK for an estimated £10m, giving it access to the approximately 2 million
Asians in the UK, and 8 million in Europe. ORBIT, out of Rome, and MEBC,
198 Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi

out of London, broadcast not only to the Middle East, but also to Arab
speakers across Europe and North America. Emirates Dubai TV (EDTV) in
the UAE has been broadcasting to the estimated 8 million Arabs in Europe
and the 8 million in the US since December 1993, offering a 24-hour channel
of news and entertainment including children’s programming and sport that is
70 per cent in Arabic, sourced from the Arab world and supported by two
Dubai-based production houses. Slowly the south is broadcasting to the north.
Going Global
Other southern channels are also going global: India’s Doordashan will lease
capacity on PanAmSat PAS 4 over the Middle East and Europe; China Central
Television (CCTV) is set to launch the world’s first 24-hour Chinese televi-
sion service and Chinese News and Entertainment (CNE) already serves an
estimated one-million-strong Chinese community in Europe. WETV also aims
to globally distribute programmes from the south, by women, by non-com-
merical groupings with a dedicated satellite, Mondiale, in the planning stage
(Fountain, 1995).
Such developments mean that global flows do not only flow out from the
West, but increasingly flow in. The issues of international communication
described here are not just concerns of the south but increasingly of the north
as well, and connect to debates about multiculturalism and diversity in North
American and European contexts. Indeed, it is ironic to note how Third World
concerns about cultural identity, so scorned by western countries in the 1970s,
are now articulated by those very countries in the 1990s.
Forms of Resistance
Governments have reacted to the heavenly invasions in different ways. None
have tested the ‘prior consent’ principle accepted by WARC to limit the
incursions of satellite signals (Chan, 1994b). Some have banned satellite
dishes (Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Iran); dishes are produced by
People’s Liberation Army in China while technically banned, the ban being
ignored in rural China. The encryption of signals limits access; ORBIT,
broadcasting from Rome to the Middle East, uses an encrypted signal which
requires a decoder. Other controls on distribution have also been devised; for
example, Bahrain utilizes an MMDS delivery system, taking in outside
satellite channels but feeding them to the domestic population via cable,
allowing for a governmental point of control over what is distributed. The
satellite distributor may also clash with the programme maker: STAR bumped
BBC World from its China footprint when the Chinese authorities objected to
BBC coverage of human rights issues but Murdoch wanted to maintain his
positive relationship with the Chinese authorities. Despite curbs and regula-
tions in many states, economic, political and cultural resistance are variously
expressed through piracy, illegal dishes, illegal cable, etc.

Conclusion: Global, Regional, National, Local

If nothing else, the chapter has shown the complexity of the global contem-
porary media/culture spectrum at the start of the twenty-first century, and
the
 The Global and Local in International Communications 199

range of theoretical constructs that have been used to explain, and base policy
on the international role of media, particularly in the ‘Third World’. The ‘mood’
of contemporary analysis can be quite varied. One position is that of the happy
postmodernist who sees that many kinds of cultural texts circulate internation-
ally and that people adopt them playfully and readily integrate them in creative
ways into their own lives, and that cultural bricolage is the prevailing experi-
ence as we enter the twenty-first century. Another is the melancholy political
economist who sees the all-pervasive reach of the multinationals and wonders
how long distinctive cultures can outlast the onslaught of the western culture
industries. Somewhere in between lies the cautiously optimistic fourth-worlder
who sees in the spread of media the possibilities for revitalization of local
identities (ethnic, religious, class, etc) and their use as tools of political
mobilization vis 4 vis both national and global forces. But we have also seen
the slippery nature of the linguistic terms used in international communications
analysis: that ‘global’ rarely means ‘universal’ and often implies only the actors
of the north; that ‘local’ is often really ‘national’ which can be oppressive of the
‘local’; that ‘indigenous’ culture is often already ‘contaminated’ through older
cultural contacts and exists as a political claim rather than a clean analytic
construct. The bi-polar model suggests either imbalance/domination, the
political-economy perspective, or balance, the ‘global pluralist’ perspective,
whereas the real world reveals far greater complexity.
Cultural boundaries are not etched in stone but have slippery divisions
dependent on the self-adopted labels of groups. What seems clear is that,
far from an end to history, or the loss of the subject, identity politics and
cultural preservation are going to be amongst the hottest issues of the next
century that will be fought out internationally and intra-nationally, with
profound political and economic consequences. The apparent triumph of
late capitalism in 1989-90 and the demise of the so-called second world of
state socialism suggest that ideological politics in the classic sense is going to
be less important than the revival of identity politics in the future. Yet at the
same time as the demise of a single master narrative of global progress is
trumpeted in some quarters, in others the old indicators of a single path to
‘development’ are still utilized, and even adopted with greater eagerness by
Third World societies yearning for ‘progress’. It is likely that in the next
decade we shall see a revival of intense debate about development, and the
unresolved role of culture within that process, neo-Lernerian arguments for
the positive role of media systems as part of national development encounter-
ing arguments for more thoroughgoing Third World economic disassociation
and delinking from the global capitalist economy (Amin, 1990), as well as
fourth world/indigenist culture arguments for the maintenance of local iden-
tities (Verhelst, 1990). These levels may themselves be in conflict, for a
strong ‘national’ position taken in relation to international economic and
cultural forces may lead to repression of ‘local’ forces and voices in relation
to that ‘national’ level. Interstate relations are not coterminous with inter-
cultural relations, and the political and conceptual agenda of the twenty-first
century is going to be how to cope with these various levels of actors and
processes. It is here that conceptual leakage in the global/local framework of
analysis is most evident, highlighted by the particularly complex set of issues
raised by mediated cultural flows which poignantly reveal in their electronic
200 Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi

presence the absence or porousness of boundaries. In the bipolar model it is

the ‘national’ level of analysis that becomes invisible. Yet it is national
policy-making that helps define a cultural identity, provides the regulatory
framework for media organizations — the state providing direct funding and
control in many Third World nations — and cultural trade policy, as well as
defining the domestic public sphere and the extent to which diverse voices
will or will not be heard. As Giddens himself underscores in much of his
work, nation-states are the key political systems of the modern world,
controlling the structures — legal, administrative, financial, military, surveil-
lance, and informational — in which we all live and which are now involved in
transnational dynamics — a capitalist world economy, the world military order,
systems of inter-governmental organizations, transnational political move-
ments, etc — which both press in on and explode the meaning of national
boundaries (Giddens, 1985). Indeed, as Giddens argues, the worldwide system
of nations states exists in constant tension with the global capitalist economy.
In the mid-1990s the global media picture is more complex than ever.
Transnational media co-exist with domestic, and compete for audiences;
domestic production can become even more commercial, garish and explicit
than the western ‘originals’; but perhaps new programming formats, indigen-
ized media products, alternative news frames, might also develop. Pressures
for democratization, variety, entertainment, are strong, and it seems a form of
Eurocentric hubris to deny others what we enjoy in the name of some
questionable ‘high culture’ purity. It is an exciting time in media develop-
ment, when the paternalistic preoccupation of the past twenty years might
give way to a realization that the creativity, energy and indeed entrepreneur-
ship of the south is at least equal to that of the north. Southern media
environments need to be taken as seriously as northern sites, and studied
with as varied and contextualized approaches, and that must now include
flows and actors on many levels: the global, the regional, the national, and the
local, since all of these might constitute the loci of the ‘imagined commu-
nities’ (Anderson, 1983) of the future.

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10
The Globalization of Electronic
Journalism
Michael Gurevitch

Introduction

The notion of globalization has become one of the more common, rather
overused buzzword of our times. Often accurately, sometimes hyperbelically,
all manner of events, processes, products and ideas, from political and
military conflicts, to industrial production, to consumer products, to culture,
are endowed with a global embrace. Yet perhaps in no other field has
globalization become so visible as in the areas of culture and mass commu-
nication. Every television viewer witnesses the process every day.
Overuse of a concept leads, inevitably, to its trivialization. Much of the
discussion of the globalizaton of the media, both in the media themselves and
often also in the academic literature, is either platitudinous, repetitive, or
soaked in the aura of ‘high tech’. The great ‘media events’ of our time, such as
the live broadcasting of the landing on the moon, or of the explosion of the
Challenger space shuttle, or of sports events such as the Olympic games, are
invoked to illustrate and dramatize the marvels of the new technologies. Less
attention is paid to questions concerning the social, cultural, economic and
political antecedents and consequences of this ‘communication revolution’. A
‘blue Skies’ psychology seems to permeate the discussion, nurturing the
notion of a communication ‘revolution’ that will bring people and nations
together, shrink our world and turn it into McLuhan’s prophesied ‘global
village’. It is a perspective based on the implicit assumption that ‘commu-
nication is a good thing’, that tensions and conflicts stem from ‘breakdowns in
communication’, and that if we could only have ‘better communication’ a
more harmonious global order will come about.
To be sure, the other side of that coin has also been argued forcefully. The
seemingly boundless optimism about the potential promises expected to
emerge from the ‘communication revolution’ has been countered by various
critics. Some (e.g. Ferguson, 1992) challenged the very mythology that has
been generated around the concept of globalization. Others raised two related
objections. First, they saw in an unbridled tide of global communication
 The Globalization of Electronic Journalism 205
genuine threats to the autonomy and the viability of the cultures of weaker and
more dependent societies, primarily indigenous Third World cultures, or even
to the cultures of some First World societies, whose ‘authenticity’ and
uniqueness were seen as perilously vulnerable to the products of Hollywood
and US television. (Note, for example, debates concerning European Union
policies designed to create ‘a trade barrier to limit American entertainment
imports — in the name of national cultural “preservation” (Smith, 1990a).
Second, questions were raised about the economic, political and ideological
interests being served by an unlimited and ‘free’ flow of communication.
Were these, the critics asked, indeed ‘technologies of freedom’ (in the phrase
of Ithiel Pool, 1983), or did they actually threaten to undermine the capacity
of weaker countries to structure their national media systems, and to formu-
late their own national communication policies according to their own
interests?
The challenge for students of the processes of media globalization is to ‘get
a conceptual grip, beyond the language of gee-whizzery, on an escalating yet
formless, sprawling and globe-shaking process that may be impinging on
people’s senses of their places in the world and on the power of regimes to
effect their wills within it’ (Blumler, 1989). In this chapter we do not intend to
confront the comprehensive challenge presented in this statement and, rather
than dealing with arguments which, for the most part, date back to the heyday
of the debate about ‘media imperialism’ in the 1970s, we shall explore one
specific aspect of that process, namely the ramifications of the globalization of
television news. Structurally, we shall argue, the globalization of television
news has consequences for the shifting balance of relationships of dependency
in a number of areas: between notionally dominant and subordinate national
media systems; between media institutions and political institutions; between
national and ‘local’ television news services; and between television news
professionals as encoders of meanings and audience members as decoders. At
the level of the audience the process of globalization facilitates a comparative
examination of issues in the reception of news, examined cross-culturally.
By way of setting the scene we begin with a background discussion of the
issue of globalization. Next we examine the institutional structures compris-
ing the global system, looking specifically at the European Broadcasting
Union’s news exchange system as a specific case, followed by a discussion
of some of the implications of the process for the different roles of television,
and the shifts in the relations of dependency these entail. We conclude by
considering some of the problems involved in a comparative analysis of the
reception of news.’

Globalization

For students of the media, interest in the globalization process lies in its happy
mixture of technology, issues of information flow, and questions of audience
comprehension and reception of that information. But the concept is equally
pervasive in many other domains of the late twentieth-century world. It is
difficult to think of an area to which this concept has not been applied. The list
206 Michael Gurevitch

seems to be endless: from the mantras of free trade and the globalization of
capital, to globally shared ‘media events’ and tales of global celebrities.
Globalization is more than a recurring theme in common cultural con-
sciousness. Its easy lodging in everyday discourse is mirrored in contempor-
ary social theory and political analysis and is invoked in many and varied
ways by many and varied people. Politicians, journalists and western econo-
mists deploy it to describe a worldwide interdependent political and economic
system framed in the language of the connectedness of markets, with an
explicit emphasis on the economic determinants of that system. Globalization
is seen as a technologically determined, institutionally created set of relations
that has altered traditional models of economic operation. Lying not far
behind this use of globalization is the older discourse of development and
of global integration. It is a throwback to an older model of uniform,
international model of growth with western economies as the reference
group. The difference lies in the fact that development is now seen not as
linear (i.e. all countries need to develop towards this ideal) but rather as an
interdependent process. Economic interdependence spells interconnected
growth — imbalanced in part or at different stages — but eventually arriving
at the same end.
However, the ideal of globalization has, of course, a longer history. Liberal
thought saw humanity progressing as modernization eroded localism and
created huge societies whose flexibility and inclusiveness presaged the dis-
solution of all boundaries and other divisive categories (Smith, 1990b). This
notion of globalization has been viewed sceptically by other commentators
(especially those on the left) and political economy theorists who drew on
neo-marxist formulations. Critics of globalization equated it with a set of
distorted relations — economically, politically and socially — that reiterated
historical imperialism and perpetuated postcolonial inequalities.
More than thirty years after its initial appearance, McLuhan’s (1964) coined
slogan of the ‘global village’ remains the sacred chant for a large number of
pundits of globalization. Instead of the sound bite, here is the entire passage:

After a thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical

technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we
had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electronic
technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global
embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. As
electronically contracted, the globe is no more than a village.
(1964, pp. 11-12)
Thus, and in spite of the torrents of scepticism that followed, was set up the
frame of reference for much of the discussion about media globalization in the
past three decades. The debate may be described as a succession of frames or
paradigms. They have been labelled ‘communications and development’,
‘cultural imperialism’ and the currently revisionist ‘cultural pluralism’, still
searching for a theoretical shape (Sreberny-Mohammadi, 19972).
Whatever the differences between these approaches, all see the role of
communication and mass media as crucial elements in the process of globa-
lization. The differences are as much conceptual as they are historically
located. “Communication and development’ emerged out of developmentalist
 The Globalization of Electronic Journalism 207
thinking in the early 1960s. Faced with the economic poverty of Third World
countries following the Second World War, western academics debated the
nature of development’ and the obstacles therein. Some arguments focused
on the lack of capital for investment, others on the lack of education and
entrepreneurial vision. Lerner (1958) and Schramm (1964) argued that the
problem lay with traditional and conservative world views or mentalities that
could be removed or circumvented through the use of the mass media, which
would bring about change in values and attitudes. This perspective has been
criticized (and increasingly strawmanned) for its ethnocentrism, its a-histori-
city, its linearity and its conception of development in an evolutionary,
endogenist fashion (Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1991).
Much of that criticism has come from ‘dependency’ or ‘media imperialism’
theorists who have characterized the nature of the ‘global embrace’ as less
than cuddlesome. The critique centred around the idea that the conditions of
postcolonialism were not very different from those of colonialism, only
subtler. The economic, political and cultural relationships between the First
and Third Worlds are characterized less by direct economic or political
control and more by dependency, whereby the Third World is dependent
for economic, political, and cultural resources on the First World which,
through a continuation of colonialist logic and action, has created such
patterns of dependency. The media are seen as part of the institutional
apparatus that creates such dependencies by providing western-produced
packages of information and entertainment that carry and transmit western
cultural values. Development through media contents and policies is part of
the process of cultural hegemony.
The development of revisionist cultural theory can be traced from Horkhei-
mer and Adorno’s (1972) criticism of the ‘culture industry’ in the 1940s to the
more pragmatic concept of the “knowledge industry’ in 1965, to the appear-
ance of the terms ‘consciousness industry’ in 1968 and the ‘information
industry’ in 1970. Currently, the cultural pluralist or revisionist position is
strongly underwritten by a postmodernist vision of globality. The approach’s
strength, however, derives from its emphasis on the complex nature of
processes of cultural production, distribution and consumption and its insis-
tence that understanding the process should not be sought in any single part of
the process but in its entirety.
Both the developmental and the media imperialist formulations (especially
in their classic formulations) saw the role of the media as essentially devel-
oping/enlarging traditional modes of community, either by incorporating new
cultural elements or by arriving at global, albeit imbalanced, cultural forms. In
the developmental approach, the media were agents of both nation-building
and of enlarging that nation into a union of nations — politically, culturally or
economically conceived. In the latter, the media were seen as creating
connections that resulted in undermining the cultural integrity and coherence
of nation-states. The cultural revisionist view draws on postmodernist ideas to
efface ideas of locality (such as nation-state) and argue for the emergence of
global, cosmopolitan and transnational cultures.
Where does television news fit into this panoply of ideas and formulations?
The picture is somewhat fragmented. Some studies have dealt in piecemeal
fashion with television news production and distribution, especially news flow
208 Michael Gurevitch

and news content. The history of this research stretches back to the systematic
analysis of the flow of international news conducted by Wilbur Schramm over
three decades ago — a fact conveniently forgotten by more recent critical
scholars who note only his ‘developmentalist’ orientation. Schramm (1964)
claimed that the:

_ . . flow of news among nations is thin, that it is unbalanced, with heavy coverage
of a few highly developed countries and light coverage of many less developed
nations, and that, in some cases it tends to ignore important events and distort the
reality it represents.

Other students of international communication followed on Schramm’s

critical understanding of international news flow. Hester (1973) argued for
a range of variables to explain the volume and direction of international news
flow, including ‘power hierarchies’, ‘economic affinities’ and the rank order
of nations. Galtung and Ruge (1965) added variables such as socio-cultural
proximity, wealth of nations, saliency of elite nations and people and
negativity of events.
There is, then, a connection between this earlier work and the bulk of work
on news flow which draws on dependency/media imperialism theory. Much of
that work is linked to issues of news flows articulated in political forums such
as the non-aligned movement and UNESCO and to the debate on the ‘New
world information order’ (NWIO) in the 1970s and 1980s. A range of critical
writing has informed this debate, such as the work of Schiller (1969; 1976;
1984), Hamelink (1980; 1983), Garnham (1985), Mowlana (1985) and Matte-
lart (1983), who have pointed to issues of institutional practice, political
culture, cultural imports and most significantly global capitalist expansion.
Some of the work referred to above focuses methodologically on content
analysis, seeking to reveal the presence (or absence) of textual elements, but
not their cultural orientation or their ideological import. The search for that
missing element — a formulation of the cultural function (and politics) of news
— has been attempted in a limited number of comparative studies that examine
not only the global frameworks of news stories but also, and most importantly,
their reception by the audiences for news in different countries. Hence the
emergence of a comparative, cross-societal framework for the study of the
globalization of television news. That perspective is informed by narrative/
structural approaches that regard television news not as a limited set of
content features but rather as a text, a social artefact, amenable to cultural
decoding. Gurevitch et al. (1991) outlined the general parameters of such
perspective:

News stories should be examined as related, in the same way as documented

historical facts and incidents, to one or another myth or super-story or cultural
theme, as these appear in different cultures. The meaning of a concrete news story
is always produced in the public space of culture, and in the framework of a
relevant family of stories, already familiar to the members of a society.

Understanding news as narrative allows for a first step towards an under-.

standing of globalization in comparative and cultural terms. We shall return to
that issue later on.
 The Globalization of Electronic Journalism 209

The Institutional Structures

Claims concerning the globalization of the news media are not new or even
recent (see, for example, Schramm, 1964, and Hachten, 1987). The printing
press crossed national and cultural boundaries long before television. The
international news agencies have been in the business of disseminating news
materials around the world for almost a century and a half (Boyd-Barrett,
1980; Fenby, 1986). Radio and films were oblivious to national boundaries
almost since their inception. Yet the advent of satellite technology, facilitating
the instant transmission of visual materials around the world, can arguably be
_ regarded as having ushered in a qualitatively new stage in the globalization of
news.
Two reasons underlie this claim. First, it could be argued that the institu-
tional arrangements for transmitting and exchanging television news materi-
als, spawned by the availability of satellite technology, have transformed the
institutional structures engaged in the global dissemination of news materials,
toward a greater decentralization of the system. Second, the differences
between the flexibility and degree of ‘openness’ of verbal versus visual texts
(see, for example, Fiske, 1987) suggest that news exchanges based on the
dissemination of visual materials must be qualitatively different from the
transmission of verbal texts (as conducted, for example, by the global wire
agencies).
The deployment of satellite technology for use in the global dissemination
of television news has not only extended the reach, and increased the speed
with which visual news materials are transmitted around the globe, but has
also led to the setting up of new institutional arrangements dedicated to the
international dissemination of television news materials. At least three
branches of that system could be identified here.
1 The best known, at least by viewers around the world, are the International
satellite-delivered news services, such as the US-based CNN, the British-
based BBC Television World Service and BSkyB, and the Hong-Kong
based STAR. These services provide fully shaped television news pro-
grammes via satellite. At this point in time CNN is the oidest and probably
has the widest global reach, and therefore is the most familiar of these
services. The situation on that front is quite fluid, however, and new
services are quite likely to emerge in the future.
2 The international television news agencies are the outgrowths of the
‘traditional’ wire agencies. The ‘big two’ are Reuters (formerly Vis-
news) and WTN (Worldwide Television News). The first traces its
origins to Reuters, and is now owned jointly by Reuters, the BBC and
the American network NBC. The second originated as a joint operation of
UPI (United Press International, now defunct) and ITN, the British
Independent Television News. Both distribute television news materials
around the clock to television news organizations around the world.
3 Systems of television news exchanges operate under the umbrellas of a
number of regional broadcasting organizations, such as the European
Broadcasting Union, the Asian Broadcasting Union, the Arab States Broad-
casting Union and Intervision, serving the Eastern Bloc countries.
210 Michael Gurevitch

The organizations listed above, and the US television networks, are linked
in a complex interlocked system of international distribution and exchange of
television news materials. :

The International Television News Agencies

The international television news agencies, outgrowths of the global wire

agencies, function along the same principles that guided their parent organiza-
tions (but replacing words with pictures) and play a central role in the
globalization of electronic journalism. They provide news footage as well
as complete stories to clients around the world, as well as to the regional news
exchange systems. For example, the European news exchange organization,
Eurovision, whose own story sources have for a long time been confined to its
European member countries, looks to the agencies for the first coverage of big
non-European stories; to topical hard news coverage from the Third World
and other areas outside Europe, and to sports news, ‘soft’ stories and other
off-beat stories that relieve the ‘bulletin gloom factor’ (Fenby, 1986). Stories
offered by Eurovision’s member stations are preferred to stories matched by
the news agencies, but often the news agency story serves to reassure the news
coordinators and news editors that the stories supplied by the member country
is complete and accurate. A news agency story is often perceived as free from
‘political motivation’ and hence as more objective.
This faith in the news agencies’ ‘objectivity’ is driven in part by the
historical track record of the wire agencies, whose viability as purveyors of
news stories over the last century and a half hinged on their scrupulously
guarded impartiality, and in part by the assumption that pictures are more
‘objective’ than words. The agencies themselves reinforce this faith through
the ‘dope sheets’ they produce to accompany and ‘explain’ the news footage
they provide. These are written in a style that aims to be as ‘neutral’ as a
descriptive narrative can possibly be, in order to be acceptable to a diverse
range of news editors in different countries, and to alleviate the ideological
sensitivities of news services in over 100 countries. The ‘dope sheets’ style
avoids all potentially controversial terminology and adheres to a ‘minimalist’
language. The imperative to be non-judgemental extends even in extreme
cases, as a (former) Visnews executive tells it:
If the PLO bomb a bus load of kids in Tel Aviv, VISNEWS would not describe
that as an atrocity; we would not describe the PLO as terrorists, nor would we
describe them as freedom fighters; nor would we, ourselves, refer to that specific
event as a tragedy. We might well quote somebody else as saying it was a
tragedy. The reason is quite simple. To many of our subscribers, the PLO
blowing up a bus load of children anywhere might be a victory for the oppressed
people of Palestine. There are no militarists in VISNEWS; there are no freedom
fighters. We have to choose this very precise middle path.
Ironically, ‘objectivity’ entails greater ease of manipulating the raw materi-
als for different story-telling purposes. Indeed, it is easy to see how the ‘raw’
footage supplied by the agencies may be used for a variety of editorial
purposes by television news editors around the world. Anecdotal evidence
 The Globalization of Electronic Journalism 211
of this was related by a member of WTN’s bureau in Tel Aviv. During an
especially cold winter spell in Europe a few years ago, a cameraman on the
bureau’s staff suggested a story that could appeal to freezing European
television viewers. He went to Tel Aviv’s waterfront and shot some footage
of bathers splashing in the sea (thus, presumably instilling some hope that
spring would come to Europe too). The footage was duly sent to WTN’s
headquarters in London, and from there was transmitted to WTN’s clients.
WTN’s bureau chief in Tel Aviv, who regularly monitored the news on
Jordanian Television, was surprised the following evening to see their
footage on Jordan Television’s news broadcast, illustrating a story about
the decline of tourism to Israel. The pictures did, indeed, show a rather
sparsely populated beach.
The risk of manipulation is not the only problem inherent in the emergence
of global video wire services. As Powell (1990) puts it, if news editors around
the world will start building their newscasts from universally available pool
pictures, ‘news coverage will have evolved into a video commodity, as
anonymous and bland as any product on the future exchanges. And there is
another hazard: very little foreign news footage is tagged and attributed to its
source. Yet in most countries the originating agency is the government-run
television network. Editors who would never approve stories filed by official
propaganda writers may routinely approve the use of video shot and edited by
government agencies.’

The News Exchange System

While the television news agencies are coherent, centralized organizations,

the news exchange system is a rather decentralized, loose grouping of regional
news exchange organizations. Its decentralized character is reflected in the
structure and operational mode of the European news exchange system.
The European news exchange system began its trial runs in 1958, and
started its regular service in 1961. It grew from 21 active members in 1964
to 38 members in 1984. Ten years later, in 1994, active membership stood at
62 members (that number includes the members of the former Eastern Bloc
news exchange organization, Intervision, who joined the system following the
dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc). Thus, in spite of the
explosive growth of global news services, the European system managed not
only to find its niche in the global system, but indeed grow and thrive.”
Internally, the European system, like the other regional news exchange
organizations, is based on collaboration between its constituent national
broadcasting services. Through a constant flow of telex messages and daily
closed-circuit telephone conferences between specially designated ‘news
coordinators’ and news liaison personnel based in the broadcasting organiza-
tions in different countries, an ongoing exchange of information is maintained
about the availability of visual materials of news events (Lantenac, 1975). The
news exchange services and agencies also provide the technical arrangements
for receiving and sending news materials via satellite to those news organiza-
tions who expressed an interest in them.
212 Michael Gurevitch

In 1994 twenty national broadcasting services provided news coordinators

for the daily exchange. The duties of the news coordinators are essentially
those of ‘gatekeeping’, relating to the selection and choice ofstories to be-sent
on the exchange system and determining questions of priority — both on
selection of items and choice between different offerings on the same story.
Perhaps the most sensitive part of their job involves attending to the needs and
interests of all the different members services and selecting those stories that
reflect supranational considerations. They are required to transcend their own
national news interests and to adopt a cross-cultural, ‘global’ news perspec-
tive (Lantenac, 1975). In the words of one news coordinator, an employee of
SRG (the Swedish broadcasting service):

When I am coordinating for Eurovision, I just forget SRG. I do my work on a

Eurovision basis and if something comes up that SRG would have liked to have
they have always the means of taking the unilateral (i.e. a one member feed) to
get the material.

The requirement of serving a ‘global’ clientele is especially significant in

the first satellite feed of the day (dubbed EVN-0), which contains stories
chosen solely on the judgement of the news coordinator. Later feeds reflect
the needs and wants of the different broadcasting organizations, as expressed
during the editorial teleconference. Usually, when a story is ‘bought’ by three
or more members it is incorporated into the satellite feed; but it is not
uncommon for the news coordinator to continue to hold on to a story with
an eye on future EVNs, even if there is no immediate demand for it.
Despite initial pessimism that the news coordinators would be ‘biased’ in
their preselection, experience and analysis have shown that they conform to
the general consensus: on over 90 out of 100 items, their choices would have
been the same as the outcome of a general consultation (Lantenac, 1975). The
similarity in news judgements reflects a remarkably high degree of shared
news values in countries with highly varied political ideologies and perspec-
tives on the functions of the media. These shared news values are reflected in
the preference for hard news stories that are likely to be of interest to most, or
all, members. They are the product of a shared news culture, based on mutual
understanding and personal acquaintanceship amongst the small band of news
coordinators, developed through their daily interaction (as well as the bi-
annual face-to-face meetings of all news coordinators). More generally the
shared news judgement is also based on a shared vision of the EBU. As one of
the news coordinators put it: ‘Any agenda that the EBU has is an agenda put
to it by its members. . . . We are a service organization. The members decide
if there is to be any agenda.’ He also agreed that the news coordinator’s role is
not ‘programmatic’ but rather is one of a ‘facilitator’.

Some Institutional Implications

The relevance of the operations of the news exchange system for this
discussion has to do not only with its contribution to the global flow of
television news materials but also with its implications for the relationships
 The Globalization of Electronic Journalism 213
of dependency implied in the ‘media imperialism’ thesis, according to which
western media institutions and interests dominated the global media system,
and served as the back door for the reintroduction of western economic and
cultural influences into Third World countries.
In the course of an observation study of the operations of the Eurovision
News Exchange system, conducted in 1987, we were struck by the apparent
“give and take’ that took place between the European ‘news coordinator’ and
other regional news exchange organizations, primarily Asiavision and Inter-
vision (now defunct). The exchanges we observed suggested that the relation-
ship between the different regional organizations was becoming increasingly
‘interactive’ and hence, we deduced, mutually interdependent and therefore
decentralized. An era in which two or three global news agencies dominated
the flow of world news from bases in London, Paris or New York, and in
which news stories had to be channeled to the ‘centre’ before being dissemi-
nated again outward toward the ‘periphery’, appeared to be gradually replaced
by one in which Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur (the coordinating centres for
Asiavision) played a role more on par with the one played by the centres of
the EBU news exchange system in the various European capitals.
However, data detailing the number of news items exchanged between the
regional organizations portray a less rosy picture. In 1994, for example, the
EBU’s News Exchange transmitted over 22,000 stories. It received and
transmitted no stories from SIN (the Madrid-based Servicio Iberio-Americano
de Noticias, serving Latin American broadcasters); five stories from Caribvi-
sion, the exchange serving Barbados, Curacao, Jamaica and Trinidad; 110
stories (one half of 1 per cent of the total) from Arabvision, and 455 stories
(about 2 per cent) from Asiavision (Cohen et al., 1995). Thus while the
exchanges between the regional organizations continue, the dependence of
the European exchange on the others is barely noticeable.
Other evidence also raises doubts about the move toward parity within the
global system. For example, the availability of CNN’s transmissions around
the globe and the gradual expansion of BBC Television World Service could
be seen as evidence of the continued domination of global news coverage by
western news organizations. CNN provides, inevitably, an American perspec-
tive on domestic (i.e. US) as well as ‘foreign’ (i.e. non-US) events. Its
newscasts are, by definition, impervious to the process of domestication
that characterizes the processing of news stories by editors working within
the terminologies and meaning systems of their own societies. The same
applies to the BBC World Service, notwithstanding its claim that it presents
the news from ‘nobody’s’ point of view. It should be noted, however, that
these services are, and will continue to be regarded as supplementary services,
unlikely to replace the primary, domestic news service in the countries in
which they are available. Moreover, because the audience for them is
necessarily confined to those with some command of the English language
they are viewed by only a fraction of the audience in many countries. These
factors mitigate to some extent the potential impact of their feared global
reach.
214 Michael Gurevitch

The Consequences of Global (Often Live) Television

Amongst the many consequences of the globalization of television news is the

expansion of the range of roles that flow from television’s omnipresence in
world events and the instantaneous, often live transmission of these eventsto
a global audience. The enhancement of the role of television inheres primarily
in its emergence, in the era of instant global communication, as an active
participant in the events it purportedly ‘covers’. Television should no longer
be regarded (if it ever was) as a mere observer and reporter of events. It is
inextricably locked into these events, and has clearly become an integral part
of the reality it reports.
The consequences of the intertwined relationship between television and
the events it brings to the screen are especially significant in the case of ‘live’
coverage. This can be seen in the disjunctions it creates between locality and
globality and between television narrators and television viewers.
The most obvious function of live television is its compression of space.
Global media events, as Dayan and Katz (1992) point out, essentially present
the same event to audiences worldwide. Perhaps the most memorable recent
instance of this new genre is CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War, viewed by
audiences around the globe. While this was an ostensibly American produc-
tion, its live quality gave it a universal dimension. CNN’s viewers around the
world could watch for hours on the ‘opening night’ of the war, as CNN’s
correspondents in Baghdad rushed from window to window in their hotel
room, describing the bombardment of the city. In the days that followed,
many hours of live coverage of the war turned viewers around the world into
virtual eyewitnesses of the armed conflict, perhaps instinctively ducking with
the reporter, as he described ‘live’ how scuds were flying over his head.
Live television, then, does a number of things. First, it presents reality as
self-revelatory, i.e. it makes it appear as reality rather than as a construction.
As Chatman (1981) puts it:

The implications of the camera eye style is that no one recounts the events, they
are just revealed, as if some instrument — some cross between a video tape
recorder and speech synthesizer — had recorded visually and then translated
those visuals into the most neutral kind of language.

Live television also affects the narrative of television by being open-ended.

It purports to lack a perspective or point of view. Unlike the usual television
news product — over which journalists have almost total editorial control —
little rhetorical manipulation is possible in ‘live’ coverage. The relationship
between the event, the reporter and the audience is thus drastically changed.
The audience is positioned inside the event, and the textualization that is
usually the journalist’s imperative is taken away, with potentially damaging
consequences for the practice of journalism (see Katz, 1992). The event
becomes an invitation to the audience to take part in the process of inter-
pretation. There is little the reporter knows that the audience could not see for
themselves, thus eliminating one of the key elements of the journalist’s
control over the narrative. The audience is left without the suspense built
into narratives, except, of course, for the suspense of the unfolding event.
 The Globalization of Electronic Journalism 215
_A related consequence of live broadcasting is the obliteration of the
difference between the duration of the event and the time dimension in the
narrative of the event. Time construction in the narrative and time as it
unfolds are the same. Live broadcasting thus elongates time: the camera
pans slowly over the skyline of Tel Aviv during a scud attack; Saddam
Hussein lectures for an hour to British hostages in Baghdad.
By structuring the narrative in these significant ways, live broadcasting
renders television news open to audiences in different countries, and in doing
so creates a media product that, while obviously culturally determined, has a
significant universalistic dimension, making it possible for diverse audiences
to move between the universalization of meanings and the cultural specificity
of their own decodings.

Television as Participant

The notion that television, and the media generally, are active participants in
the world they report on, rather than observers of that world, raises a sensitive
issue for media practitioners because it challenges one of the central tenets of
western journalism, namely that in order to achieve objectivity, and through it
truthfulness, journalists should detach themselves from the objects of their
reporting, and maintain at all times a scrupulously neutral, impartial stance.
To achieve this journalists attempt to position themselves ‘outside’ the events
they report on. Only thus, they argue, can they perform their journalistic
function properly.
In spite of the hallowed status of this position, however, this ‘norm of
apartness’ is clearly flawed, both empirically and conceptually. Journalists
can not extricate themselves from their societal context, either physically,
socially or culturally, any more than other members of society can. They
cannot, therefore, claim to — and hence should not pretend to — be able to
observe the social world as if they were not part of it, as if from a position
‘floating’ above it. There is nothing new, of course, about this argument. Yet
it is worth re-stating here because the rapid globalization of television news
has established the participatory nature of television news as more crucial and
fraught with consequences than ever before. This can be observed at a number
of different levels.

The International Level

The role now played by television in the conduct of international relations is
merely an extension onto the international level of the actively participatory
role that the media have always played in the lives of societies. But the
dramatic expansion of the stage upon which television now performs this
role — from a societal/national to a global one — has endowed it with a
qualitatively new and sharper edge. This is especially the case in times of
social and political turmoil, of rapid and revolutionary social change, or in
periods of international crises. As discussed above, the capacity of television,
utilizing satellite technology, to tell the story of an event as it happens,
216 Michael Gurevitch

simultaneously with its unfolding, can have direct consequences for the
direction that the event might take. Some of the more memorable examples
of this in recent years include the role played by global television in the
student uprising in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1988; in the revolutionary
events in eastern Europe in 1989 and, of course, in the Gulf War.
The presence of television cameras in these events affected the course they
took in some signficant ways, some more ‘passive’, others more ‘active’, as
follows.
First, it created a global audience for events presumed to be of global
interest or significance: revolutions, (e.g. the Chinese students’ ill-fated
demonstration in Tiananmen Square; the transformation, peaceful and other-
wise, of the regimes of eastern Europe in the late 1980s and the early 1990s);
wars (in the Persian Gulf and in the former Yugoslavia); human disasters (as
in Rwanda and Somalia); dramatic scientific/political events, such as the
landing on the moon; sports events like the Olympics, or ‘human interest’
stories. By transmitting these events ‘live’, and enabling instant global
exposure, they transformed the city squares and other sites in which these
events took place into a global stage. It is probably no exaggeration to say that
‘the whole world is watching’.
Second, the consequent global publicity given to these events by ‘live’
television undoubtedly influenced the behaviour of the protagonists. Clearly,
the publicity enjoyed by the demonstrating students in Tiananmen Square
helped to sustain the demonstration and was probably taken into account by
the authorities, perhaps first constraining their response and later hastening it.
Large-scale publicity probably also acts as a mobilizer, leading the yet
uninvolved to get involved. For example, the call for mass demonstrations
in Wenceslas Square in Prague in 1989, publicized by television, was
apparently responsible for recruiting even more demonstrators and, indeed,
to engulf the whole society in the process of political change. The fall of the
Berlin Wall in the glare of the television cameras endowed this event with an
even greater symbolic value than it might have had, had it not been witnessed
‘live’ by countless millions around the world.
Third, global television can act as a ‘go-between’, a channel of commu-
nication between countries and leaders, especially when hostile relationships
between governments tend to preclude direct contacts. One of the more
celebrated examples of television’s capacity to open up such channels of
communication is the role imputed to US television in bringing about the
Visit of the Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, to Jerusalem. The news people
who ‘mediated’ between the Egyptian President and the Israeli Prime Minister
may or may not deserve credit for Sadat’s trip, but at the very least they
created a channel of communication where no other public one existed, and
through which the opposing leaders appeared to communicate with each other
almost directly.
A number of recent instances suggest that globalized television sometimes
assumes not merely the role of a ‘go-between’ but may launch reportorial
initiatives that tend to blur the distinction between the roles of reporters and
diplomats. The Sadat-Begin ‘dialogue’ is one case in point. The same could
be said about the Gulf crisis, during which the Iraqi leader and the
American President communicated with each other via separate interviews
 The Globalization of Electronic Journalism 217
with television reporters. In the course of such interviews the interviewers
sometimes slid, almost imperceptibly, into the roles of negotiators, explor-
ing, with their interviewee, various possibilities for resolving the crisis.
Such ‘extra-professional’ behaviour raises questions and some criticism of
the performance of television journalists. It has been argued, for example, that
the scramble to secure the first interview with Saddam Hussein, born of the
immense competitive pressures under which reporters and networks labour,
offered the interviewee an opportunity to address a global audience directly,
going ‘above the heads’ of other governments; that the reporters tended to
become advocates for their own side, their own governments and its policies,
and that consequently they usurped the role of the true professional advocates,
the government’s own representatives.
The role journalists sometimes play as go-betweens in international crises
raises other questions concerning the very nature of the journalism they
profess to practise. Their active involvement in the events they presumably
‘cover’ is often achieved at the cost of sacrificing some traditional journalistic
norms, such as editorial control over which actors (and perspectives) to
incorporate into the story and which to ignore. Reporters broadcasting from
Iraq during the Gulf War were, of course, aware that they were being ‘used’
by their Iraqi hosts to present a view of the hostilities as seen through Iraqi
eyes, yet were criticized by television viewers in the west for spreading Iraqi
“propaganda’. Likewise, in the wake of the American bombing of Tripoli in
1986, the Libyans assisted western television crews in filming civilian
casualties, and naturally restricted access to military areas (Wallis and
Baran, 1990). By facilitating the work of these journalists, both the Iraqis
and the Libyans, ironically, ‘assisted’ the western news organizations to
uphold the traditional journalistic norm of ‘balance’ — of showing ‘the other
side’. The motives impelling the journalists, however, stem, more likely, from
competitive pressures than from adherence to the norm of ‘balance’.
In addition to the hazards of control and manipulation that the media
undergo in their new role as international political brokers, it is not entirely
clear that the consequences of their interventions are always beneficial. For
example, questions could be raised whether the failure of the diplomatic
negotiations that preceded the Gulf War could be attributed, at least in part,
to the fact that their intense coverage on global television made them part of a
public, rather than diplomatic/secret discourse, which in turn meant that they
were framed in political and ideological terms that left little room for deal-
making.
Fourth, global television assumes a significant role in the construction of
world public opinion. As Blumler (1989) puts it:

The news media are not only a selectively-focusing and agenda setting force in
international affairs. They are also a world-opinion defining agency. For at
present, they virtually have a monopoly over the construction of world opinion,
its agenda of prime concerns, and its main targets of praise and blame. At present,
at least, what they tell us about what world opinion apparently holds on a certain
matter can rarely be double-checked by international opinion poll results.

It should, of course, be noted that the role played by the media in the
construction of world opinion is an extension, onto a global scale, of the
218 Michael Gurevitch

similar role they play in their own societies. However, whereas public opinion
in a given society is typically tapped through surveys and polls (thus being a
construct of the pollsters’ work) global public opinion is, of course, wholly a
media construction. In the absence of global polls or other similar ‘hard’
evidence, global public opinion is inevitably merely what the media say it is.

Inside the Television Industries

Media systems around the world vary in many ways. The relationship between
the press and broadcasting systems and the political system is governed, in
every country, by the nature of its political system and the norms that
characterize its political culture. The socio-political and the economic struc-
tures of different societies also determine the internal structure of their media
systems, their modes of finance, and consequently the intra-system relation-
ships between different media organizations. Thus, for example, truly reflect-
ing its economic base, the American broadcasting system has always been
regarded as a ‘classic’ example of a privately owned, commercially driven
system, claiming autonomy from government or other political controls.
Many European countries, on the other hand, had a ‘mixed’ media system,
combining state-controlled or public-service media organizations side by side
with privately owned commercial organizations. For many years these struc-
tures were fairly stable, exhibiting little propensity for change. The advent of
the new communication technologies appears to have changed all that. Our
concern here is limited to examining the impact of the introduction of satellite
technology on the relationship between different television organizations.
The US experience is instructive in this regard. This is so partly because
the American broadcasting system is the largest in the world, certainly in
terms of the number of different television outlets, but especially because its
specific structure, consisting of four national networks, with their affiliate
local stations, a sizeable number of independent local stations, and a fully
fledged cable television system. This structure constitutes a system of power
dependencies, which turned out to be vulnerable to the potential impact of
technological change.
For many years, television news, in the American context, by and large
meant network news. The global news gathering machineries constructed by
the networks’ news organizations required resources above and beyond those
available to any single station. As a result, local stations were always
dependent on the networks’ resources for any news materials which origi-
nated beyond their immediate home areas. News programmes produced by
local stations refiected this dependency in the ways in which networks’
originated materials were used in those (fairly infrequent) instances when
foreign or other remote news stories were inserted into ‘local’ news shows.
_ Satellite technology has altered these dependencies. It enabled local sta-
tions to receive remote stories directly, often using their own sources. The
resources required to send a reporter equipped with a satellite dish to a remote
location where a major news story is unfolding have become bearable by
single stations, especially when the prestige value of having one’s own
correspondent on the scene is considered. Thus, by extending the news reach
 The Globalization of Electronic Journalism 219
of local stations the same technology that contributed to the globalization of
television news has, perhaps paradoxically, promoted developments in the
opposite direction, namely increased decentralization of newsgathering.
The new status and prestige gained by local television news has also
resulted in increased economic returns for local stations through steadily
increased ratings. According to a 1985 study by Baran (quoted in Wallis
and Baran, 1990), local television news in some stations accounts for 40—
60 per cent of the stations’ profits. These profits, in turn, allow the local
stations to buy further national and foreign news footage. The position, and
the market share, of large scale, centralized news organizations has thus been
severely affected. For example, in 1994 the overall audience for network
television news fell to an all-time low of slightly over 30 per cent of the
total television audience. The proliferation of news outlets results not only in
a fragmentation, and diminution, of the audience, but also in an increasing
fragmentation of television news production.
While these developments are clearly evident in the commercialized and
virtually deregulated American broadcasting arena, parallels can be found in
Europe. ‘Even in the European context of highly regulated broadcast media,
many local lobbying groups are agitating for extended regional and local
broadcast media’ (Wallis and Baran, 1990). If extrapolated to the global
scene, it could make smaller, less affluent television news organizations
less dependent on the ‘big boys’ in the news business, and more capable of
deploying the technology to serve their own needs. The technology might thus
be a double-edged instrument.

Audience/Reception Research in a Global Context

Issues of media consumption or reception are dealt with only tangentially in

the globalization literature. Both the ‘developmental’ and the ‘dependency’
theorists assumed (in different ways) a dominance of western cultural pro-
ducts, but demonstrated little by way of actual, empirical evidence for this
argument at the audience level. The difficulties are obvious. Besides the
logistics involved in large-scale comparative audience studies, the methodo-
logical difficulties of tracking what happens at the decoding end of the process
across a large number of countries loom very large. Nevertheless, some of the
theoretical issues involved in the study of media reception in a global setting
can be identified.
First, the notion of cultural variance constitutes one important link between
the process of reception and issues of globalization. The idea is to look for
different readings of the same or different stories across cultures, attempting
to identify a range or matrix of global and local meanings. Much of the news
materials disseminated globally, but especially the ‘raw materials’ dissemi-
nated through the regional news exchange systems and the television news
agencies can be regarded as ‘open’ texts. ‘Openness’ implies the extent to
which different texts constrain the meanings embedded in them or, alterna-
tively, allow for multiple decodings of their meanings. In that sense verbal
texts (e.g. news stories in the printed press) are relatively ‘closed’, that is, they
220 Michael Gurevitch

constrain the range of interpretations or meanings of the events they report,

since any account of an event necessarily defines its meaning. On the other
hand, ‘pure’ visuals (i.e. visuals unaccompanied by a verbal caption or. text)
are relatively ‘open’, as they are susceptible to a wider range of interpretations
or ‘stories’.
The visual materials that are the stock in trade of the news exchange
organizations and the news agencies are, indeed, sent primarily in the form
of ‘raw materials’, that is unedited footage, including only ‘natural sound’.
The task of editing and shaping these materials into news stories remains in
the hands of news editors in the different broadcasting organizations. Thus,
while the same visual materials might be used in different countries, the final
shape of the stories they are telling, their narrative and thematic structures,
and the meanings embedded in them remain in the hands of editors working
with different national audiences in mind. In fact, such is the degree of
‘openness’ of the visuals that come down from the satellites that they could
be regarded almost as ‘an empty vessel’ (Barkin and Gurevitch, 1987).
This implies a shift away from questions of ‘flow’ or ‘content’ to concerns
with ‘meaning’, the sense in which a text is framed and addresses its
constituency — the local culture.
News stories should be examined as related, in the same way as documented
historical facts and incidents, to one or another myth or super-story or cultural
theme, as these appear in different cultures. The meaning of a concrete news story
is always produced in the public space of culture, and in the framework of a
relevant family of stories, already familiar to the members of a society.
(Gurevitch et al., 1991)

The resulting diversity of meanings offers a unique opportunity to examine

the ways in which television news construct different social realities. By
comparing the similarities or differences in the meanings encoded into a
variety of stories of the ‘same’ event, some insight may be gained of the
degree of control that encoders have over the construction of meanings. Such
comparative analysis may also offer an important antidote to ‘naive univers-
alism’ — that is, to the assumption that events reported in the news carry their
own meanings, and that the meanings embedded in news stories produced in
one country can therefore be generalized to news stories told in other societies
(Gurevitch and Blumler, 1990). A comparative study could then reveal the
degrees of ‘domestication’ and/or ‘universalization’ embedded in the texts, as
well as such patterns in decodings by audiences in different countries,
depending on their specific social and cultural conventions.
A second issue involved in the conduct of comparative audience research
is that of identifying the units of reception for global television news. At
one level, the question, and the answer, seem fairly straightforward: the unit
of reception is the audience that is exposed to, and receives, any specific news
broadcast. Since most countries, societies or nation-states receive ‘national’
news broadcasts the audience for these becomes co-terminous with society
or the nation-state. Society, or the nation becomes the ‘interpretative
community’.
Clearly, however, this formulation is problematic. Cultures and nations are
not monolithic. They are fractured and are constituted by multiple cultural
 The Globalization of Electronic Journalism 221
groupings. If ‘national’ cultures are internally differentiated, does it make
sense, then, to continue classifying audiences in such broad categories as
‘German’, ‘French’ or ‘American’? The question is further complicated when
we consider that nations and nationality are constructs (Anderson, 1991).
Nationalist consciousness, the bedrock of the nation-state, argues Anderson,
1s a construct whose reality is contingent on the strength of belief in that
construct.
A third issue has to do with questions of the ‘balance of power’ between
those responsible for the production and shaping of media texts — the encoders
— on the one hand, and members of the media audiences — the decoders — on
the other. In presenting a view of the audience as active and autonomous,
reception theory has brought about a shift in conceptions of the power of the
audience.
How real is the ‘autonomy of the audience’ — its capacity to act as active
producers of meanings — in regard to globally disseminated news materials?
Since viewers of television news typically have no access to the more ‘open’
texts of raw visuals and are only exposed to already fully edited stories, their
position as news consumers may not have changed from the one in which they
were placed in the era of ‘conventional’ television news. It would therefore be
plausible to assume that they may not have gained any greater autonomy vis a
vis the story-tellers. In fact, it might be possible to argue that, faced with a
larger amount of news stories from faraway places (for that is one of the
changes that the global flow of news facilitates), their dependence on the
encoders to make sense of these events actually increases. Presented with
stories of events for which they have no ready-made ‘schemas’ (Graber,
1984), or frameworks for interpretation, viewers are less able to negotiate
and construct the meanings of these events for themselves, and are inevitably
more dependent on the perspectives embedded in the stories. Arguments
about the ‘empowerment of the audience’ in the era of global television
should therefore be taken with a grain of salt, at least until further evidence
on this question becomes available.
We should note, at the same time, that this conclusion is based on a simple
extrapolation of current theories of media-audience relationships, rather than
on any evidence. However, if it were to be confirmed it might result in another
swing of the theoretical pendulum, a retreat from the recent formulations of
‘reception theory’, back to the theories of powerful media and powerless
audiences.

Concluding Remarks

The process of globalization of electronic journalism is growing apace,

transforming the flow of communication around the world and impacting in
myriad ways on the ways people and societies know, perceive and understand
each other and conduct relationships with each other. Perhaps paradoxically,
however, the defining contours of the process are not easy to discern. The
difficulties we confront in trying to grasp the nature and consequences of this
process lie partly in the rapid development of the technology that facilitates it,
222 Michael Gurevitch

the rapid emergence and change in the institutional structures that carry the
globalization process forward, and the diverse ways in which the implications
and the consequences of these developments manifest themselves. But the
more significant obstacle, as suggested earlier, lies in the uncertainty about
the most appropriate and theoretically productive way to conceptualize the
process. In the absence of a comprehensive theoretical framework these
diverse phenomena will remain unrelated, disconnected and more difficult
to make sense of.
In this chapter we attempted to offer one starting point for the construction
of such conceptual framework. Such a starting point, we suggested, could be
found in the shifting balance of relationships of dependency between different
participants in the networks of global communication. Each ‘communication
revolution’, from the Guttenbergian to the electronic to the emergence of
global, satellite-based communication, brought in its wake a transformation in
the power relationships in society: the printing press contributed to under-
mining the power of the Papacy; the press facilitated the consolidation of the
dominance of the middle classes in industrial societies; the electronic media,
among other things, helped to legitimate counter-cultures and other stirrings
against the existing social order. The globalization of television news may or
may not be a ‘revolution’ on a par with these other historical revolutions.
Nevertheless, the path to understanding it is similar.

Notes

1 Portions of this chapter are based on work conducted with my former doctoral
student, Anandam Philip Kavoori. His contribution is herewith gratefully acknowl-
edged.
2 For acomprehensive study of the European News Exchange System, see Cohen
et al., 1995.
3 A similar case in point is the Internet, the network of inter-computer commu-
nication that is now expanding at an explosive rate. In the absence of a coherent
conceptual framework, questions about its ‘democratizing’ implications, its ‘empow-
erment’ of its users, or its contributions to the formation of ‘electronic communities’
continue to baffle many observers of this new phenomenon.

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 11
In Defence of Objectivity
Revisited
Judith Lichtenberg

Introduction

In these postmodern times, the ideal of objectivity may seem a bit tattered
around the edges, but American journalists still embrace it as one of the
fundamental norms of their profession. The distinction between news, where
objectivity is thought possible and desirable, and opinion, where objectivity is
thought impossible, is deeply entrenched in the journalistic culture. Inextric-
ably intertwined with truth, fairness, balance, neutrality, the absence of value
judgements — in short, with the most fundamental journalistic values —
objectivity is a cornerstone of the professional ideology of journalists in
liberal democracies.
Yet the objectivity of journalism has come increasingly under fire in recent
years. The criticisms come from a variety of quarters and take several forms.
Some say that journalism is not objective; others that it cannot be objective;
and still others that it should not be objective. Odd as it may seem, sometimes
the same critic seems to be making all of these charges at the same time.
One challenge comes from critics — from across the political spectrum —
who claim that the media have misrepresented their views or have not
reported their activities impartially. Some say that the media have a ‘liberal
bias’, that they overemphasize unrest and dissent, or look too hard for muck to
rake. Other critics contend that, on the contrary, the press serves the con-
servative interests of government and big business. Aggrieved individuals and
groups of all kinds charge that news coverage of this or that issue is unfair,
biased, or sensational.
Those who attack journalism on these grounds seem to share one crucial
assumption with those they criticize. Charges of bias or unfairness suggest
that objectivity is at least possible. How can one complain of bias, after all,
unless unbias can be imagined? But many contemporary critics, not only of
journalism but of every other form of inquiry, reject this assumption.
Journalism is not objective, they say, nor could it be. As one recent textbook
puts it, objectivity ‘is a false and impossible ideal’, and although all media
226 Judith Lichtenberg

writers claim it in some way, ‘they are all wrong’ (Kessler and McDonald,
1989: 24, 28). ;
This view has its roots in the sociology of knowledge and today finds its
fullest expression in postmodernism; it is shared by many sociologists,
humanists, legal scholars and other social critics. They believe that the idea
of objectivity rests on an outmoded and untenable theory of knowledge,
according to which objective knowledge consists in correspondence between
some idea or statement and a reality ‘out there’ in the world. ‘Objectivity’, in
the words of a former journalism school dean, ‘is an essential correspondence
between knowledge of a thing and the thing itself’ (McDonald, 1975: 69).
According to the critics, however, reality is not ‘out there’; it is “a vast
production, a staged creation — something humanly produced and humanly
maintained’ (Carey, 1989: 26). Reality, on this view, is ‘socially constructed’,
and so there are as many realities as there are social perspectives on the world.
There is no ‘true reality’ to which objective knowledge can be faithful.
One might have expected at least that those reaching such conclusions
would do so with a certain regret or disappointment. ‘Wouldn’t it be good
if true knowledge were possible, and isn’t it sad that it isn’t?” Yet the same
people who believe objectivity is impossible often hold also that it is an
undesirable and even a dangerous ideal. Objectivity is a strategy of hege-
mony used by some members of society to dominate others (MacKinnon,
1982: 537); a ‘strategic ritual’ enabling professionals to “defend themselves
from critical onslaught’ (Tuchman, 1972); even ‘the most insidious bias of all’
(Schudson, 1978: 160).’ At best, objectivity ‘is a cultural form with its own
set of conventions’ (Schiller, 1981: 5).

The Compound Assault on Objectivity

On the face of it, there is a certain oddness in this compound assault on

objectivity — that journalism is not objective, that it could not be, that it should
not be — for the charges are essentially incompatible. Thus, although often a
single critic makes more than one of these accusations, no two of them taken
together makes sense. Why not? '
1 The sincere complaint that a piece of journalism is not objective makes
sense only against the background assumption that objectivity is possible
(why bother complaining about the inevitable?).
2 The insistence that journalism cannot be objective makes superfluous the
ge objectivity is undesirable (why bother denouncing the impos-
sible?).
3 The assertion that objectivity is not desirable makes senseless the com-
plaint that journalism is not objective (what is the complaint?).
These apparent confusions do not result from simple muddleheadedness.
Ultimately we will find that the different charges levelled against objectivity
are really charges levelled against different understandings of objectivity.
Let us begin by trying to reconstruct roughly the chain of reasoning to the
 In Defence of Objectivity Revisited 227
all-encompassing conclusion that objectivity in journalism does not, could
not, and should not exist:
-@ Experience continually confronts us with examples of clashes of belief
(between individuals, between cultures) that we cannot resolve — we do
not know how to decide which belief is true.
e No one can totally escape his or her biases; no one can be completely
objective.
e Therefore, the idea that there could be an objective, true account of things
is a fiction.
e Anyone who sincerely thinks there could be such an account is deluded by
a faulty understanding of the relation between mind and the world.
e This faulty understanding has significant practical consequences; belief in
objectivity and adherence to practices thought to be implied by it rein-
forces existing power relations and cultural and political chauvinism.
e Therefore, the aspiration to objectivity, whether innocent or not, serves as
a prop in an ideological agenda.
e So, in other words, real objectivity is impossible and its attempted
manifestations are either naive or insidious or both.
Who is this enemy that makes such strange bedfellows, uniting critics from
left and right and bringing together the most abstruse of academics with
worldly politicians, advocates, and journalists? The alleged enemy is no
single entity. In elevating objectivity to an ideal one may be endorsing any
of several different ends, or the supposed means of attaining them. It is for this
reason that the attack on objectivity can represent a variety of different
complaints. Since the values captured by the term ‘objectivity’ vary greatly
— in the extent to which they are possible, probable, actual, or desirable — the
legitimacy of the complaints varies as well.
In what follows I have two aims. One is to show that in its core meaning we
cannot coherently abandon the ideal of objectivity, and that, whatever they
may think, objectivity’s critics do not abandon it either. The other is to
acknowledge, and to explore, the critics’ genuine insights. I shall argue,
then, that those detractors of objectivity who enlighten us about the defects
and pitfalls of journalism (or other forms of inquiry) themselves covertly rely
on the idea of objectivity. Their real target is something else. It may be a value
such as neutrality — something commonly associated with objectivity but
distinct from it; or it may be a practice or method commonly thought to
attain objectivity. There may be good reasons for repudiating these values or
practices or methods, but they do not, I shall argue, mean that we should
repudiate objectivity in its core sense.

Metaphysical Questions

Our most fundamental interest in objectivity is an interest in truth. We want to

know how things stand in the world, or what happens, and why. In this sense,
to claim that a particular piece of journalism is not objective is to claim that it
fails to provide the truth or the whole truth. In addition, to deny that
228 Judith Lichtenberg

objectivity is possible is at least to deny that there is any way of getting at the
truth, on the grounds that all accounts of things are accounts from a particular
social, psychological, cultural or historical perspective and that we have no
neutral standpoint from which to adjudicate between conflicting accounts. To
deny that objectivity is possible is often also to insist, not only that we can
never get at the truth, but also that for precisely this reason it makes no sense
to think there is any such thing. Even to speak of ‘truth’ or ‘the facts’, these
critics strongly suggest, demonstrates a certain naiveté.
To doubt that objectivity is possible, then, is to doubt that we can know how
things really are or what really happens, where ‘really’ means something like
‘independently of our own perspective’. But there is a crucial ambiguity in
the phrase ‘our own perspective’. One way to doubt the objectivity of a story
or an account of things is to challenge the particular perspective from which it
is told. So, for example, one might doubt that American news accounts of the
Gulf War told an objective story. When our worries take this form, we may be
doubting that a particular account or set of accounts is objective — i.e. true or
complete — but we need not be denying that it is possible to tell an objective,
or at least a more objective, story. Indeed, we typically have specific ideas
about how to go about getting one. We seek out foreign press reports of these
events, compare them to each other and to American news reports, and
evaluate inconsistencies within and between stories in light of a variety of
standards. We inquire into a news organization’s sources of information,
likely obstacles to the reliability of its judgements, whether it has interested
motives that might give it reason to distort the story. So, for example, in
attempting to understand what happened in the Gulf War, the cautious
inquirer will question the American media’s reliance on US military reports
and press conferences as a source of credible information, and will attempt to
find other sources of information with which to compare and assess US
reports. These sources will be subjected to the same kind of scrutiny.
We have, in short, a multitude of standards and practices for evaluating the
reliability of information. This is not to say that we can often determine the
whole truth and nothing but the truth, particularly in the quick-and-messy
world that journalists cover. It is rare, however, that we have no guidance at
all. We know how to distinguish between better and worse, more or less
accurate accounts.
Often, however, the challenge to objectivity connects to deeper philosophical
worries, to the centuries-old debate between realists and idealists. The
metaphysical realist says that there is a world or a way things are ‘out
there’, 1.€. existing independently of our perspective. Traditionally, ‘our’
perspective meant not yours or mine or our culture’s, but the human perspec-
tive, or even the perspective of any possible consciousness. The ideal of
knowledge presupposed by this view holds that objects or states of affairs
in the world are ‘intrinsically’ or ‘independently’ a certain way, and that
knowledge consists in somehow ‘mirroring’ the way they are.
The metaphysical idealist denies that we can know what the world is like
intrinsically, apart from a perspective. The world is our construction in the
sense that we inevitably encounter it through our concepts and our categories;
we cannot see the world concept- or category-free. Kant, the father of the
contemporary idealist critique, described universal categories shaping our
 In Defence of Objectivity Revisited 229
perception of the world that are necessary for human beings to experience the
world at all. The sense for Kant in which we cannot get outside our
perspective is unthreatening, because by ‘our’ perspective Kant meant not
that of our clan or culture but that of all human consciousness. So understood,
idealism poses no threat to objectivity. The idealist can make all the distinc-
tions the realist can make: between the real and the illusory, what is ‘out
there’ and what is ‘in here’, the objective and the subjective. Lions are real
and unicorns mythical; trees and sky are ‘out there’ and stomach-aches and
beliefs are ‘in here’. Idealism leaves everything as it is (Luban, 1986: 708-11).
But Kant opened the door to a more threatening relativism. For having
admitted that our knowledge of the world is relative to a framework, it was a
natural step to the view that the categories moulding our experience depend
partly on concrete and particular conditions that vary from culture to culture,
community to community, even person to person. When twentieth-century
thinkers took this step, arguing not simply that reality is constructed but that it
is socially constructed — constructed differently, therefore, by different groups
and cultures — they repudiated Kant’s consolation that we could accept
idealism while preserving objective, because universal, knowledge.

Global Doubts and Local Doubts

When critics tell us that reality is socially constructed by way of explaining

that our news accounts of events are not objective, what are they saying? That
our culture, our political and other interests do much to structure and
determine the way we (whoever ‘we’ may be) look at the world, and that
our news reports reflect, reinforce, and even create these biases? Of course
this is true. Yet some of the sharpest critics of the press make this latter
argument without calling into question the possibility of objectivity; indeed
they rely on it, as I would argue they must (Chomsky, 1969). But the assertion
that reality is socially constructed means something more than this. There is a
finality and inevitability about it: we believe what we believe because of our
gender or class or cultural attachments; others with other attachments believe
differently, and there is no adjudicating between our beliefs and theirs, for
there is no neutral standpoint.
Yet surely the critics do not mean that we can never get outside our
perspective in this sense, outside the particular world-view in which we
have been raised, that we can never look at it, criticize it, judge it. They
have, after all. How do they know that American news accounts of the Gulf
War are partial, except by comparison with some other actual or possible
accounts? The judgement of partiality rests partly on other sources of
information, which taken separately or taken together have, they believe,
proved more consistent or coherent. cab, + 2
The pcint is that it makes no sense to criticize a statement or description as
biased or unobjective except against the background of some actual or
possible contrast, some more accurate statement or better description. We
have a variety of means to settle differences between conflicting beliefs or to
establish one view as superior to another. We get more evidence, seek out
230 Judith Lichtenberg

other sides of the story, check our instruments, duplicate our experiments, re-
examine our chain of reasoning. These methods do not settle all questions, but
they settle many. In showing us how, say, British news stories construct
reality, critics of necessity depend on the possibility of seeing and under-
standing alternative versions of the same events. And if no means existed to
compare these alternative ‘realities’, the charges would have no bite. For the
critics’ point is not that these alternative ‘realities’ are like so many flavours
of ice cream about which de gustibus non disputandum est but that those who
see things in one way are missing something important, or getting only a
partial view, or even getting things wrong.
Typically, the social constructionist critique vacillates between two incom-
patible claims: the general, ‘global’ assertion that objectivity is impossible
because different people and cultures employ different categories and there is
no way of deciding which framework better fits the world; and the charge that
particular news stories or mass media organizations serve ideological inter-
ests or represent the world in a partial or distorted or otherwise inadequate
way. It is crucial to see that these charges are incompatible. In so far as
objectivity is impossible there can be no sense in the claim — certainly none in
the rebuke — that the media are ideological or partial, for these concepts imply
the possibility of a contrast. Conversely, in so far as we agree that the media
serve an ideological function or bias our vision, we implicitly accept the view
that other, better, more objective ways are possible.

Transcultural Communication

Lurking in the assault on objectivity is the assumption that different cultures

possess radically different worldviews, worldviews so different they are
impermeable to outside influence. On this view, different cultures cannot
engage in genuine conversation with each other, because they speak different
conceptual and evaluative languages and employ different standards of
judging. And there are no available yardsticks external to the culture by
which to judge these internal standards of judgement. —
This claim is overstated, however. Two points are important. First, despite
all the talk about differences in worldview, we share a great deal even with
those from very different cultures. Second, even where we see things differ-
ently from those of other cultures we can see that we see things differently
and we can see how we see things differently. So our worldviews are not
hermetic: others can get in and we can get out. As we shall see, the two points
are not wholly separable: the distinction between sharing a perspective and
being able to understand another’s perspective is not sharp.
It is easy to fall under the sway of the doctrine of cultural relativism. At a
certain point in our intellectual development — often in late adolescence — we
are struck with the realization that language plays a crucial role in shaping the
experience and worldview of individuals and even whole cultures. But the
truth in this insight has been misunderstood and exaggerated. For one thing,
what impresses us depends partly on the premise that different ‘worldviews’
take the same underlying stuff, the same data of experience, and shape it
 In Defence of Objectivity Revisited 231
differently. The ‘aha experience’ of relativism depends, then, on the com-
monsense recognition of one world out there — something that, paradoxically,
the relativist is often at pains to deny.
Furthermore, the differences between worldviews can be exaggerated. Even
those from very different cultures can agree, despite their deeply different
conceptions of time, to meet at ten and to come together at what all recognize
as the negotiating table. Intractable disputes between cultures arise sometimes
because their values diverge; equally often, however, such disputes arise
precisely because their values coincide. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians
invest Jerusalem with sacred and irreplaceable value. In what sense do their
worldviews clash? As Francis I is supposed to have said about Henry VIII:
‘Henry and I agree about everything: we both want Calais.’
Even where our points of view clearly differ, what should we make of this
fact? As Donald Davidson puts it (1984: 184).
Whorf, wanting to demonstrate that Hopi incorporates a metaphysics so alien to
ours that Hopi and English cannot, as he puts it, ‘be calibrated’, uses English to
convey the contents of sample Hopi sentences. Kuhn is brilliant at saying what
things were like before the revolution using — what else? — our postrevolutionary
idiom.
Our worldviews, then, are not unalterable and hermetic. We can and do
come to see things as others see them — not just others from our culture but
from radically different ones. Thucydides brings the agony of the Athenians’
war to life; Ruth Benedict gets us to see ‘the uses of cannibalism’; Faulkner
shows us how things look to an adult with the mind of a child. The possibility
of communication between cultures is perhaps inseparable from the first
point: from the outset different cultures possess points of commonality and
contact, and these enable us to travel back and forth. Could there be a point to
history, anthropology, literature, journalism, biography, if this were not so?
Of course, some people and some cultures are easier to understand than
others. Sometimes, at the limit, we remain after all in the dark. Generally,
however, we can succeed more or less in overcoming the barriers. We can see
the world as others see it.

Deconstructing ‘The Social Construction of Reality’

If other ‘realities’ are not hermetic and impermeable, that takes much of the
wind out of the assertion that reality is socially constructed. For the usual
connotations of the word ‘reality’ are exhaustive and exclusive: reality is all,
and all there is. If instead there are many possible realities, and ways to get
from one to the other, then we can see into each other’s worlds, and our
realities can thereby be altered. a
Perhaps the claim is that even when we seem to escape the determination of
our vision by a particular social construction, even when we seem to sce
things in a new light, that new vision is also socially constructed. Suppose, for
example, that, partly as a result of changes in American news accounts, over
the last twenty years or so Americans have come to understand the Palestinian
point of view in the Middle East conflict better than they had before.” It might
232 Judith Lichtenberg

be argued that these changes result from differences in the American political
establishment’s view of its own geopolitical interests. On this view, the
changes are themselves socially constructed out of the web of American
ideology. i
No doubt changing American interests partly explain the changes in
perception; but to insist that apparently divergent views always and only
derive from the push of the dominant culture’s interests, from the powers
that be, amounts to an unfalsifiable conspiracy theory. The claim that reality is
socially constructed is then in danger of becoming empty. If, on the other
hand, it is acknowledged that other sources, apart from the powers that be, can
be responsible for changes in our views, then the question is what work the
concept of social construction is doing. Is the point simply that ways of
looking at the world do not come into being ex nihilo, but are rather the
product of ... of something — the total social-political-economic-cultural-
psychological-biological environment? And is this anything more than the
claim that everything has a cause? Beyond these extremely general assertions
the view that reality is socially constructed seems to add nothing. For if every
view is socially constructed but no view could not be socially constructed we
learn nothing of substance when we know that reality is socially constructed.
This is not to deny that the media sometimes or even often present events in
a distorted, biased or ideological way. It is rather to insist that we can only
explain this fact on the assumption that there are better and worse, more and
less faithful renderings of events, and that, despite our own biases, preconcep-
tions, ‘conceptual schemes’, we can escape our own point of view sufficiently
to recognize the extent to which it imposes a structure or slant on events that
could be seen differently.
The word ‘reality’ is to blame for some of the confusion. By her own
account, one crucial theme of Gaye Tuchman’s book Making News is that ‘the
act of making news is the act of constructing reality itself rather than a picture
of reality’ (Tuchman, 1972: 12). Tuchman’s point trades on ambiguities in the
term ‘reality’.
News can illuminatingly be said to construct reality rather than a picture of
it in two senses. First, some events are genuine media creations. When
Newsweek in the 1980s proclaimed on its cover that ‘Nixon Is Back’, then
in a crucial sense Nixon was back. To have arrived on Newsweek’s cover is to
be back from whatever realm of uonbeing one formerly inhabited. We have
here a variation on the Pirandellesque insight that ‘It’s the truth if you think it
is’: ‘It’s the truth if they (the major media) say it is’. But this rule applies to
only a very limited fraction of our beliefs, a tiny portion of the total news
product.
Second, the act of reporting news is an act of constructing reality in the
sense captured by the sociological commonplace that ‘if a situation is defined
as real it’s real in its consequences’. If people believe that news stories of an
event are accurate, they will behave accordingly, and for certain purposes
those stories function as ‘reality’. This is sometimes simply a matter of the
bandwagon effect: when a news story describes college-bound students’
scramble for admission to elite institutions, more students may panic and
start scrambling.
Nevertheless, journalists purport to represent an independent reality, and,
 In Defence of Objectivity Revisited 233
although they often fall Short, if we abandon the concept of a reality
independent of news stories we undermine the very basis on which to
criticize their work.

The Existence and Meaning of Facts

Most people have a crude picture of what objectivity means, and this partly
explains its bad name. Belief in objectivity does not mean that every question
that can be posed, or about which people might disagree, has a single
determinate right answer. If it did we would be wise to reject it.
What, then, does belief in objectivity commit us to? At the very least it
means that some questions have determinate, right answers — and that all
questions have wrong answers. So, for example, it is a fact that Bill Clinton is
currently the President of the USA, and that in 1995 the New York State
legislature reinstated the death penalty.
Do objectivity’s critics deny that Bill Clinton is President or that the death
penalty was reinstated in New York? Let us hope not. How, then, do they
reconcile these unassailable facts with their repudiation of objectivity? We
find several strategies.
1 One is to insist that nevertheless such facts are socially constructed. What
does this mean? No reasonable person would deny that for there to be such
a thing as a President of such a thing as the USA, a wide variety of
complex social institutions must be in place. If that is all it means to say
this fact is socially constructed, nothing significant turns on admitting it.
Typically, however, the point of emphasizing the constructedness of a fact
is to undermine its truth or credibility. Yet however constructed ‘Bill
Clinton is President’ may be, it is no less true or credible for that.
‘A variation on the theme that all facts are socially constructed is the
claim that they are all ‘theory-laden’. Certainly every factual statement
can be understood to imply decisions about the usefulness or appropriate-
ness of categorizing things in one way rather than another. If we want to
dignify even the most commonsensical of such categorizations with the
label ‘theory’, who is to stop us? But then we must keep in mind that there are
theories and theories. ‘The human fetus is a person’ and ‘The PLO is a
terrorist organization’ are laden with controversial theories. “The earth
revolves around the sun’ and ‘The lion is a mammal’ are laden with
theories not seriously contestable in modern times. Facts, then, may be
theory-laden; but whether they therefore lack objectivity depends on the
particular theories they carry as freight. ‘Bill Clinton is President’ may in
some sense rest on a theory or conceptual framework, but it is one so
widely shared and innocuous that the label ‘theory-laden’, usually brought
as an accusation, loses its bite. Without an account of the faulty theory
embedded therein, we can rest content: when our theories are good,
theory-ladenness is nothing to fear. :
It may be said that the facts just mentioned are not interesting facts, and
that this weakens the point they are used to illustrate. In what sense
are they not interesting? Surely New York’s reinstatement of the death
234 Judith Lichtenberg

penalty is in many respects interesting. In claiming these facts are not

interesting the critic must mean that it is uncontroversial that these are
facts. With that we would agree; but to have gained the critic’s agreement
on this point is itself a victory. For the social constructionists sometimes
seem to include all facts, however humdrum, in the realm of the con-
structed (and to be deconstructed). To acknowledge that these ‘uninter-
esting’ facts are facts is to concede what seemed to be a point of
disagreement.
2 An alternative strategy for the relativist is to exempt such facts from the
realm of the socially constructed, but to insist that they are trivial and that
all non-trivial ‘facts’ of the kind prominent in news stories are socially
constructed in an interesting sense. Yet to admit this is more significant
than it looks. First, there will be Jots of these trivial facts, perhaps an
infinite number of them. Second, such facts will serve as a crucial check
constraining all the non-trivial, socially constructed ‘facts’ that are sup-
posed to comprise the bulk of the news. In this sense it is hard to see how
the apparently innocuous facts can be trivial, even if taken one by one they
seem to lack a certain cosmic weightiness. Finally, having admitted the
existence of some non-socially constructed facts, it will prove difficult to
draw the line between these and the socially constructed ones, especially
given the constraints the former place on the latter. So the camel of
objectivity gets its nose in the tent.
3 A third strategy is to admit the independence of some facts from socially
produced theories, but to insist that nevertheless these facts will be
interpreted differently by members of different groups or cultures, and
that these interpretations, themselves social constructions, will invest the
same facts with different meanings. This claim can be understood in at
least two ways.
(a) In one sense there is no disputing that these facts will be interpreted
differently by different people. We all agree that the New York State
legislature reinstated the death penalty, but we disagree about the reasons
for it and about the agents ultimately responsible, its consequences, its
symbolic significance.
Yet our disagreements about these matters of ‘interpretation’ will in
turn depend partly on other facts, such as people’s beliefs about crime and
about the efficacy of capital punishment. The constraint of facts will rule
out some interpretations as wrong, even if it typically leaves room for
reasonable disagreement about which interpretation is right. The web of
expectations on which everyday life depends rests on the possibility of
knowing all sorts of things ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. So the insistence
that an interpretation of the facts is beyond the reach of objective
‘evaluation is simply overstated. There may generally be room for dis-
agreement, but not all the room in the world. Some interpretations are
better than others, and some are simply wrong.
(b) A second sense in which it may be said that different people and
groups will invest the same facts with different meanings can be illu-
strated by a study of British, American and Belgian coverage of elections
in Ireland. The study found that the BBC story focused on the potential
consequences of the vote for British-Irish relations; the CBS story used the
 In Defence of Objectivity Revisited 235
election as a peg to talk about Irish unemployment and its potential
consequences for immigration to the USA; and the Belgian account
focused on the role of the Catholic Church in Irish politics, the relation
between church and state being an important issue in Belgium (Gurevitch
et al., 1991). It makes sense to say that each story took the same set of
facts but interpreted them differently; each invested the facts with differ-
ent meanings.
The point is important, and we should not underestimate the signifi-
cance of this ‘meaning construction’ function of the mass media; it bears
extensive examination. Those who stress this point, however, often seem
to misunderstand its relevance (or lack of it) to the question of objectivity.
The British, American and Belgian news reports invest the Irish election
with different meanings — they see it as signifying different things — but
they all refer to the same events and agree about certain crucial facts, such
as who won the elections. Indeed, the three stories may be perfectly
compatible with each other. It is no surprise to find that the same events
have different significance for people of varying histories, cultures or
interests. We might put this point by saying that the issues raised here
go beyond the question of objectivity, but they do not subvert objectivity. I
conclude that these challenges pose no threat to the existence of objective
facts.

Beyond Objectivity?

Belief in objectivity does not mean that about every question we might ask (or
everything that reporters report) there is a single right answer. The interesting
question is how extensive the realm of objective facts is. Imagine a continuum
of objectivity along which to locate the variety of subjects and statements
news reporters investigate. At one end we find the relatively straightforward
and uncontroversial facts of the kind we have just been discussing. In the
middle we find statements about which clearly there is a truth, a ‘right
answer’, but where to a greater or lesser extent the answer is difficult to
discover. How did the dinosaurs become extinct? Who were the high-ranking
Communists in MI5? Did O. J. Simpson murder Nicole Simpson and Ronald
Goldman? The answers to some of these questions may depend partly on
what we mean by certain terms (like ‘murder’), but even assuming consistent
usage we may reasonably disagree about the answers. Still, no one doubts that
there are definite answers.
The line is sometimes thin between cases where clearly there is a truth
about the matter although we have difficulty finding out what it is, and those
where it cannot be said that there is a truth about the matter. For many of the
complex goings-on between people, both at the ‘macro’ political level and at
the ‘micro’ interpersonal level, the language of truth and objectivity may be
thin and inadequate. When, for example, we have heard in detail “both sides of
the story’ from quarrelling lovers or friends, we may sort out some clear truths
about what happened, but in the end we may still be left with a residue of
indestructible ambiguity, where it is plausible to say not simply that we do not
236 Judith Lichtenberg

know for sure what happened but that at the appropriate level of description
there is no single determinate thing that happened.
Now it seems clear that examples of this kind of ambiguity and indetermi-
nacy abound for the most interesting and important subjects covered in the
news. Did Clarence Thomas sexually harass Anita Hill? Uncertainty may
depend partly on insufficient evidence and doubts about the credibility of
witnesses. Disagreement may, however, depend on other things as well: on
different understandings of how sexual harassment should be defined, and on
related questions about the meaning of certain gestures, expressions and
interactions. Depending on the framework in which we embed the bits of
evidence, the gestures and utterances, we will get different answers. And the
question ‘Which framework is the appropriate one?’ may not always have a
determinate answer.
On the other hand, sometimes it does. Once we know the context of a given
utterance or action, the ambiguous often becomes unambiguous. ‘Did he or
didn’t he?’ The answer is yes or the answer is no.
So the defender of objectivity can perfectly well agree with Stanley Fish —
perhaps to his dismay — that ‘no degree of explicitness will ever be sufficient
to disambiguate the sentence [for example, what he said to her] if by
disambiguate we understand render it impossible to conceive of a set of
circumstances in which its plain meaning would be other than it now appears
to be’ (Fish, 1980: 282-83). As long as we can know what context, frame-
work, or set of conventions actually governed the circumstances — which often
we can — we will be entitled to conclude that in these circumstances he meant
x or did y.
Questions about the application of concepts such as sexual harassment or
racism reside in the murky area where fact meets value, description meets
evaluation. Some who would describe themselves as objectivists would reject
the view that values are cbjective. To the extent, then, that sexual harassment
and racism are evaluative rather than descriptive concepts, these objectivists
would deny that there can be a truth about such matters as whether a remark is
racist or a person has sexually harassed another. Facts can be objective, they
would say, but value judgements cannot.
Yet our commonsense understanding of concepts like racism and sexual
harassment supports the view that they can be applied or misapplied: that it
can be true or false that a remark is racist or that someone sexually harassed
another. Facts and values are not so neatly separable. Their inseparability of
facts and values is commonly taken to support the anti-objectivist position:
facts are not that ‘hard’, because they are infused with values. But the shoe
can be placed on the other foot: values are not that ‘soft’, because they are
infused with facts.
I cannot take up the larger question lurking here of the objectivity of
value judgements. But two points are worth making. First, the realm in
which this question is relevant forms a limited part of the object of journal-
istic investigation. Journalists are typically concerned with issues at the
more factual end of the continuum. Second, the more important point
is
that the journalist (and indeed anyone who hopes to understand the world)
must arrive at the conclusion of indestructible ambiguity or indeterminacy -
 In Defence of Objectivity Revisited 237
very reluctantly, only after the arduous search for the truth has been found
not fully realizable.
We must, in other words, proceed on the assumption that there is objective
truth, even if sometimes in the end we conclude that within a particular realm
the concept of truth does not apply, or that in any case we will never discover
it. It is not irrelevant to note that the vehemence with which defenders of both
Thomas and Hill (a category that came to include a large number of Amer-
icans and other observers) made their respective cases reveal that they had no
doubt that there was a right answer to the harassment question. Perhaps they
were deluded. But it is significant that people behave and think as if there
were a truth about these matters.
They cannot, I would argue, do otherwise. The concepts of objectivity and
truth function for us as ‘regulative principles’: ideals that we must suppose to
apply, even if at the limit they do not, if we are to possess the will and the
ways to understand the world.* And we do possess, even if to an imperfect
degree, the will and the ways.

The Politics of Objectivity

I hope to have shown in the foregoing discussion not only why we must make
the assumption that objectivity is possible, but also why critics have thought
otherwise. Nevertheless, we still do not have a complete answer to the
question (although hints are strewn along the way) why many of these
critics not only deny that objectivity is possible but express hostility toward
the idea. Why are they angry rather than sorry?
The main reason is that they see the claim of objectivity as the expression of
an authoritarian, power-conserving point of view. Michael Schudson (1978:
160) describes this attitude, as it arose in the 1960s:

. ‘objective’ reporting reproduced a vision of social reality which refused to

examine the basic structures of power and privilege. It was not just incomplete, as
critics of the thirties had contended, it was distorted. It represented collusion with
institutions whose legitimacy was in dispute.”

Is this view right? I think in many ways it is. But there are a variety of
accusations implicit here that need to be sorted out.
First the assertion of objectivity seems to heighten the status of claims to
which it attaches. To insist not only that the enemy is winning the war, but
that this statement is objective seems to elevate it to a higher plane of truth or
credibility. The assertion of objectivity then appears to involve a certain
arrogance, a setting-up of oneself as an authority. Now in one sense this is
silly. Ordinarily when we say ‘The sky is blue’ we imply ‘It’s an objective
fact (for all to see) that the sky is blue’. My belief that what I say is true or
objective adds nothing to the belief itself. At the same time, to the extent
that we are convinced of our own objectivity or that of others, we are less
likely to be open to other points of view. Belief in one’s own objectivity is a
form of smugness, and may lead to a dangerous self-deception. Belief in the
238 Judith Lichtenberg

objectivity of others (such as the news media) enhances their credibility,

often unjustifiably. ae ees
So acceptance of the ideology of objectivity — the view that institutions like
the news media are generally objective and are sincerely committed to
objectivity — has significant political consequences, as the critics suggest.
Your belief that a newspaper always and only publishes true and objective
information will serve as an impediment to your political and intellectual
enlightenment, whether you are a consumer or a producer of news. However,
for the ideology of objectivity to have the political consequences the critics
suggest, we must add a further premise: not only that people believe the press
is objective, but also that the news provided favours the powers-that-be. (We
can imagine an alternative: an opposition press with a great deal of authority
and credibility.)
Is the press biased in favour of the powers-that-be? One reason to think so is
that mass media organizations are vast corporate entities; they are among the
powers-that-be, and so have interests in common with them. I am interested
here in a different question, however. Does the commitment to objectivity
itself create biases in favour of the conservation of political power? This is the
implicit claim of some of objectivity’s critics: that the methods associated
with the ideal of objectivity contain an inherent bias toward established
power.
One reason for thinking that objectivity is inherently conservative in this
way has to do with the reporter’s reliance on sources. Among the canons of
objective journalism is the idea that the reporter does not make claims based
on her own personal observation, but instead attributes them to sources.® Yet
sources must seem credible to perform the required role, and official, govern-
ment sources — as well as other important decision-makers in the society —
come with ready-made credentials for the job. In addition, they often have the
skills and the resources to use the news media to their advantage. Yet such
sources are not typically disinterested observers motivated only by a love of
truth.
Journalists therefore confront a dilemma. If they provide to such sources an
unfiltered mouthpiece, they serve the sources’ interests. In order not to
provide an unfiltered mouthpiece, journalists must make choices about which
of the sources’ statements are sufficiently controversial to call for ‘balancing’
with another point of view, and they must choose the balancing points of
view. If, in cases where the official view is doubtful, they merely balance the
official source’s view without even hinting at the probable truth, they mislead
the audience. Each of these policies raises troubling questions about objec-
tivity.
The first alternative, simply to provide an unfiltered mouthpiece, charac-
terizes the press’s response to Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. This example,
widely cited by objectivity’s critics, has helped tarnish its reputation.
Although we can see why journalists might have worried about challenging
McCarthy’s accusations, however, it is just as clear that leaving them
unanswered does not satisfy any intelligent conception of objectivity. We
care about objectivity because we care about truth; giving credibility to
baseless charges — whether by commission or omission — cannot count as
objective.
 In Defence of Objectivity Revisited 239
It follows that journalists must make judgements about the credibility of
sources and what they say. Objectivity does not mean passivity. But when
does a source’s statement invite challenge? The obvious answer is: when it
seems controversial. What seems controversial, however, depends on the
consensus existing in the culture at a given time. That consensus derives
partly from powerful ideological assumptions that, while unchallenged in
the culture, are by no means unchallengeable. So it is that I. F. Stone argues
that most of the time objectivity is just the rationale for regurgitating the
conventional wisdom of the day’ (quoted in Hertsgaard, 1989: 65-66). What
goes without saying may be dogma rather than truth.
_Supposing, however, that, the journalist does recognize that an official
view is sufficiently controversial to invite challenge, she must choose which
Opposing sources to cite and how to frame the debate between the opposing
points of view. Is the dispute taken to span a fairly narrow range of the
political spectrum? If so, the press may be criticized for perpetuating the
status quo by reproducing the conventional wisdom. Is the opposing point of
view chosen an ‘extreme’ one?® In that case the press may sensationalize the
matter at hand or marginalize the opposition by making them seem like
crazies. Either way, the journalist cannot avoid exercising judgement.
These dilemmas explain another of the standard criticisms of journalism’s
commitment to objectivity: not that it necessarily favours established power,
but that it leads to a destructive agnosticism and scepticism.’ Objectivity must
be ‘operationalized’, and this is done through the idea of balance. In exploring
controversial issues, the journalist does not himself commit to a view, but
instead gives voice to different sides of the story. The reader is left to judge
the truth. If the journalist truly balances the views, however, there may be no
rational way for the reader to decide between them. So she comes to the
conclusion that ‘there’s truth on both sides’ — or neither. Every view is as
good as every other. Rather than connecting with truth, objectivity, according
to this way of thinking, leads to cynicism and scepticism.
Yet both these criticisms — that objectivity favours established power, and
that it leads to scepticism and indecision — suffer from too mechanical a
conception of objectivity. It is easy to see how the problems they address
arise in the transition from objectivity-as-an-ideal to objectivity-as-a-~method.
In part, they stem from a confusion between objectivity and the appearance of
objectivity. Questioning the remarks of an important public figure may look
partisan, while leaving them unchallenged does not; but the appearance is
misleading and only skin-deep. Similarly, leaving two opposing points of
view to look equally plausible where one has the preponderance of reason
and evidence on its side is a charade of objectivity. It reflects the common
mistake of confusing objectivity and neutrality. The objective investigator
may start out neutral (more likely, she is simply good at keeping her prior
beliefs from distorting her inquiry), but she does not necessarily end up
neutral. She aims, after all, to find out what happened, why, who did it.
Between truth and falsehood the objective investigator is not neutral.
The confusion between objectivity and neutrality arises, I think, because of
the belief alluded to earlier that ‘values’ are not objective, true, part of the
‘fabric of the universe’. According to the positivist outlook of which this is
part, the objective investigator will therefore remain ‘value-neutral’ and his
240 Judith Lichtenberg

inquiry will be ‘value-free’. Yet the identification of neutrality and objectivity

within a given realm depends on the assumption that there is no truth within
that realm. Leaving aside the question of whether values are objective, if-facts
are objective the objective investigator will not be neutral with respect to
them.
As a journalistic virtue, then, objectivity requires that reporters not let
their preconceptions cloud their vision. It does not mean they see nothing, or
that their findings may not be significant and controversial. Nevertheless, it is
easy to see why many people confuse objectivity and neutrality. Often the
outsider cannot easily tell the difference between a reporter who has come to a
conclusion based on a reasoned evaluation of the evidence, and one who was
biased toward that conclusion from the start. The safest way to seem
objective, then, may be to look neutral.

The Inevitability of Objectivity

We have good reasons, then, to suspect claims to objectivity. People who

insist on their own objectivity protest too much; they are likely to be arrogant,
overconfident, or self-deceived. In fact, those who acknowledge their own
biases and limitations probably have a better chance of overcoming them than
those who insist they are objective. Those who have faith in the objectivity of
others may be complacent or dangerously naive. They fail to see the many
obstacles — inborn and acquired, innocent and insidious, inevitable and
avoidable — on the way to truth.
My defence of objectivity, moreover, in no way amounts to the claim that
the press (in general or in any particular manifestation) is in fact objective or
free of ideological or other bias. Sometimes the biases of the press result from
overt economic or political purposes, as when news organizations suppress
damaging information about corporations to which they belong; sometimes
from structural or technological features of media institutions, such as
television’s reliance on good pictures. It is also true that, paradoxically, the
aspiration to objectivity can contain biases of its own, by advantaging
established sources or by encouraging an artifical arithmetic balance between
views and tempting reporters to maintain the appearance of neutrality even in
the face of overwhelming ‘non-neutral’ evidence. These tendencies are
genuine, although not, I have been arguing, insuperable.
To believe in objectivity is not, then, to believe that anyone is objective. My
main purpose has been to show that, nevertheless, in so far as we aim to
understand the world we cannot get along without assuming both the possi-
bility and value of objectivity. That the questions reporters ask have answers
to which people of good will and good sense would, after adequate investiga-
tion, agree is the presupposition that we make, and must make, in taking
journalism seriously.
 In Defence of Objectivity Revisited 241

Notes

1. I should add that although Schudson is sympathetic to this view, in this passage
he is characterizing it rather than espousing it.
2. Whorf’s views can be found in Whorf (1956). For a clear critique of Whorfian
relativism, see Devitt and Sterelny (1987: 172-84).
3. For evidence of this change, see Schmidt (1990: A1), reporting a New York
Times/CBS News Poll on changes in American attitudes toward Israel and the
Palestinians.
4. The idea of a regulative principle or ideal comes from Kant: ‘the ideal in such a
case serves as the archetype for the complete determination of the copy. . . Although
we cannot concede to these ideals objective reality (existence), they are not therefore
to be regarded as figments of the brain; they supply reason with a standard which is
indispensable to it, providing it, as they do, with a concept of that which is entirely
complete in its kind, and thereby enabling it to estimate and to measure the degree and
the defects of the incomplete’ (Kant, 1965: 486 [A569 B597]).
5. See also Hallin (1986: 63-75). For a good discussion see West (1990).
6. This is not strictly speaking true: as an eyewitness to events, the reporter often
enunciates facts directly; even when not an eyewitness, he does not attribute every
statement made to a source. Reporters could not get their stories off the ground if they
had to attribute every statement to a source. The question of when a statement is
thought sufficiently important and controversial to require attribution goes to the heart
of disputes about objectivity and the appearance of objectivity, as I. F. Stones’s
remark, quoted on p. 239, illustrates.
7. Note in this connection Schudson’s discussion of Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein’s approach in the Watergate investigation. Schudson believes that the ideal
of objectivity implies the conventional, passive model of journalism associated with
the press’s response to McCarthy. Yet he remarks that Woodward and Bernstein
‘insisted that they did nothing exceptional. They denied that their manner of reporting
was distinctive; to them, “investigative reporting” is just plain reporting .. . They
make a case for a journalism true to an ideal of objectivity and false to the counterfeit
conventions justified in its name’ (Schudson, 1978: 188-89). Even Schudson, one of
objectivity’s influential detractors, here acknowledges (what Woodward and Bernstein
have no trouble seeing) that much of what goes under the name of objectivity reflects a
shallow understanding of it. The distinction often manifests itself in the use of
quotation marks: is it objectivity or ‘objectivity’ that’s the culprit?
8. Obviously what we characterize as extreme depends again on the prevailing
consensus at the time, and may therefore involve controversial political judgements.
The dilemmas — and journalists’ common capitulation to the prevailing political
consensus — are hilariously illustrated in Cockburn (1987).
9. The criticisms are not unconnected. If Nature abhors a vacuum, then even a
precise balancing between two opposing views will give the advantage to the more
prestigious view that is associated with established power.

References

CAREY, J. W., 1989: Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston:
Unwin Hyman.
CHOMSKY, N., 1969: ‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship’. In American Power and the
New Mandarins. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
COCKBURN, A., 1987: ‘The Tedium Twins’. In Corruptions of Empire. London: Verso.
242 Judith Lichtenberg

DAVIDSON, D., 1984: ‘The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’. In Inquiries into Truth
and Interpretation, New York: Oxford University Press.
DEVITT, M. and STERELNY, K., 1987: Language and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
FISH, S, 1980: Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
GUREVITCH, M., LEVY, M. and ROEH, I., 1991: ‘The Global Newsroom’, in P. Dahlgren and
C. Sparks (eds), Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere
in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.
HALLIN, D., 1986: The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam. New York: Oxford
University Press.
HERTSGAARD, M., 1989: On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency. New
York: Schocken Books.
KANT, l., 1965: Critique of Pure Reason. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
KESSLER, L. and MCDONALD, D., 1989: Mastering the Message: Media Writing with
Substance and Style. Belmont, California: Wadsworth.
LUBAN, D., 1986: ‘Fish v. Fish or, Some Realism About Idealism’, Cardozo Law Review
Te
MACKINNON, C., 1982: ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for
Theory’, Signs 7.
MCDONALD, D., 1975: ‘Is Objectivity Possible?’. In Merrill, J. C. and Barney, R. D.
(eds), Ethics and ‘the Press: Readings in Mass Media Morality. New York:
Hastings House.
SCHILLER, D., 1981: Objectivity and the News. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
SCHMIDT, W. E., 1990: ‘Americans’ Support for Israel: Solid, But Not the Rock It Was’,
New York Times, July 9.
SCHUDSON, M., 1978: Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers.
New York: Basic Books.
esa el G., 1972: ‘Objectivity as Strategic Ritual’, American Journal of Sociology

WEST, R., 1990: ‘Relativism, Objectivity, and the Law’, Yale Law Journal 99.
WHORF, B. L., 1956: Language, Thought and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 12
Commercialism and
Professionalism in the
American News Media
Daniel C. Hallin

In October 1993 Dan Rather created a brief sensation with a speech at the
Radio and Television News Directors Association, where he railed against the
current state of the institution he has personified for the past decade or so.
‘They’ve got us putting more and more fuzz and wuzz on the air, cop-shop
stuff, so as to compete not with other news programs but with entertainment
programs, including those posing as news programs, for dead bodies, mayhem
and lurid tales’ (Viles, 1993).
The following Sunday (October 17) Walter Goodman, television critic for
the New York Times ridiculed ‘Parson Rather’ for his ‘sermon’ on journalistic
responsibility:

The ratings may not be all that scientific, but the bottom-liners have learned that
they are more reliable guides to the nation’s taste than high-minded journalists.
Corporate executives are not by and large suicidal. If they were persuaded by the
figures that news from other countries, economic news and serious, substantive
news of any kind would bring in more money than game shows or crime shows,
America would have an hour’s worth of such nourishment every night. The
problem faced by Mr Rather and his allies is that mass merchandising does not
permit much in the way of boutique programming. That’s the reason for public
television. . . . [T]he fat cats he is fighting have nothing more devious in mind
than catering to the enormous audience he wants to serve. . . . He has to hope that
the watering down and dolling up of the ‘CBS Evening News’ do not increase its
ratings, for otherwise he may be driven to flee the studio and charge about the
land, trying to stir up new hurricanes against old windmills.

What is remarkable here is not so much Rather’s speech as its reception by the
Times. For perhaps twenty years, from the early sixties to the early eighties, it
was taken for granted that television news was not simply show business. Any
television executive, any broadcast journalist, and certainly a critic for the
New York Times could be counted upon to repeat that the journalist indeed had
an obligation higher than the ratings, that television news served the public,
not simply the market. What was a commonplace of journalistic ethics a few
244 Daniel C. Hallin

years ago is now increasingly regarded as the modern equivalent of knight

errantry. ——
The American media have of course been essentially commercial in
character at least since the penny press of the 1830s, save the small institu-
tion of public broadcasting, created in 1967 and always very marginal.
Commercial logic has never been completely dominant, however. In the
case of broadcasting it was modified by government regulation, which
imposed an obligation, modest and somewhat vague to be sure, to serve the
‘public convenience and necessity’. In the case of journalism generally, it was
modified in the nineteenth century, by political commitments of owners and
editors, and then in the twentieth by the growing culture of professionalism.
As the twentieth century ends, government regulation of broadcasting has
been for the most part swept away, and the culture of professionalism is
clearly in decline. Is it possible that in the twenty-first century commercial
logic will finally rule the American media without challenge? If it did, what
would this mean for American culture?

The Nature of Professionalism

In the late 1940s, the Commission on Freedom of the Press articulated the
argument for what came to be called the ‘social responsibility’ theory of the
press (Siebert, Peterson and Schramm, 1956). The commission was concerned
with increasing concentration of media ownership, which, they felt, meant
that the public interest could no longer be protected simply by preventing
government interference with the ‘marketplace of ideas’. They were con-
cerned both with the danger that media owners would exclude political
views contrary to their own, and the danger that commercialization would
undermine responsible reporting. They advocated certain forms of govern-
ment action to encourage competition, as well as action by non-profit institu-
tions, which they hoped would supplement the commercial media as
communicators. Nevertheless, deeply rooted in the American liberal tradi-
tion, they looked above all to the press itself for the solution: ‘We suggest’,
they wrote, ‘that the press look upon itself as performing a public service of a
professional kind’. They added, ‘there are some things which a truly profes-
sional man will not do for money’ (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947:
p. 92). In calling for professionalization, the Commission was endorsing a
trend that was already well under way. It happened gradually, and is hard to
date. It had its roots in the ‘information’ model of journalism that developed
near the turn of the twentieth century, led in part by the New York Times after its
purchase in 1896 by Adolf Ochs (Schudson, 1978). Into the 1960s, the change
was still in progress. Among the last major papers to make the transition were
the Los Angeles Times, which was still clearly a Republican paper through the
1950s, but in 1960, to the great consternation of Richard Nixon, gave essen-
tially even-handed coverage to Kennedy’s campaign and to his, and the
Chicago Tribune, which remained faithful to Colonel Robert McCormick’s
politics into the 1970s (Squires, 1993: 29-32). It is probably fair to say, though,
that professionalization was mostly consolidated by the mid-1940s when the
 Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media 245
Commission on Freedom of the Press was preparing its report. In the
intervening years most journalists and most commentators on the American
media came to see this model of journalism as stable and permanent, the end
product of the ‘natural history’ of journalism. Now it seems we have to ask
whether the era of professionalization might prove to be a brief, rather
anomalous phase, a period of a little more than a generation when the
contradictions between the different roles of the news media, economic,
political and cultural, seemed resolved, but were so only in a temporary or
illusory way. It is not likely that the professional model of journalism will
disappear from the scene altogether. It is too deeply rooted in the culture for
that; even ‘tabloid news’, which we will explore later, is parasitic on it in
many ways, borrowing its forms and authority. Yet professionalism is also not
likely to continue with the sense of confidence in its own identity and its
dominance of the American media scene that it has enjoyed for the past
generation or two.
It has often been pointed out that the notion of the journalist as a
‘professional’ is vague and in many ways dubious. Many journalists would
characterize it as a craft rather than a profession; in a number of cases
journalists have gone to court to argue that they should be considered not
professionals under labour laws, but ordinary wage-workers engaged in
routine activities under close supervision — and therefore eligible for over-
time pay. Many toilers in the media industry indeed fit this description, and of
course many, at the top levels of journalism, do not. Journalism is also very
different from the classical professions — law, medicine, architecture, engi-
neering — in that its practice is not based on any systematic body of knowI-
edge. A degree in journalism is optional — and probably more necessary for
employment at the bottom than the top of the profession; no licences or exams
are required, and no peer review boards judge one’s competence.
What I mean by professionalization here is, first of all, that journalism, like
other professions, developed an ethic of ‘public service’. The professionaliza-
tion of journalism was part of a general trend, beginning in the Progressive
Era, away from partisan politics as a basis for public life, and toward
conceptions of administrative rationality and neutral expertise. The journalist
was supposed to serve the public as a whole, and not particular interests, such
as the partisan causes journalists had championed in the nineteenth century, or
the narrow commercial interests of advertisers and owners. The notion of the
‘public interest’ is very much under assault today, from a number of
different sides, and this shift in political culture is one of the factors cutting
the ground from beneath the professional model. The ideology of public
service was connected with the notion of objectivity, the faith that it was
possible to report ‘events’ from a non-political and non-sectarian standpoint,
relying on neutral criteria of ‘newsworthiness’ to make the inevitable
choices media ‘gatekeepers’ must make. This notion is also under assault.
It was also connected with an important change in the structure of the news
organization: owners stepped back to some degree from day-to-day control
of news operations, and journalists were given relative autonomy to make
certain kinds of decisions.
Professionalization certainly never eliminated the underlying contradictions
of journalistic practice. There was always, for example, an ambiguity over
246 Daniel C. Hallin

how the need to interpret news to make it comprehensible to the audience

could be reconciled with the demand for objectivity. There was also recurring
tension over the bounds between the owner’s prerogative and journalistic
autonomy. Yet it did provide a provisional resolution that seemed to most
of those involved — journalists, owners, readers, politicians — to work well
enough. Morale was high in news organizations; the media were growing in
prestige and there was relatively little controversy over their ethics or their
political role.
I have called this period the ‘high modernism’ of American journalism
(Hallin, 1992a). I use the term with some hesitation, because I do not mean to
drag in all the baggage of postmodernist theory. I do think that this period in
the history of the American news media has much in common with what is
often called the ‘high modernist period’ in art and architecture (Harvey,
1990): a belief in progress, rationality and universal truths or standards, as
well as a conviction that it is possible to be part of the ‘establishment’, with
wealth, access and prestige, and simultaneously independent — an avant-garde
in art, a watchdog in the media. The current fragmentation of the news
media, with Geraldo Rivera and the New York Times both claiming the mantle
of journalism, the increasingly blurred line between news and entertainment,
and the journalists’ growing uncertainty about their voice and standpoint —
should they, for example, just give the facts, or say to people, ‘I feel your
pain’ — all these things clearly fit the description of postmodern culture.
Why is this change taking place? It seems to me there are two kinds of
causes. The first, and more obvious, is a change in the economics of the news
media, which has shifted the balance between business and journalism,
bringing into question the equilibrium on which the professional model was
based. The second, more complex set of factors has to do with the evolution of
journalism itself, and its response to changes in politics and culture which, in
a number of ways, have undermined the rather special conditions under which
professionalism flourished.

Market-driven Journalism

The pressures toward commercialization are strongest in the case of televi-

sion, but they affect print media as well. I will begin with the latter.

The ‘Total Newspaper’

The separation between journalism and business so dear to the hearts of the
‘traditional’ journalist is increasingly giving way to the concept of ‘total
newspapering’: the idea that circulation, sales and editorial efforts must be
integrated, all directed toward the project of marketing news-information
(Towles, 1984; Underwood, 1993; Squires, 1993; Kurtz, 1993a; 1993b). A
Business Month of profile of Knight-Ridder’s chairman bore the headline:
‘Customers First: After a Year as CEO, Jim Batten is Campaigning to Get
Every Knight-Ridder Employee Thinking Like a Marketer’ (quoted in Under-
wood, 1993: 17). Editors are increasingly expected to have business training,
 Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media 247
and market research increasingly influences editorial decisions. Often there is
considerable tension between the cultures of journalism and marketing.
‘Nobody with a reporter’s mentality was allowed in these meetings’, said
Wayne Ezell, editor of the Boca Raton News, referring to strategy sessions
in which the Florida paper was forged into a particularly pure example of
the market-driven paper (Kurtz, 1993b: 86). The results of this shift are plain
to see in any American paper, though their extent varies considerably. They
include shorter stories, colour and graphics, and a shift in the news agenda
away from traditional ‘public affairs’, toward lifestyle features and ‘news you
can use’. Surveys of American journalists have also found a substantial
decline in job satisfaction, which seems to be in part a response to diminished
autonomy on the job (Weaver and Wilhoit, 1991; Underwood, 1993).
Why has this shift come about? There are two major schools of thought on
this issue, which might be called the readership theory and the stockholder
theory. The readership theory holds that newspapers are doing what they must
to respond to a dangerous decline in readership, becoming more responsive in
an effort to hold on to ‘customers’ who can choose between a number of
sources of information. Newspaper readership is indeed declining. Between
1967 and 1991, the percentage of American adults reporting they read a
newspaper every day declined from 73 to 51 (Kurtz, 1993b: 62). In the late
1950s, newspaper circulation reached a peak at 1.3 papers sold per household.
By the late 1980s, it was down to 0.7 per household (Bogart, 1989: 16). Given
these facts, according to the readership theory, newspapers had no choice but
to find out what modern readers wanted and give it to them.
The stockholder theory interprets the changes very differently. For the
readership theory, the story begins with the introduction of television in the
1950s. For the stockholder theory, it begins in the late 1960s, with the trend
toward ‘public’ ownership of newspaper companies. In 1967, the Gannett
chain, which now owns over 90 newspapers, began selling stock on the New
York Stock Exchange. At that point, only Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall
Street Journal, and Times Mirror, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, were
publicly traded, though they, like other newspaper companies, remained
essentially family-controlled.
Gannett, under the leadership of Al Neuharth, demonstrated to Wall Street
that newspapers could be, as he put it, ‘a dependable profit machine in good
times and bad’ (quoted in Squires, 1993: 21). His were mostly monopoly
papers, not the competitive urban papers of the past. They were aggressive at
introducing the technology that has cut newspaper production staffs by
roughly half from the 1970s to the 1990s, and were leaders in the introduc-
tion of market research and the shift toward softer news. Gannett’s USA
Today, launched in 1982, is the classic case of the consumer-oriented
paper, and the main competitor to the New York Times model of what a
newspaper should be. Even as newspaper readership declined, Gannett’s
papers made spectacular profits, often in the 30 per cent range, far above
the average in other industries. Since 1970, as formerly family-owned
papers have sold out to chains or have themselves gone public, American
newspapers are increasingly oriented toward Wall Street’s expectations, and
as this has happened, according to the stockholder theory, public service
notions of journalism have increasingly been pushed aside. Traditional
248 Daniel C. Hallin

newspaper owners wanted to make money, of course; but they were often
satisfied with profit margins of 5-7 per cent, and were strongly oriented
toward the prestige and public standing of their papers. It was im that
economic context, according to this view, that journalistic professionalism
thrived; with Wall Street calling the shots it is not clear it can survive.
The two theories diverge, among other things, over the question of how to
account for the decline of readership. According to the readership theory, it
results primarily from forces outside the control of the newspaper industry.
The most important is the rise of television as an alternative source of
information. Increasing time pressure has also been cited as an important
factor: people are working more, the argument goes, in part because of the
trend toward households with two wage-earners, and perhaps also playing
more; they therefore have less time for reading the paper (Denton, 1993). The
time explanation draws some support from the fact that Sunday newspaper
circulation has not declined as weekday circulation has. Finally, demographic
changes are often cited, particularly the increase in minority populations often
with weak literacy skills in English and without the cultural habit of news-
paper reading — though here it should be pointed out that immigration is
hardly a new phenomenon in the USA, including extensive immigration from
regions of the world — eastern and southern Europe, particularly — where
newspaper readership was limited.
According to the stockholder theory, on the other hand, newspapers
themselves bear much of the responsibility for the decline in readership: in
pursuit of shori-term profits they have cut quality and raised price, alienating
the reader in the process. They have also in many cases made a choice to serve
a smaller, more affluent readership for which they can demand premium
advertizing rates, rather than attempting to maximize circulation in the
population as a whole. James Squires, who edited the Chicago Tribune and
the Orlando Sentinel and later served as media advisor for Ross Perot’s
presidential campaign, has argued this position most forcefully, underlining
the fact that readership and profits have moved in opposite directions, with
profit margins increasing from around 8-12 per cent in the 1960s to 15-20 per
cent in the 1980s, even as readership had declined (Squires, 1993: 72-102).
One other explanation for this pattern might be that the trend toward mono-
poly accounts for both high profits and low circulation: perhaps a single
newspaper simply cannot serve the diverse urban community in the way
competing newspapers could (the newspapers that disappeared in this period
were mostly afternoon papers serving a working-class readership).

From Broadcast Journalism to Reality-based Programming

In television, the heyday of professionalism was briefer, and its decline has
been more dramatic. Many popular accounts push the ‘Golden Age’ of
broadcast journalism back to the 1950s, when Edward R. Murrow and his
associates held forth at CBS. There were indeed distinguished journalists in
television in this era, carrying into that new medium journalistic traditions
established in print and in radio. Far more characteristic of this period,
however, was NBC’s Camel News Caravan, a slight, fifteen-minute bulletin
 Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media 249
largely drawn from wire reports, anchored by John Cameron Swayze, hired by
a Reynolds Tobacco account executive who thought he had a pretty face
(Matusow, 1983). It was in the early 1960s that journalistic professionalism
became firmly institutionalized at the networks. In 1963, CBS and NBC
expanded their evening news broadcasts from fifteen minutes to half an
hour, and began to devote increasing resources to public affairs program-
ming. The news divisions that produced this programming were to a large
extent insulated from commercial pressures. They were run largely by
journalists, who identified far more with their colleagues in the print press
than with network headquarters or the people in Hollywood who produced
commercial television. They were not expected to make money, and indeed
lost millions. Why did these businesses engage in an activity that lost such
sums? News did provide some indirect economic benefits. News personnel
became visible, prestigious symbols of network identity, useful for marketing
the network to viewers, advertisers and affiliates. It seems unlikely, though,
that the news divisions would have enjoyed the size and autonomy they did if
broadcasting had not been a regulated industry, and the networks therefore
concerned to show that they were more than routine businesses, but respon-
sible institutions, fulfilling the public service mandate of the Federal Com-
munications Act and deserving of protection under the First Amendment. To
ali of this it should be added that they could easily afford it, as a highly
profitable oligopoly. ,
By the mid-1980s, the networks were moving to eliminate the special status
of the news divisions, supervising them more closely and forcing them, like
any other division of the corporation, to contribute to the bottom line. It was
this move, of course, that produced Dan Rather’s outburst. The change
resulted from a number of factors, as follows.
1 Increased competition. This began in the 1970s, as ABC moved to
compete with the other networks in the area of news. Then in the 1980s
the entire structure of the television market began to change with the
growth of cable, the development of the Fox network, and now the
prospect of a fifth broadcast network and a move to direct broadcast
satellite. The three-network share of the television audience declined
from about 90 per cent in the 1970s to about 60 per cent by the end of
the 1980s.
2 Deregulation. In the 1980s the FCC eliminated a working requirement that
stations devote 5 per cent of broadcast time to news and public affairs, and
generally moved toward treating broadcast licences as private property.
Broadcasters now feel little pressure to show they are serving the ‘public
convenience and necessity’.
3. The rise of local TV news. In the 1970s, local TV stations discovered that
news could make money. They began expanding their news operations,
and developed a much more market-driven model of television journalism
than that produced by the networks. The public service culture of network
and newspaper journalism, with its corresponding hostility to letting
commercial considerations intrude into the newsroom, is not entirely
absent in local television news, but it is much weaker: sometimes with
embarrassment and sometimes — especially among news directors and
250 Daniel C. Hallin

other top personnel — with defiance or with bland matter-of-factness,

local TV people are usually quick to explain that they are in the
television business and that ratings are the ultimate arbiter of news
judgement. Local TV news is extremely important for a number of
reasons. It is more watched than the network news. One 1988 estimate
puts the nightly audience of network news at 47 million, as compared
with 80 million for local news (McManus, 1994: 10). It is also now the
primary training ground for network news personnel, who in earlier years
typically spent some time working in print journalism. It is also an attractive
model to network executives who would like to remake news in a more
profitable form.
4 The rise of ‘reality-based programming’. The term originated in the 1980s,
but the trend can be dated to 1968, when 60 Minutes went on the air.
Within a few years this hybrid of news and entertainment was among the
most successful shows on television, competing for ratings with the top
entertainment programmes, and, because it is cheaper to produce than a
fictional programme, becoming the most profitable television series ever
produced. It has since spawned a series of imitators; at this writing the
line-up included 48 Hours and Eye to Eye with Connie Chung on CBS, 20/
20, Prime Time Live and Turning Point on ABC, Dateline NBC and Now
on NBC. Magazine programmes are crucial to the survival of the news
divisions, as a way they can prove their worth to corporate managers.
They also change the news divisions, ‘breaking down the corroded
barriers’ between news and entertainment, as a CBS executive said about
48 Hours (Haithman, 1988). They exert a strong pull on the evening news
programmes, once the raison d’étre of the news divisions, both because
the evening news is increasingly used to promote news magazines appear-
ing later the same night, and, most importantly, because production of the
magazines is gradually coming to be the news divisions’ primary activity,
and is likely to shape the recruitment and socialization of TV journalists
(Zurwick and Stoehr, 1993; 1994).
Meanwhile, other forms of ‘reality-based programming’ have been
developed entirely outside the networks — and outside journalism as a
profession. These include, most notably for our purposes, the ‘tabloids’ —
Hard Copy, A Current Affair, and Inside Edition. These are shows which
borrow the forms of journalism but are produced strictly as commercial
products, with minimal connection to the traditional professional culture.
They too are an influential model, and their techniques for heightening the
emotional impact of stories, slow-motion video and the use of music, for
example, have already influenced both local and network news.
5 Corporate culture. Finally, in the 1980s, each of the networks was either
involved in a major merger, or taken over by a larger corporation. Many
accounts of these mergers and acquisitions argue that the new owners
thought of broadcasting more strictly as a business than previous owners,
and approached news in those terms (Auletta, 1991; Boyer, 1989;
Mazzocco, 1994).

The effects of these changes include substantial budget cuts at the network
news divisions, with Washington bureaus, for example, being reduced from
 Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media 251
near 30 correspondents to less than half that number (Kimball, 1994: 23), and
an increased focus on stories that provide ‘moments’ of emotional involve-
ment (Boyer, 1989).

Political and Cultural Change

Beyond economics, a series of other forces have joined to bring the profes-
sional model into question. Let us begin with politics. It is probably no
accident that the period of ‘high modernism’, in the news media as in other
branches of culture, coincided with the aftermath of the Second World War
and the unusual political consensus that then prevailed. Foreign policy
dominated political thinking; in journalism the national security beats were
the most prestigious, and in many ways provided the model for the rest of
reporting. Bipartisanship was the political watchword, and it was based on a
conviction that power and justice were united: the president and his chief
advisors made decisions on behalf of the nation as a whole and indeed on
behalf of the Free World. Those decisions were conceived as essentially
above politics, and the men who made them were regarded with real awe. In
domestic policy consensus prevailed on the basic outlines of New Deal
politics, a consensus strengthened by robust economic growth and a convic-
tion that the modern economy was close to eliminating class divisions.
Surveys showed strong public confidence in political leaders and institu-
tions, and there was a widespread belief that neutral expertise could solve
social problems.
In this context it was easy for journalists to settle in as part of the political
‘establishment’ without feeling that they were compromising their indepen-
dence or their relationship with the ordinary citizens who formed their
audience. It was easy, too, to believe in ‘objectivity’: official statements
could be reported ‘straight’ — that is, at face value — and basic political
assumptions were widely enough shared that they could be taken for
granted. The consensus of Cold War liberalism and the faith in political
authority that went with it were broken by Vietnam, Watergate, the struggles
over race and gender, and the deteriorating position of the blue collar ‘middle
class’, to name just a few of the forces of change. This had two major
consequences for the news media. First, it undermined the credibility of
‘objective journalism’, and pushed the news media toward more interpretive
forms of reporting. Second, it left journalists with a problem of how to
position themselves: were they insiders or outsiders? Did they identify with
the elite, or with the increasingly alienated mass public?
The trend toward interpretive reporting deserves further comment. The idea
of interpretive reporting is hardly new: important figures like Walter Lipp-
mann and Curtis MacDougall argued for it in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet
‘straight’ reporting clearly dominated during the height of the professional
era. ‘Today, subtly, without any clear consensus’, in the words of Los Angeles
Times media writer Tom Rosenstiel (1993), ‘the idea of straight reporting is
giving way to something else. Many of the nation’s newspapers are shifting
uneasily toward a new era of subjectivity.’
252 Daniel C. Hallin

There are many reasons for the shift. Partly it represents a reaction to the
decline of political authority. In practice, straight journalism meant taking
official statements at face value; but if those become ‘inoperative’, as Nixon S
did during Watergate, journalists feel pressure to fill the void. Partly it arises
from competition and commercialization. Part of the appeal of the tabloid
news shows, for example, is that the journalists take sides, and emote along
with the audience. Network television had already moved during the 1970s
from a particularly narrow form of ‘straight’ reporting toward thematic,
packaged stories with strong ‘story lines’ (Hallin, 1992b). The rise of the
magazine shows is likely to push TV news further in the direction of
subjectivity. An ABC producer said of the magazine-style ‘American
Agenda’ segment which appears on World News Tonight:

American Agenda pieces are by definition supposed to offer a solution to the

problem being covered. If not a solution, a point of view. It’s easier to connect
with the audience that way.
(quoted in Kimball, 1994: 20)

Newspapers, in their effort to appeal to younger readers, have also moved in

the direction of commentaries and features (Diamond, 1994: 274-83). There
is also some tendency for the voice of interpretive reporting to change, from
the ‘voice of God’ adopted by Time magazine or the top Washington
columnists of the Cold War era to the ‘voice of the people’ of tabloid
news, or to a more obviously subjective voice.
In much of Europe, of course, it has long been assumed that journalism is
indeed an exercise in interpretation, and necessarily involves adopting a
political point of view. American journalism, however, has been based on a
denial of this kind of subjectivity, and the traditional style of American news
writing is in large part designed to conceal the voice of the journalist. So the
move to subjectivity creates considerable confusion among American journal-
ists about what the rules of the game are now to be.
Another problem arises from the blurring of the lines between public and
private domains. This is most obvious in the recurring problem of how far to
go in covering politicians’ private lives. In the 1940s, journalists used to call
Wendell Willkie at the home of his lover, Herald-Tribune literary editor
Irita Van Doren, but none would ever have thought of reporting that relation-
ship; by the 1980s the Miami Herald was staking out Gary Hart’s apartment
to catch him in the act, and the New York Times was sending a questionnaire
to every presidential candidate, asking if he or she had committed any
private ‘indiscretion’ (Sabato, 1993). The media are far from passive
observers of this change, but they also did not create it by themselves: it
results in part from the challenge posed by the women’s movement to the
separation of public and private — the notion that ‘the personal is political’ —
and in part from breakdown of traditional norms as the elite community of
Washington has become less ‘clubby’ and more individualized (Kernell,
1993). At any rate this change too undermines the professional model: it
tarnishes the journalist’s aura of high-mindedness, thrusts the subjectivity of
news judgement to the forefront, and undermines the division of labour
between the ‘serious press’ concerned with public affairs and the tabloids
 Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media 253
and gossip sheets, which major news organizations increasingly find them-
selves following or imitating.
Professionalism is also brought into question by an increased consciousness
of diversity in the newsroom. It is common today to assume that newsrooms
are more diverse than they once were. This is true in at least one respect: there
are significantly more women among the ranks of journalists, an increase,
according to Weaver and Wilhoit (1991: 22) from 20 per cent in 1971 to 34
per cent in 1982-83. Gays are also now openly present in most major news
organizations. It is not clear, on the other hand, that newsrooms are more
diverse in ethnic terms. Only something like 9 per cent of newsroom employ-
ees are from ethnic minority groups, with most studies showing little progress
over time (Gilliam, 1991; Weaver and Wilhoit, 1991). Diversity is mainly
thought of today in terms of gender and ethnicity, not class, and there is little
information about trends in the class background of journalists; some have
suggested it is more uniformly middle class today than a generation ago. It is
certainly true though that in the wake of the cultural revolution of the 1960s
and 1970s there is greater consciousness of the cultural roots of news
judgement, a consciousness that is often manifested in sharp debates over
particular news decisions (Kurtz, 1993a). This makes it harder to sustain the
notion of the professional neutrality.
Finally, professionalism is brought into question by the rise of new media
which make it possible for newsmakers to communicate with the mass public
without the mediation of journalists. This trend began long ago, of course,
with radio, which made it possible for the president to address the public
‘directly’. Yet the number of channels has multiplied considerably with recent
explosion of ‘infotainment’ media. H. Ross Perot launched his presidential
campaign through talk shows and magazine programs, reaching 20 per cent
support in the polls before the mainstream news media took note of him
(Rosenstiel, 1993: 164-65; Zaller with Hunt, 1994). Clinton holds ‘electro-
nic town meetings’ rather than press conferences. The police reporter of old is
replaced by Cops, and Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, syndicated shows
on which the main narrators are policemen, not journalists (Katz, 1993). The
trend toward live reporting led by local news and by CNN, is also important here,
since it partly removes the journalist from the role of gatekeeper and interpreter,
and thrusts either the images themselves or other communicators to the fore-
front. In the case of the Gulf War, live coverage meant that military briefers
partly supplanted journalists as providers of information and commentary.
These new forms of media are often described as providing ‘unmediated’
communication. This is clearly not accurate: they are shows, often carefully
scripted, each with its own logic of selection and emphasis. Conventional
news media, moreover, are still very powerful, as Zaller and Hunt (1994)
demonstrate in the case of the Perot campaign. Nevertheless these new media
do decentre the process of communication in important ways, and encourage
people to ask, ‘What do we need journalists for, anyway?’
254 Daniel C. Hallin

Decline or Utopia?

Are we witnessing the decline of public life, or the dawn of a more democratic
age of multiple voices and responsiveness to popular taste? The answer, I
think, is complex.
I am not convinced by the view, most often articulated by elite journalists
of the ‘high modernist’ period, that the transformation of the American media
represents a downhill slide from a golden age. Journalistic professionalism,
for one thing, is far from entirely dead, and in certain ways 1s stronger than
ever. The journalism of the ‘golden age’ was most of the time extremely
passive, particularly in its handling of official information. Today’s more
analytic journalism is often much more sophisticated. The journalism of the
‘golden age’ was event-oriented in the extreme: ‘hard news’ was what
happened yesterday, and long-term trends or underlying conditions were
ignored. Today there is at least a modest tendency toward more thematic,
less event-centred reporting.
The rise of the new media, moreover, does seem to represent real demo-
cratization in certain ways. Many journalists denounced the move toward ‘talk
show democracy’ in the 1992 presidential election. With presidential candi-
dates avoiding the press and appearing instead on Larry King Live and MTV,
they would never have to face tough questions from people who had enough
background knowledge to put them on the spot, and the image-makers would
have a field day — so went the argument. There are, to be sure, plenty of
problems with talk shows as a political forum. Clinton’s ‘electronic town
meetings’ are in fact more like royal audiences than town meetings: indivi-
duals come to ask the President for help not to exchange ideas among
themselves. The commercial character of these media certainly affects their
agenda. When Clinton appeared on the Phil Donahue show, Donahue tried
aggressively to push the discussion onto Clinton’s alleged affair with Genni-
fer Flowers. Donahue’s audience, however, objected vociferously, applauding
a woman who insisted the discussion should focus on public policy. In the
second of the three presidential debates, which broke with political tradition
by employing a talk-show format rather than the traditional panel of journal-
ists, audience members again insisted that the candidates address the economy
rather than Gennifer Flowers and Clinton’s draft record; in the third debate,
with the journalists back in charge, attention turned again to the personal
charges, as well as to the kind of ‘insider baseball’ analysis of polls and
political tactics favoured by the professional journalist. There is also, it seems
to me, considerable symbolic importance simply in the fact that the candidates
are seen interacting with ordinary voters, and that members of the mass public
see people like themselves speaking out in the political arena. Perhaps the
increased public interest in the 1992 election was in part a result of the fact
that the campaign was carried out in forums where ordinary voters felt more at
home. The mainstream media do not have a very good record in recent years
of including the ordinary citizen in the representation of political life (Hallin,
1992b).
Even the shift toward a more market-driven form of journalism, and the
blurring of the lines between news and entertainment which goes with it, are
 Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media 255
positive developments in many ways. News and entertainment have never
been absolutely separate, of course, and there is no reason why they should be.
The best journalists have always been good story-tellers. Story-telling is
essential to journalism because it generates popular interest. It is central, as
well, because news has never been only about providing information in the
narrow sense; news has also been, quite properly, a contribution to a dialogue
about values and collective identity, and that kind of dialogue is carried on
largely through narrative.!
_ The traditional agenda of ‘hard news’, moreover, was always narrow, and in
important ways elitist. It was extremely Washington-centred, preoccupied
with inside-the-beltway discussion of limited relevance to most audience
members. It was heavily focused on the activities of elites (Gans, 1979). It
tended to define issues ‘from the top down’, privileging the point of view of
the policymaker over the more experiential point of view of the citizen who
would live with the policy.” It reflected the gender, class and race biases of the
elite journalists who produced it. If there are more stories today about
education, health, the media, or the politics of personal life — domestic
violence, for instance — so much the better: this represents a much-needed
broadening of our sense of what constitutes a public issue.
Once we reject the notion of the golden age, however, once we accept that
there is plenty of room for change in the professional culture of American
journalism, there is still much in the trend toward commercialization of news
that is deeply disturbing. If the news agenda has been broadened in certain
ways, it has also been trivialized, in others. The most extreme version of this
can be found at local TV stations during the ‘sweeps’ — the four months of the
year when ratings are determined for all local markets. The kinds of stories
routinely featured during this period would have been considered the wildest
parody of commercialization fifteen years ago; a few recent ones in the San
Diego market include week-long series on local nudist colonies, private eyes
who use hidden cameras to spy on spouses suspected of infidelity, and on
S&M sex (the latter generated considerable community protest). At news-
papers, there is often pressure to focus on news that will ‘help the new-value
consumer seek the full, rich life’ in the words of an executive of Harte-Hankes
Communication (Underwood, 1993: 8). Or in the words of the editor of the
Boca Raton News, ‘ “Champagne prices soon to explode” — we’re the only
paper in America to do an eight-inch story on that. For baby boomers who go
to a lot of champagne parties, that’s more interesting than what Jack Kemp
had to say today’ (quoted in Kurtz, 1993b: 86). ,
In other ways, meanwhile, the news agenda has been narrowed. There is,
for example, considerably less international news, both in newspapers, where
it has declined from 10.2 per cent of the newshole in 1971 to 2.6 per cent in
1988 (Emery, 1989). TV news has seen similar declines. It should be said here
that the focus on international reporting in the Cold War era is certainly open
to criticism. Much of that reporting reflected the journalists’ status as insiders,
and their often uncritical acceptance of an ideology that saw threats to
‘national security’ in every political development around the world. Yet
international reporting is declining at a time when increased economic
interdependence is making world politics in many ways more, not less,
relevant to the lives of ordinary people.
256 Daniel C. Hallin

The trend from ‘hard news’ to ‘sensationalism’ is of course often referred to

as tabloidization, and it makes sense to pause a moment here to consider
specifically the influence of the new television tabloids. Appropriately
enough, these shows tend to generate debates among media critics which
resemble the shouting matches of the Geraldo Rivera show. For journalism
traditionalists they are the purest manifestation of evil; for some popular
cultural theorists of postmodern bent they represent ‘a place where ideologi-
cal forces of the powerful may be challenged by oppositional or popular forces’
(Glynn, 1990: 32; see also Fiske, 1992). Obviously a bit more subtlety is
needed in understanding these shows. Like every form of popular culture,
there is clearly a story to be told about why and how they appeal to their
audience. It is also clearly true that — like other ‘infotainment’ forms — they
sometimes provide a vehicle for voices normally marginalized by the
‘serious’ news media.’ Louise Mengolkoch, a journalist served as an infor-
mal media advisor for a victim of a gang-rape whose father was tried for
killing one of her attackers, puts it this way: ‘As gatekeepers [the tabloids are]
lousy, and that’s often fortunate for those who need them most. They will
listen to your story when nobody else will, if it has the elements and angles
they’re looking for’.
However, to present these products of the media industry as a form of
popular resistance to oppression — the modern equivalent of Bakhtinian
carnival — is rather far fetched. They have their own principles of exclu-
sion: ‘A Current Affair’, reports a former tabloid producer, ‘didn’t like doing
stories about gays, people of colour, or unattractive women’ (Bradford, 1993:
41). They also, of course, do not like doing stories about politics: an
individual rape victim might find a hearing on the tabloids; an organization
dedicated to defending the interests of rape victims is far more likely to
succeed with traditional journalism. Like their print forerunners, the super-
market tabloids (Bird, 1992), they tend to be quite traditional in their world-
view: they focus, to be sure, on transgressors of social norms, but typically
with strong moral condemnation. It would make far more sense to defend
them on conservative grounds, as reinforcing social values, than as ‘exposing
the cracks in the hegemony of the normal’ (Glynn, 1990: 29). There are plenty
of reasons to worry about the effect of tabloidization on the wider culture. The
tabloids, to give just one example, depend heavily on the exploitation and
amplification of fear. The local television promotion reproduced in Fig. 12.1,
advertising a tabloidized sweeps-month feature, illustrates an important
consequence: the dichotomy drawn in this genre between the forces of order
and the outgroups, represented here by the hairy wild man, who threaten it and
must be controlled.
_ Those who celebrate the tabloids as a form of social resistance typically
identify journalistic professionalism as a form of oppression, a tool of the
‘power-bloc’ in Fiske’s words (1992: 49), which ‘hides its disciplinarity under
notions of objectivity, responsibility and political education’ “In fact, it is just
as simple-minded to identify traditional journalism as purely top-down
communication as to identify the tabloids as purely bottom-up. Journalistic
professionalism was as contradictory in its relations to the powerful and
powerless as any other branch of popular culture. In the name of profession-
alism, to be sure, a correspondent in Central America may be admonished
to
 Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media 257

F a c e W ith
To

Because you're riding along with San Diego’s

toughest cops—the vice squad. In alli News Extra
that gives you a firsthand look
at people you’d never want to meet—and places
you wouldn’t dare go near.

Fig. 12.1
258 Daniel C. Hallin

confirm what s/he has learned from a peasant with an ‘authoritative’ source; a
black reporter pushing for greater coverage of the African-American commu-
nity may be asked, ‘are you black first, or a reporter?’ It is also in the name of
professionalism, however, that reporters will resist the dictates of marketers to
report on suburban champagne parties, and insist instead on covering the inner
city. Professionalism, moreover, is by no means the sole possession of elite
journalists in Washington bureaus; thousands of rank-and-file journalists
around the country hold it dear as a protection of the ‘privilege’ of a rather
modest autonomy. I have often been struck in talking to local television
people at the anger expressed, often most strongly in lower ranks, among
camera crews, for example, at the pressure for tabloidization; within local TV
stations there is no question that tabloidization is imposed from the top, while
professionalism provides the language of resistance from below.
It is in the name of professionalism, too, that journalists will often resist
pressures to shape the news to fit the political interests of the owners, and that
the latter will often be inhibited from attempting such influence. The decline
of professionalism therefore raises the question about whether the connection
between ownership and political power might become more direct in the
future. Professionalization did not, of course, eliminate the ability of media
owners to influence the political content of the news. After all, Warren
Breed’s (1955) famous essay, ‘Social Control in the Newsroom’, was written
at a time when professionalization was largely consolidated. Subtle influence
has always flowed from the top down in media organizations. Diamond (1994:
124) quotes Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, as saying, ‘I don’t
believe in telling editors and reporters what to do. But I do believe in long,
philosophic conversations with my editors about where the paper, the city and
the country are going’. One can typically find in the ‘Darts and Laurels’
column of the Columbia Journalism Review one or two examples of more
heavy handed intervention in the news process. Still, professional norms have,
over the last generation, significantly limited the manipulation of news by
owners seeking to push their particular political convictions or interests. We
are hardly back yet to the days when politically ambitious owners reserved the
right to use the news columns to shape public opinion whenever they pleased.
Yet if journalists get more and more accustomed to deferring to management
in matters of advertising tie-ins and to producing news to specifications —
Underwood (1993) reports a trend toward a sort of fill-in-the blanks journal-
ism, in which reporters, rather than being sent to find out ‘what the story is’
are assigned to supply part of a package devised by marketers — it certainly
seems conceivable that the inhibitions against political interference might
gradually die out.

Conclusion

Mark Fowler, chairman of the FCC under Ronald Reagan, once said, ‘the
public interest is that which interests the public’. This is the dominant view in
discussions of the media today, that the media are industries producing a
consumer product like any other, and that the market can be the only basis for
 Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media 259
deciding what kind of product that should be. The Times’ Walter Goodman
echoes that view, and so, in an interesting way, do those who express the
particular brand of postmodernism cited above, who also argue that whatever
succeeds on the market is by definition ‘the popular’, and any criticism of it
can only be elitist.
This view, however, runs into tremendous difficulties, both logical and
empirical, once one tries to think out what it really means. Mr Fowler’s
comment seems like a clever line, and not a nonsensical tautology, only
because users of the English language are perfectly capable of distinguishing
between different senses of the word ‘interest’: what captures one’s attention
at a particular moment, and what one has a stake in, in a more lasting way.
Donahue’s audience recognized this when they insisted they did not want to
hear about Gennifer Flowers on that occasion, or, to put it in terms of the
related distinction between public and private life, that they wanted to be
treated for the moment as citizens rather than consumers. These distinctions
are properly the subject of considerable debate today, but they are not for all
that meaningless. A number of scholars have offered critiques of the notion of
consumer sovereignty applied to the media, including Curran, in this volume,
McManus (1994) and Gitlin (1985) in his analysis of the role of audience
‘feedback’ in production decisions in the television industry. The issues
involved are too complex to be summarized fully here; suffice it to say that
if ever there were an industry that involved what economists call ‘external-
ities’ it is the cultural industry, with the news media as a particularly obvious
case. The nation’s political agenda, its stock of social knowledge, its style of
political discussion, all are shaped by the news media, and there is no reason
to suppose that they will be ‘optimized’ by profit-seeking programmers and
advertisers.
Professionalized news media will not, of course, disappear. They will
always have a market, at least among wealthier people who feel they have
a stake in public affairs. It is possible, however, that we will see a division of
the news audience into one, wealthier segment, which watches news produced
on traditional journalistic lines, and another part which watches only news
produced in a tabloid style. In principle, differentiation of the news market
could be a force for greater democracy; different parts of the community
obviously do have different concerns, and the news has never served them all
equally or in a satisfactory way. Unfortunately, however, what seems most
likely, if ‘serious news’ indeed becomes what Goodman calls ‘boutique
programming’, is a kind of differentiation that reinforces social barriers, in
effect excluding working-class audiences from the information about public
affairs, and ‘interpellating’ them as private, ‘emotional’, and properly outside
the political world where power is exercised.
If we are to avoid the collapse of a news media with some sense of public
service, two things probably will have to happen. First, journalism will have
to change. The ‘high modernist’ conception of professionalism is clearly no
longer viable, and needs to be rethought in important ways. For one thing, as
Carey (1993) has argued, journalists will probably have to shift from
conceiving of themselves as, in effect, a representative or stand-in for a
unitary but inactive public, toward a role of facilitating and publicizing
public dialogue. Second, we will need a new public, debate over the question
260 Daniel C. Hallin

asked fifty years ago in A Free and Responsible Press: what can be done,
through public policy or the structuring of media institutions, to free the Tess
from the influences which now prevent it from supplying the communication
of news and ideas needed by the kind of society we have and the kind of
society we desire’ (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947: 79).

Notes

1 Richard Campbell’s (1991) analysis of 60 Minutes makes this point particularly

well.
2 See my comparison of the New York Times’ journalism of policy with the Daily
News’ journalism of experience (Hallin, 1986).
3 See Hallin (1994) for a discussion of morning news.
4 See also Pauly (1988), who, though he does not characterize tabloid news as
popular resistance, interprets mainstream journalists’ criticism of it as nothing more
than a defence of their privileges, and dismisses professionalization as a ‘simulation of
social responsibility.’

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262 Daniel C. Hallin

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SECTION III

Mediation of Meaning
 13
Representation and Popular
Culture
Christine Geraghty

The involvement of mass audiences in the representations proposed by

popular culture has been one of the main areas of debate in work on the
mass media. How far can the mass media produce culture which speaks of
popular concerns rather than the interests of ownership; how do audiences
engage with cultural texts as varied as, for example, photographs, television
series and bestselling novels; to what extent do the values of the popular press
or television dominate or control the way in which we think about the world?
Such questions are crucial to our understanding of the media, and in this essay
I want to outline, not answers, but frameworks for understanding the implica-
tions of such questions in relation to media texts. There are of course many
ways of looking at such questions, a number of which are explored in other
essays in this book. My focus will be specifically on representation and the
media text. It can be argued that the way in which we engage with the media
depends more on the habits and practises of our daily life — buying the
newspapers on the way to work, reading a women’s magazine in the bath,
turning on the television to keep the children amused — than on the specific
pleasures of the cultural product. Nevertheless, I would suggest that the
particularities of cultural texts are important both to the pleasure we take in
them and the use we make of them in our relationships with other practices
and institutions such as the family or work. While work on texts cannot give
all the answers, it should form part of the equation. In this essay then I am
going to look at particular examples of textual analysis and use them to
explore issues of representation, a concept which has been crucial to the
development of theoretical work on the media.
To represent, to mediate, to image — if we make into active verbs the nouns
we use so commonly in communications and media studies — representation,
media, image — we can see how powerfully the language we have at our
disposal frames our understanding. What it suggests is a process whereby a
pre-existing given, whether it be a physical object or philosophical abstrac-
tion, is translated so that it can be comprehended and experienced by a
recipient, an observer, an audience. In the process, the mediation may be
266 Christine Geraghty

presented as reflection with the implication that the original is relatively

unchanged by the process; or there may be questions of bias, distortion,
reframing so that somehow the purity of the original is lost. A particular
relationship is established by this vocabulary in which the reader or viewer 1s
involved in recognizing, checking, reconstructing the original from the media
production — the photograph, the television series, the newspaper article — or
else is taken in or absorbed by it. I intend to focus on some of the implications
of using the term ‘representation’ in relation to the mass media by analyzing
specific examples from television and the press so as to demonstrate what is at
stake in the process of transmission which we so readily associate with the
media.
Work on representation in the media is crucially marked by the develop-
ment of semiotics in linguistics and the application of its techniques to
communications systems which also involve images. Accounts of the work
on language systems developed through semiotics can be found in more detail
elsewhere’ but it is important to note certain principles. Semiotics was
significant in work on the media because it attempted to break the notion of
mediation and to show that the key relationship within a language system was
not between a word and its referent, a pre-existing object to which the word
referred; instead it was argued that a word’s meaning was established through
its relationship with other words and that it was recognized because it was
different from other words — ‘cat’ was ‘cat’ because it was not ‘mat’ or ‘cot’;
further, what it signified or referred to was not a particular cat but the concept
of a cat. This had important consequences for how language systems, and by
extension other communications systems, might be conceived. It created a
structure in which the key relationships were inside the language system
rather than between language and something conceived of as being outside
language, in the ‘real world’; indeed the ‘real world’ did not pre-exist
language but was constructed through it. Semiotics also emphasized the
abstraction of language systems in which a word referred to a concept rather
than a particular object; it proposed that language did not spring naturally
from a relationship between word and object but was based on conventions
which the users of a language had to learn.
Abstraction, convention, construction — these were all concepts which were
to have important consequences in the development of studies of the media
particularly in studies of photography, film, television and the press, all of
which involved representation based on visual images as well as spoken or
written language. By bringing these concepts to bear, it was possible to see,
for instance, that a photograph was composed not just in the usual sense by the
photographer but by conventions of colour, lighting and subject which helped
to fix meaning; that films were understood through the way in which they
referred to each other in generic systems such as the western; that newspaper
layout and the composition of headlines were not determined by what
happened ‘out there’ but by the conventions internal to the press. Most
importantly, semiotics challenged the notion of transparency in mediation —
the media as a window through which we see the world or a mirror in which
society is reflected. The notion that the language of the image was ‘rhetoric’
(Barthes, 1977), was based on construction not reflection, undermined some
key value judgements in the area. If language was not a process of reflection,
 Representation and Popular Culture 267
why were the mimetic claims of realism so highly valued as compared with
the non-realist forms of, for example, melodrama? If media texts were a
construction, what was the significance for audiences of their claims to
represent reality?
I will come back to some of these questions in looking at particular
examples, but it is important at this stage to note that the prevalence of
visual images in the media posed particular problems for the use of semio-
tics. For in visual representation relying on photography it could be argued
that the relationship between the image and the object imaged was not abstract
or arbitrary. A photograph of a cat might signify the concept of a cat but it
also relied on the concept of resemblance by referring to this cat, at this
moment, in this place. Barthes in ‘The rhetoric of the image’ reflects on the
way in which the photograph’s capacity to record ‘reinforces the myth of
photographic “naturalness” ’ and generates ‘an awareness of its having-been-
there’ (1977: 44). For Bill Nichols, writing about documentary film, the link
between the visual sign and that particular object it refers to ‘anchors the
image in the specificity of the given moment’ (1990: 108) and ‘refers us back
to the historical’ (111). Even in fiction, the visual image can generate a sense
of something beyond the initial construction — John Wayne, constructed as a
star through a series of Hollywood texts, plays a dying man in The Shootist
(Siegal/US/1976), but part of the meaning of his fictional character is
generated by the visible signs of his own final illness. Thus the double
reference of the visually recorded image, to the particular as well as the
general, to the local as well as the abstract, remained a problem in the study
of media texts.
Semiology has been criticized for promoting too narrow a focus on texts
and for being too hermetically sealed in its own systems to allow for analysis
of the processes of historical change. In addition, concern has been expressed
within communications studies at the too-ready adoption of semiotic
approaches for visual languages which lack ‘anything equivalent’ to the
stable vocabulary, syntax and grammar of ‘natural language’ (Corner, 1986:
53). As Ellen Seiter put it, in a statement on television which could be applied
to other media forms, ‘because television is based on weaker codes than those
that govern verbal languages, it is, as a system of communication, unstable; it
is constantly undergoing modification and operates by conventions rather than
by hard-and-fast rules’ (1992: 49). Accepting these limitations, I nevertheless
want to look at three media representations in the context provided by
semiotics’ emphasis on language as a construction in order to tease out the
possibilities and limitations of this approach.

Understanding a Photograph

The first example which I want to recall and use is that of a photograph or
rather a series of photographs taken and used in the press when Charles and
Diana, the British Prince and Princess of Wales, were on an official visit to
South Korea in November 1992. The photographs showed us two people, one
male, one female, formally dressed, unsmiling, as they turned away from each
268 Christine Geraghty

other to gaze abstractly out of the frame. The images are a professional
construction, taken by the many photographers accompanying the royal
tour, cropped to focus attention on the two figures, isolated from each other,
the two heads, looking away; thus framed and laid out on the front pages of the
British press, they enter into the international circulation of images.
In understanding such images we bring a number of frameworks to bear, a
number of discourses which help to organize meaning. We draw on different
kinds of knowledge and a study of that process suggests that the meaning of a
photograph is not hidden or immanent in the picture but constructed through a
range of different signifying practices. During the process of recognition and
understanding we relate what we see in a photograph, the visual signs, to a
wider set of understandings. Some of these may be signified directly from
what is in the photograph; others depend on cultural knowledge which can be
activated by the photograph.
Take Diana’s hat, for instance. The photographs tell us which particular hat
Diana was wearing that day and avid royal-watchers may be able to recognize
it as one she has or has not worn before. The hat also, however, if we
understand what certain kinds of dress signify, tells us that this is a formal
occasion with all that that implies in terms of being on best behaviour. It may
also be a sign of how royalty are marked as different from ‘ordinary’ women
who do not in modern Europe wear hats very often. If we have experience of
the way in which Diana is perceived to operate as a fashion-leader we may
also be drawn to judge her physical appearance — does the hat suit her? Thus,
in understanding the photograph, we are called on to use our understanding of
codes of dress which operate both inside and outside photography in order to
understand some of its meaning.
The photographs depict two people, a man and a woman. These need to be
identified through cultural knowledge as members of the British royal family.
The capacity to identify and name the people may be accompanied by a set of
associations with hierarchy, history and tradition which surround royalty in
Britain. In this context, the pair may be understood to be participating in a
particular kind of formal occasion at which they have themselves a represen-
tative function. Set against that understanding of the formal roles and tradi-
tions of British royalty, however, may be a more scurrilous discourse of
gossip and speculation about the behaviour of some members of the royal
family, including these two. Thus, the photograph can be understood through
the associations which invoke the privileged position and private stresses of
the modern royal family.
The photographs therefore may be placed in these kinds of general contexts
and for some press photographs this may be enough. The British press and
magazines like Hello frequently feature photographs of Diana which can be
understood almost entirely in the context of royalty, fashion and glamour —
this is what she was wearing, isn’t she dazzling? But press photographs often
need to be understood in the contextof news — this photograph is important at
this point because it tells us something new. The meaning of the photograph
then has to be established more clearly so that the viewer is guided to the
appropriate response.
One way of doing this 1S, to use Barthes’ term, to ‘anchor’ the
meaning
through the written text which accompanies it. The written text then rules
out
 Representation and Popular Culture 269
as inappropriate certain meanings and underlines others as being correct; the
viewer does not necessarily have to follow this guidance but other readings
run the risk of being deemed irrelevant or deviant. In this example, the written
text warned us that it was not enough to understand the photograph through
discourses of fashion or the royal family. To do so would be to miss the point
of the unsmiling faces turned away from each other. The meaning of this is
underlined by articles such as that in the Daily Mail which was headlined
‘Charles and Diana face new crisis’ and began ‘This is the picture which
reveals the rift between the Prince and Princess of Wales. The physical and
emotional distance between them is clear’ (November 3, 1992). The written
text thus focuses attention on one specific aspect of the photograph, the
demeanour of the couple, and suggests, quite forcibly, that this is where the
photograph’s meaning must be found.
A number of professional practices allow this anchoring to take place: it is
conventional in newspapers to accompany photographs with headlines and
captions in order to make their meaning more stable; it is also conventional that
photographs are used to support written text and to provide evidence which
backs up journalists’ stories. The practice is also supported by other dis-
courses which encourage us to understand the photograph in this way. By
reading the photograph as ‘the breakup of the marriage’ we place it in the
context of a narrative, the story of the marriage which has been told through
the media — in the press, on television, in books. Narrative organization
encourages us to make sense of a story by looking for the way in which
one event causes or has an effect on the next and by associating individual
participants with particular character traits. In this story, the overarching
narrative has moved from the hermeneutic of the prince’s choice of bride
through the fairytale wedding and the birth of two sons to the estranged
couple trapped in marriage and the subsequent separation. This narrative is
not the invention of any one journalist or indeed the media as a whole. It is a
structure which draws on different kinds of stories — fairytales, family sagas,
the movement from adolescence to adulthood — and provides the means of
making sense of a mass of information, selecting what is significant and
giving it meaning. Thus a photograph of Charles and Diana can be under-
stood through where it is placed in that story. The narrative encourages a
reading which emphasizes the turned-away heads, the gazes out of the frame,
the sense that being trapped in the official car is the physical equivalent of the
trap of their marriage. Could the South Korean photographs, however, have
been used in the early years of the marriage to signify the way in which the
happy couple took their formal duties seriously and performed them well, not
daring to look at each other in case personal happiness distracted them from
serious affairs of state?
Charles and Diana are, of course, public figures. Most of us have no
personal knowledge of them and it would seem that we cannot therefore
call on direct knowledge to understand their photographs in the way we
might with our own photos. Yet in some senses our direct experience is
called on to create meaning — not our experience of Charles and Diana but
of our own personal lives. The story of the royal couple straddles the public
and the personal spheres, spheres which we are used to thinking of as separate.
On the public side are placed issues of economics, employment, the law, the
270 Christine Geraghty

constitution; on the personal side are falling in love, getting married, having
children. The two spheres are actually inseparable but in general the public
sphere is conceived of as the place for experts — politicians, economists,
judges — while we are all deemed to have varying degrees of experience of
the private sphere. It is that expertise which we bring to bear on the
photograph of Charles and Diana. We are not asked to scrutinize the faces
of politicians at a summit meeting for signs of likes and dislikes; the formal
photographs used suppress that kind of inquiry. But to understand how the
South Korean photographs speak of the break-up of this marriage we can call
on our own experience. We use our particular experiences of relationships to
create a generality (this is how such couples look) to apply to a particular
couple (yes, Charles and Diana are in trouble).
So we are back with the photograph and to the way in which it seems to
offer a particular access to reality, the sense that it offers evidence of the truth
if we can bring to it the right keys. The more general discourses I have been
describing are locked back into a discourse specific to photography — that of
impassively recording private emotions, of catching and exposing moments
whose significance might otherwise be lost and of searching out that which the
participants might wish to conceal. The discourses I have described above — of
dress, of royalty, of the personal sphere — can be used to make meaning
because they are channelled through the photograph’s promise to make the
particular instance, the independent event, the secret relationship available to
our gaze.
In analyzing a photograph in this way, I want to stress two points in
particular. First, our understanding of the photograph is based on a play
between the particular and the general, between the specifics of the image and
the general discourses of photography, social structures and personal beha-
viour. These more general associations are what Barthes called connotations
or ‘a body of “attitudes” ’ (1977: 47) which are used to fix the meaning of a
particular image. This process is not a game of free association but almost
its opposite, of ruling out a range of possibilities in favour of those which
make sense in terms of our more general social experience. The associations
though they will vary from reader to reader also provide the common basis for
discussing the photograph; the less the common ground is shared — who is
Princess Di? why aren’t they speaking? — the less there is a basis for
communication. Second, Barthes suggests that it is through connotations
that an individual image is connected with the ideological formations of the
society which produces it; Barthes speaks of ‘a body of “attitudes” ’ because
the knowledges we bring to bear on the photograph are also positions — on
romance, on royalty, on the ability of a photograph to tell us the truth. These
positions are not monolithic, but again unless we can place ourselves within a
range of attitudes to, for instance, the British royal family the photograph will
lack significance in that discourse. Indeed, in discussing the photographs of
the royal visit, it is important to note that meanings based on an understanding
of South Korean mores are likely to be lost on British audiences. Thus an
active role is given to the audience in this process of understanding since
meaning depends not on the photograph itself but on the resources of the
viewer. This does not mean we can be content with the lazy cliché that
everyone sees things differently’; instead what is offered is ways of thinking
 Representation and Popular Culture 271
about how those differences are structured and can in their turn be understood.
The viewer may be active but is not free.

Representation and Gender

We make sense ofanews photograph in the context of its claim to represent

reality, its evidential or documentary status; but questions about representa-
tion and the mediation of reality also arise with fictional material. I want in
this section to consider how the question of women’s representation in soaps
led on to more general issues of the relationship between soap opera and
women viewers.
Much of the impetus for early work on the representation of women came
from the feeling that the available ‘images of women’ were not adequate,
generating the common complaint, ‘We’re not really like that.’ It is a
complaint which can be made by any group which feels itself to have an
identity which is misrepresented by the media and is most consistently made
by those who feel themselves to have little power within media institutions
and little control over what they do. The complaint ‘women are not really like
that? — made about soap powder advertisements, models in a women’s
magazine or characters in a popular drama — rests on a number of assump-
tions which need to be unpicked. First, it suggests that an important function
of the media is to make realistic representations, an assumption which, as we
saw earlier, depends on the concept of mediation between the audience and
what is being represented. Second, it asserts the importance of the representa-
tion at least getting closer to what ‘we are really like’. This is not necessarily a
naive position but one which rests on an understanding of the way in which
the typical is used in media representations to highlight certain common
characteristics which are deemed important. Representation then takes on
the representative function of showing what a particular group is like to
others, and therefore has a public function. Third, there is in the complaint
a sense that a more accurate representation is important to those being
represented because it affects how they see themselves and limits their own
sense of possibilities. The question of realistic representations is thus a
complex one in which their power in public and private constructions of
identity is at stake.
In this context we need to consider what is meant by ‘real’. Julie D’Acci in
her account of the US programme Cagney and Lacey quotes some comments
from fans of the programme which provide a useful starting point. One writes,
‘When I watch these two women working together being friends, fighting,
loving and surviving it’s so believable . . . I can think of no other show I’ve
ever seen that’s had real women, ordinary, living, breathing women as its
stars’ (1994: 179); and another, ‘I know I speak for all women when I say it’s
about time there has been a television show which portrays two real and
human women who are successful as police detectives. ... We prefer to
watch a show which has as its stars people like ourselves living probable
and possible lives’ (178). In both these examples, we get a sense of the
importance of the representative quality of the two characters who seem
272. Christine Geraghty

real because they are ordinary, recognizable because they are ‘like us’. Yet
these responses indicate the demand for a particular kind of reality in which
the women characters also embody positive characteristics — they work, they
survive, they are friends. So what is being welcomed by these viewers 1s a
representation which it is felt will be positively helpful to women trying to
live such a life and educational to those who are dismissive about what
women can do. D’Acci quotes another letter which is quite specific about
this. ‘Most importantly, though, it is the only show on television today which
is an honest and thorough example of the roles which women . . . play in our
society today. The women in your show are expected to be, and are able to be
the equal of their male counterparts. They are not left to assume only lesser,
more “feminine” traditional roles’ (180).
This demand by women viewers for a more positive representation of
women characters can be seen in some feminist television theory of the late
1970s and early 1980s. Although the case of Cagney and Lacey is in some
ways exceptional, a similar concern for positive representation, if not for quite
such explicit models, can be found in feminist writing on soap opera. Terry
Lovell commented on the presence of ‘strong independent women’ in Cor-
onation Street and welcomed ‘an important extension of the range of imagery
which is offered to women within popular forms’ (1981: 52) and in Women
and Soap Opera (Geraghty, 1991) I pointed to the way in which female
friendship and a shared understanding between women is an important factor
in British and US prime-time soaps.
Feminist theorists have however been cautious about the progressive model
of which Cagney and Lacey is an example. For such writers, the intervention
of semiotics and its subsequent developments had made the double call for
realism and role models problematic. An emphasis on realism seemed to
depend on a failure to recognize the constructed nature of all such representa-
tion and to be rooted in a belief that a perfect transparency could be achieved.
Griselda Pollock, for instance, in 1977, argued that it was ‘a common
misconception to see images merely as a reflection, good or bad, and
compare “bad” images of women (glossy magazine photographs, fashion
advertisements, etc) to “good” images of women (‘“realist” photographs, of
women working, housewives, older women, etc)’. Instead Pollock argued that
‘one needs to study the meanings signified by woman in images’ (my
emphasis, p. 26) but in doing so she recognized a gap growing between the
call for more realistic representation of women within feminism generally and
the work on signification being undertaken by feminists working on repre-
sentation.” In a rather separate but related development, there was concern
that the desire for a positive role model seemed to privilege one type of
woman over others and involved rejecting ‘more “feminine” traditional roles’
in a way which seemed to collude with male denigration of them. Instead,
feminist critics in media and cultural studies turned to programmes such as
soap operas and prime-time melodramas, which were for many women a
source of pleasure, with a view to examining the way in which they con-
structed femininity and represented women’s lives.
One important recognition was that realism should not necessarily be
equated with the surface detail of everyday life. Ien Ang’s Watching Dallas
(1985) suggested that, despite the programme’s surface glamour and its
 Representation and Popular Culture 273
apparent distance from the day-to-day lives of its international audiences,
viewers found a psychological believability particularly in the character of
Sue Ellen which enabled them to recognize and identify with her emotional
problems and difficulties. Indeed, Ang argued that the melodramatic format of
Dallas allowed for the expression of these emotions in a more direct and
forceful way than the restrictions of realism allowed. Experiences were
represented in such a way that they could be felt rather than merely
observed. This notion of the personal sphere of emotion, elaborated by critics
such as Charlotte Brunsdon, was of crucial importance in developing work on
how women were represented and what they signified. The separation of the
public and private sphere, which we saw in play in potential readings of the
royal photographs, was identified as a key device in both defining femininity
and denigrating it. The domestic space of the home and the problems of
personal relationships, particularly in the family, are constructed as being
female concerns; the work needed to keep the home and family going is not
given the same recognition or status (let alone pay) as that performed in the
public sphere. Soap opera, it was argued, was one of the few formats on
television which both acknowledged the nature of women’s work in the
private sphere and endorsed it. Soap operas may represent women in the
traditional roles (the mother, the bitch) which so outraged the fans of Cagney
and Lacey, but did not identify them as ‘lesser’. The women in soaps were
portrayed as wives, mothers, daughters, girlfriends, and many of the stories
revolved around the emotional problems generated by these relationships.
What was important, however, and what gave women viewers pleasure was
the care and intensity with which the problems in these relationships were
played out and the value given to women’s role in maintaining them.
In endorsing soap operas and the relationship they establish with women
viewers, feminist media theorists, including myself, found themselves in a
somewhat paradoxical position. Awareness of the processes of signification
meant that such writers distanced themselves from complaints about the
misrepresentation of women on television, while at the same time the re-
evaluation of soap opera meant that in media theory feminism was strongly
associated with programmes which privileged the traditionally feminine
associations between women and emotions. Carrying this further, some
writers have seen in the relationship created between soap operas and their
female audiences the potentiality for women to defy dominant understandings
of femininity and the appropriate position of women. This possibility centred
on the creation of a separate ‘gendered, oppositional space’ in which women
may ‘produce their own meanings and strategies’ (Seiter et al., 1991: 244).
Women’s recognition of and identification with the world which soaps
represented combined with the discussion and gossip which marks soap-
opera viewing to create a space in which women might express the inexpres-
sible. In this space, it is argued, what Mary Ellen Brown calls ‘a feminine
discourse’ (1990: 190) can be established in which emotional relationships
can be discussed in terms of power and the subordinated position of women in
their social roles can be acknowledged by women viewers. In this analysis,
the viewer is not merely active in the process of understanding media
products, as we saw in the previous section, but also resistant. In the
gendered space of soap-watching, women viewers may recognize the
274 Christine Geraghty

constraints under which women operate and acknowledge the pain they cause
or mockingly defy them. Soaps allow them to recognize not so much real
women but the reality of their position and put them in a position, potentially,
to resist more dominant and oppressive modes of representation.
Work on soap opera has been extremely fruitful in opening up work on
representation. It has drawn attention to the constructions of femininity and
masculinity which frame our understanding of representations and has
demanded that attention be paid to the intimate detail not so much of the
programmes as of the audiences’ relationship with them. Two more general
processes should also be noted in this work. First, it is rooted in the notion that
soap operas can be understood not so much as a mass media product imposing
a particular kind of representation on women from above but as a product of
popular culture, claimed from below because it can support women’s resis-
tance to male domination. Thus, while production issues are important
(particularly when as in the case of Cagney and Lacey they can change or
stop the programme), the meaning and importance of the representations lie
with the audience. Second, the emphasis in this work has been on how
meaning is established within the context of domestic viewing and often
between women viewers without the mocking interruptions of men. The
call for greater realism in the images of women seemed to indicate a need
for a public acknowledgement of the importance of representation and a
change in how such representations are produced. Work on soaps, on the
other hand, gives greater value to consumption and the possibilities of
resistance in consumption. In this shift, the argument has moved on to
more private and hidden terrain, the space of the feminine. How far the
resistances of ‘feminine discourse’ can translate into change and activity
outside the ‘gendered space’ remains for me an unanswered question.

Representation and Emergency Shows

Programmes such as soaps, with the exception of some British programmes,

make little claim to the realist project of reflecting the world; for other
programmes, however, engagement with events and issues of debate in the
public world is crucial to their success. In this final section, I want to turn to
this type of television programming and take, as an example, programmes
which deal with crimes and emergencies and which dramatize events which
have happened to ‘real people’. In looking at such programmes, I want to raise
further questions about representation and focus in particular on the increas-
ingly blurred lines between factual and fictional presentation of material in
this area, and ask how far the tools provided by semiotics are adequate for
their analysis.
Television has a strong tradition of using the drama of emergency work by
the police or medical staff, in particular, as the basis for programmes. The
documentaries in this field follow John Comer’s dictum that most documen-
tary work is premised on the ‘powerful way in which recording apparatus can
certify the independent existence of that which is recorded’ (1990: Vili).
Documentaries such as Police (1982) and The Nick (1994) were concerned
 Representation and Popular Culture 275
to record police work as the police experienced and knew it, while recogniz-
ing that the exposition of this police culture might be more revealing than the
police knew. This emphasis on accurate reflection is present also in fictional
representations of the police such as the US series NYPD and the British The
Bill and in other programmes featuring the emergency services such as
Casualty (hospital and ambulance services) and London’s Burning (the fire
service). The Bill, for instance, employs ‘resident experts on police procedure’
who are involved in plot development at an early stage to ‘ensure fiction stays
in step with reality’ (Broadcast, October 14, 1994: 23).
Semiotics, as we have seen, challenged the notion that meaning was
transparent, was imminent in some world outside and could thus be commu-
nicated through an accurate reflection of it. In their analysis, media theorists
have used semiotics to contest not only this notion of reflection but also to
query the traditional dividing lines between fact and fiction which were based
on it. In looking at documentary or actuality material, such critics noted the
importance of fictional constructions in shaping the audience’s understanding.
An early example of work in this area is provided by an article by Cary
Bazelgette and Richard Paterson on British television’s coverage of the siege
of the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980. The article focused in particular on
the ending of the siege when the SAS (the Special Air Services regiment)
stormed the building and rescued the hostages while killing five of the six men
holding the building; this outcome was shown ‘live’ on.television (with some
use of time lapses) and the BBC’s Editor of Television News declared that the
broadcast was ‘a definitive example of just how high standards of broadcast
journalism really are in this country’ (Schlesinger, 1981: 29). Bazalgette and
Paterson, however, refuted this discourse of journalism with its emphasis on
the reporting and recording of events and emphasized their concern to
‘examine the conventions and codings involved in the construction of the
story’ (1981: 55). What was offered to the television viewers, they suggested,
was a representation which could best be understood through fictional codes;
‘it was the convention and myth of thrillers that spilled out of fiction into the
Bank Holiday’s evening’s viewing’ (59). In this reading, particular emphasis
was placed on the conventions of narrative as a chain of events connected by
cause and effect and leading to closure. Far from raising troubling questions
about the use of military force by the state, the violence of the ending was
acceptable in part because it was narratively appropriate; ‘the existence of a
narrative structure ... enabled the thriller ending, the storming of the
embassy by the SAS appearing magically as if from nowhere, in disguise,
to be accommodated’ (60). The constructed nature of the event and its
creation of meaning through fictional devices is revealed through the act
of criticism and was not evident to the makers, nor presumably the
participants. ;
A recent development in television programming has been the integration
of documentary and fiction formats into the emergency show in which real
events are used either through video and/or reconstruction as the basis for the
programme. Sarah Kozloff describes the US Programme Rescue 911 as
blending ‘reenactments and documentary footage, actors and “real people”,
to recreate the “true stories” of victims of life-threatening situations, victims
who were saved by the assistance of emergency personnel’ (1992: 73). British
276 Christine Geraghty

versions of such programmes feature the police, ambulance personnel, the fire
service, and even, in Police Stop!, video recordings of vehicle accidents and
incidents on motorways. ; ;
In most cases, programmes such as this use the notion of public service as
a guarantee of their good intent. Typical in this is the BBC’s Crimewatch
UK, produced with the active cooperation of the police, which seeks to
involve the public by using reconstructions of crimes to prompt viewers to
ring in with information which might solve them; or Rescue 911 which
frames each story with suggestions on how accidents might be avoided or
ameliorated by the actions of ordinary people as well as those of the
emergency personnel; or Police Stop! which provides a stern commentary
on the perils of bad driving to accompany the bumps and crashes featured in
the official video.
Alongside these moral purposes, however, the programmes also employ and
place a value on devices which are more usually the property of fiction. The
stories of Rescue 911 are as Kozloff indicates ‘excruciatingly suspenseful’
(1992: 73), relying on fast cutting, action hidden from the protagonists but not
the viewer and a piling up of incident. The compressed nature of the story
means that characters are flat rather than rounded and are used to stand for
positions and emotions (victim, fearful mother). This together with the
exemplary nature of the stories gives them a melodramatic tone not normally
associated with the narrative devices of documentary practice. Programmes
like Crimewatch UK which reconstruct murder or violent attacks inevitably
show women or the elderly in the vulnerable positions made familiar by crime
fiction, in the dark streets or hearing suspicious noises within the fragile
home. The attraction of Police Stop! is to allow a voyeuristic viewing of
the crashes and spills made familiar in feature film car chases, sometimes
music or humorous comment to accompany the less serious episodes. These
programmes do not try to present themselves merely as reports or to disguise
their construction, their use of narrative and other devices more commonly
associated with fiction. Instead they make construction overt, presenting
reconstruction as part of their attraction, inviting the audience to be engaged
in the emotional pull of the drama as well as to play the part of concerned
public citizens.
These programmes therefore pose a particular kind of problem with regard
to representation and the use of semiotics to understand images which are
based on people who have an existence outside the programmes’ images. Bill
Nichols (1991) has suggested limitations to the semiotic approach when it
comes to documentary generally. He comments on the way in which such an
approach takes images of people as signifiers with meaning dependent on their
relation to other elements in the signifying chain. ‘Useful as this approach
may be to the refutation of the notion of transparency between image and
reality’, he goes on, ‘it does not quell the disturbances semiosis sets up in the
bodies of those who have their image “taken”. Legal principles of privacy,
libel, and slander attest to some of the dimensions of conflict’ (1991: 271).
While semiotics has been helpful in thinking through the implications of the
visual image for the viewer’s understanding, he suggests that it does not
provide a framework for addressing the political, moral and ethical questions
which arise over the position of the viewed.
 Representation and Popular Culture 277
This seems particularly pertinent in the case of the emergency shows where
it is precisely the fact of their basis in real people’s lives which lends urgency
and immediacy to the programmes. The programmes do not need to resort to
the fictional accuracy of The Bill or NYPD because their stake in real events is
of a different order. Kozloff suggests that the suspense of Rescue 911 is based
In part on our sense that the stories have ‘the unpredictability, the unforesee-
able “messiness”, of “real life”’ and that ‘the show capitalizes on a certain
“reality effect” — knowing that the action really transpired along these lines
makes the peril and the stakes much higher than they would be in an overtly
fictional text’ (1992: 74). Crimewatch UK reiterates the reality of the events it
deals with by its use of surveillance video recordings, the interviews with
relatives or survivors and the emphasis on dates and times which quite apart
from their value to the detecting process give a particular sense of being there.
The blurred video images of Police Stop!, far from detracting from the
programme, reinforce its sense of being fleetingly captured from another
source which had different purposes, reality literally as it moves.
The unease engendered in this combination of fictional display and doc-
umentary appeal seems to be present in the punctuation which Kozloff uses in
her description of Rescue 911; the inverted commas around “real people’,
“real life” and “reality effect” indicates an understandable uncertainty about
the status of the concepts which are being referred to by these television
images. For if these images are signifiers like any other, why should they be
marked as different, except that our entertainment relies precisely on them
being different and their being different surely raises questions about how
they are being used? As Nichols indicates, these are not new questions, though
the emergency shows raise them in particular ways. The use made by the
defence of the ultimate home video-on-television, the Rodney King footage,
suggests a political urgency is needed in thinking through the relationship
between people and their images on our television screens.

Conclusion

In looking at issues of representation through these three case studies, I have

tried to show the ways in which semiotic methods with their emphasis on
construction and convention have been helpful in analyzing how images are
understood in the mass media. Through such analysis, media theory has begun
to describe the complex process of understanding that we bring to a news-
paper photograph, a television fiction or a piece of news footage and
challenged the notion, so deeply embedded in our commonsense responses,
that visual images rely on revelation rather than construction and process. In
addition, semiotics drew attention to the possibilities of an active role for the
audience in understanding such constructions and paved the way for work on
the relationship between text and viewer that characterizes feminist writing on
soaps. However, I have also marked points where it seems to me that
semiotics led to something of an impasse. Such a moment occurred when,
as Pollock described, feminists tried to make a bridge between ‘images of
women’ and ‘real women’. In writing on soap opera and women’s fiction, it
278 Christine Geraghty

was possible to move out of that dilemma by working with the grain of
feminine/female representations and find the possibilities of resistance within
them. The emergency shows, too, which use reality as entertainment, also
raise questions about representation which are difficult to think through ina
framework bound by semiotics. As with soaps, it would be possible to focus
on the possibilities of audience resistance by stressing the way in which
audience members are translated into performers and given a partial access
to the telling of their own story. To do that, however, would involve a shift
from the resistance of the viewer to the viewed, a shift which requires a
political and ethical framework going beyond the vocabulary of representa-
tion.

Notes

1. Helpful general accounts can be found in Culler (1976), Turner (1990) and
Seiter (1992) among others.
2. The article was mainly concerned with photography but similar arguments were
made about images on film and television.

References

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BARTHES,R., 1977: ‘The rhetoric of the image’. In Barthes, R., Image-music-text, Heath,
S. (translator), London: Fontana.
, 1993: Camera lucida. London: Vintage.
BAZALGETTE, C. and PATERSON, R., 1981: ‘Real entertainment: the Iranian embassy siege’.
Screen Education, Winter 1980/1, no. 37.
BROWN, M. E., 1990: ‘Motley moments: soap opera, carnival, gossip and the power of
utterance’, In Brown, M. E. (ed.), Television and women’s culture, London: Sage.
BRUNSDON, C., 1981: “Crossroads — Notes on soap opera’. Screen, 22, 4.
, 1991: Pedagogies of the feminine: feminist teaching and women’s genres.
Screen, vol. 32, no. 4.
CORNER, J., 1986: Codes and cultural analysis. In Collins R. et al. (eds), Media, Culture
and Society. London: Sage.
, 1990: Preface. In Corner J. (ed.), Documentary and the mass media. London:
Edward Arnold.
CULLER, J., 1976: Saussure. London: Fontana.
D'ACCI, J., 1994: Defining women: television and the case of Cagney and Lacey. Chapel
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GERAGHTY, C., 1991: Women and Soap Opera. Cambridge: Polity Press.
KOZLOFF, S., 1992: Narrative theory and television. In Allen, R. C. (ed.), Channels of
discourse, reassembled. London: Routledge.
LOVELL, T., 1981: Ideology and Coronation Street. In Dyer, R. et al., Coronation Street.
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NICHOLS, B., 1990: Questions of magnitude. In Corner, J. (ed.), Documentary and the
mass media. London: Edward Arnold.
——, 1991: Representing reality. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univer-
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 Representation and Popular Culture 279
POLLOCK, G., 1977: ‘What’s wrong with images of women?’ Screen Education, Autumn
1977, 24.
SCHLESINGER, P., 1981: ‘Princes’ Gate, 1980: the media politics of siege management.’
Screen Education, Winter 1980/1, no. 37.
SEITER, E., 1992: Semiotics, structuralism and television. In Allen, R. C. (ed.), Channels
of discourse, reassembled. London: Routledge.
SEITER, E., BORCHERS, H., KREUTZNER, G. and WARTH, E., 1991: ‘Don’t treat us like we’re so
stupid and naive’: towards an ethnography of soap opera viewers. In Seiter, E.,
Borchers, H., Kreutzner, G. and Warth, E. (eds), Remote Control. London: Routledge.
TURNER, G., 1990: British cultural studies: an introduction. London: Unwin Hyman.
14
Reappraising Reception:
Aims, Concepts and Methods
John Corner

The rise of ‘reception studies’ has become a familiar theme in assessments of

the international media research of the last decade (see, for instance, Levy and
Gurevitch (eds), 1994). Put concisely, ‘reception studies’ are a particular kind of
audience research, distinctive in the amount of interest they show in questions
to do with the symbolic and discursive organization of media output and those
processes of meaning production by which understanding, significance and
pleasure are generated. In this chapter, I want to examine what reception
analysis involves, consider some of the main problems which it has encoun-
tered and assess its development as an essential component of media inquiry.
In its main preoccupations and guiding concepts, reception analysis
emerged from within the cultural studies approach to media analysis, but it
quite decisively moved that approach out from an earlier focus on content and
form to an engagement with interpretation and context. It also re-engaged
cultural studies, albeit obliquely and often nervously, with some of the classic
themes and methodologies of the social science tradition of media research,
connecting questions of ‘power’ with questions of ‘use’ and employing
empirical research tools in the attempt to locate both within those various
settings of everyday modernity in which media meanings get made. Most
versions of the ‘rise of “reception” tell it as a story of progress, of research
development, perhaps even of a breakthrough in our understanding of how the
media work. This is a justified emphasis, as I shall show, but there are also
signs that such research is now facing uncertainty as to how best to develop
and connect itself to other aspects of media inquiry. This uncertainty is
accompanied by a more strongly critical appraisal of the early studies.
My primary aim, then, is to identify as clearly as I can the principal aims,
concepts and methods of the short but influential tradition of reception
analysis, and then to illustrate these by reference to studies which seem to
me not only to be interesting in themselves but also to be usefully indicative
of broader tendencies and issues. A number of problems will be identified on
the way and, at the end, some of the implications for future work sketched out.
I am assuming a student reader aware of the area but still able to profit from an
 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 28}
exposition. More knowledgeable readers may nevertheless derive some inter-
est from comparing my synopsis with their own views.

‘Reception’ as Cultural Analysis: Origins

Although reception analysis is now an established part of interdisciplinary

media research, there is little doubt that it was from within the British ‘school’
of cultural studies, with its 1970s base in the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, that many of the formative
ideas emerged (Bratlinger, 1990, and McGuigan, 1992, provide useful con-
textualization). This is not to overlook the very long social science tradition of
researching the ‘uses’ and ‘influences’ of media by direct investigation of
viewing, listening and reading groups (see McQuail, 1994, for an overview).
Nor is it to ignore those developments in literary theory which have put an
emphasis upon ‘reading’ and upon the aesthetic and psychological factors
involved in interpreting literary texts. Both these areas of work have variously
informed reception study (or been the subject of its critical scrutiny) whilst
remaining largely distinctive in their primary concerns.
During the 1970s, work at the Birmingham Centre had, under the director-
ship of Stuart Hall, moved further away from its origins in literary cultural
criticism towards a more politicized analysis of capitalist culture. For its
‘macro’ theories this analysis drew extensively on structuralist Marxism
(notably via Althusser, 1971) while for its study of cultural products it was
influenced strongly by the complementary ideas of semiotics (grounded in the
work of de Saussure, 1974). The result was an intensive focus on how media
forms and meanings contributed to the reproduction of ideology and thereby
served to sustain the relations of inequality and of oppression upon which the
capitalist economic system depended. ‘Ideology’ was itself the subject of
lengthy definitional dispute, but what the term pointed to was the largely
hidden patterns of meaning and value which, it was claimed, served to make
what might seem to be ‘politically innocent’ cultural forms (e.g. a newspaper
travel feature, a film comedy, a sports bulletin) into communications uncriti-
cally supportive of existing systems of power.
Such an approach in part reflected structuralist-influenced work going on
elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, where links between lan-
guage and politics and between culture and power were being newly explored.
Unlike much social scientific analysis, it was an approach which registered the
complexity and the multilayering of images and words and accorded discourse
a constitutive importance — it was not to be seen as simply expressing
(correctly or otherwise) pre-existing social reality, it was an important part
of the fabric of that reality. Indeed, the formation of individual identity was
itself largely seen to be a product of representation.
The view of media-audience relations which followed from structuralist
Marxist theory was one often trading heavily on assumptions. Compared with
the new ‘ideology critique’, researchers in the social science tradition may
often have had some rather crude ideas about what ‘influence’ was, but they
usually went to considerable efforts in attempting to check things out from the
282 John Corner

point of view of audience members themselves. However, since by definition

much of what happened to people during the processes of ideological
reproduction was something of which they were unaware, it was not easy
for research interested in these processes to use the questionnaire and survey
methods which had become established in conventional audience research.
Although some commentators have tended to exaggerate the theoretical and
methodological originality of his work by failing to see it in proper context,
there is no doubt that David Morley, in the mid-1970s a research student at the
Birmingham Centre, was the person who decisively pushed things on. The
research which he conducted for his study of the TV news magazine Nation-
wide (Morley, 1980) is usually cited as the ‘milestone’ here, but in fact the
key ideas behind this were published in a working paper six years earlier
(Morley, 1974). As a newly appointed teacher of communication studies, I
well remember reading this paper shortly after its publication and being
impressed and excited by its commitment to opening up empirically the
question of how the ideological effects of media output were or were not
secured. The paper undertook to ‘reconceptualize’ the media audience both in
relation to the unsatisfactoriness of current ideological analysis and the
inability of social science research to engage with questions of meaning.
Ranging suggestively across a number of studies of class, meaning and power
(including those of the sociolinguist Basil Bernstein) and drawing on Stuart
Hall’s emerging ideas about ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ relationships in media
communication, it put forward the case for ‘mapping’ the audience by
adopting some of the principles of ethnography — that is to say by giving
serious address to the detail and the contexts of ordinary people’s engagement
with television. Ethnography is a key component of anthropological studies,
but it is worth noting that ethnographic work on British cultural groupings
was also a feature of the work of the Birmingham Centre at the time, being
developed alongside the more text-based studies on the media (e.g. Willis,
1977). It is also worth noting the extent to which Morley’s version of media
semiotics (informed by the ideas not only of Hall but of European writers who
had commented on the ‘textual codes’ of the media, such as Roland Barthes
and Umberto Eco) was a version in which meaning was contingent upon
interpretation. That is to say, analyzing ‘reception’ was not to be a matter
of checking out whether or not audience members had managed to ‘get the
meaning’ of items but, instead, a matter of looking at the different meanings
which they constructed from items. Such an emphasis considerably loosened
up the model of ideological communication. The conventional model was one
in which certain ideological features were seen to be inscribed within a piece
of communication, leading to the (rather limited) question of whether or not,
and how, these features actually impacted, unconsciously or otherwise, on
audience members. The general working assumption among many marxist
researchers was that, on the whole, they had a considerable impact. The new
model, giving emphasis to the interpretative work of audience members,
introduced considerable disjunction and variety between what happened at
the encoding’ stage and subsequent ‘decoding’ practices. Here, ideological
transmission seemed a good deal more a ‘hit and miss’ affair. As I shall draw
out more fully later, this shift was to have important general implications for
ideas about media power.
 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 283
In his Nationwide study, Morley gave these ideas application. He took the
‘question of ideology’ as it related to the complexities of news signification
and engaged directly with the matter of just how sample audiences understood
and evaluated what they saw and heard. He did the latter by convening what
were, in effect, ‘focus groups’ — a method which, in its basic format, had
already been extensively used both in social science and in market research.
Small groups of people were brought together to view and then discuss media
materials. The researcher chaired the session, raising questions and pursuing
follow-up queries. The sessions were taped and the transcripts were the
subject of interpretation by the researcher, who sought to identify diagnosti-
cally the assumptions and associations at work in respondent accounts as well
as noting their explicit descriptions and assessments. This diagnostic element
(imputing underlying interpretative positions to viewers; ones which were
neither articulated nor, perhaps, even available to consciousness) gave the
project an extra element of methodological risk-taking, in addition to the more
familiar problems of sociological sampling and data categorization. However,
it was a necessary and productive part of the attempt to reconnect developing
theories about media meaning and the reproduction of power relations with
actual, situated instances of viewing and interpretation.
Morley’s work has acted as the single most important point of reference for
the ‘reception studies’ strand of inquiry. Although development has often
proceeded by critique (e.g. Lewis, 1983; Dahlgren, 1988; Jensen, 1990;
Corner, 1991; Moores, 1993), a process which Morley himself has encour-
aged and even contributed to (Morley, 1992), the basic ideas which he applied
in the Nationwide study exert a continuing influence upon research. This is so
even though the core of Morley’s approach — a sense of the ideological
function which television performs — has either been radically transformed
or marginalized in much current work, a point I shall return to later.

An Outline of the ‘Reception’ Perspective

Having established something of the context of the ‘reception’ approach, and

indicated some of the founding ideas behind it, I now want to look in more
detail at what it entails. As I have suggested, there has been a great variety of
theories and methods concerned with reception, but it is still possible to offer
some preliminary generalizations. These I shall treat under three subheadings
— aims, concepts and methods.

a) Aims
In looking at the aims of reception studies, at the academic or ‘applied’ ends
which they are supposed to serve, it may be useful to distinguish between two
broad categories of study. In an earlier article (Corner, 1991), I termed these
categories the ‘public knowledge’ project and the ‘popular culture’ project.
The ‘public knowledge’ project involves a primary concern with the produc-
tion and dissemination of information throughout a society. News, current
affairs and documentary-style programmes are key categories here, though by
284 John Corner

no means the only ones. Research tends to be focused on specific themes (e.g.
war coverage, economic news, policy issues and realms of public concern
such as health). The treatment tends naturally to have a strongly cognitive
character; that is, it is concerned with what people know and how they know
it. Book length studies would include Morley (1980), Jensen (1986), Corner et
al. (1990), Livingstone and Lunt (1994).
Those working within the terms of the ‘popular culture’ project are
primarily concerned with the patterns of tastes and pleasures to be found in
contemporary media output and use, and with how these patterns connect with
more general factors to do with wealth, social class and the variables of
disposition and opinion. A far broader range of media products is included
here, with considerable importance being given to dramatic and entertainment
genres. Though a concern with ‘social knowledge’ may be present too, the
primary aim is to find out what people like and why. Book length studies here
would include Radway (1984), Ang (1985), and Press (1991).
When noting this differentiation, it is also important to register the inter-
connection between public information and popular culture, especially as a
number of researchers and research teams are actively interested in both (e.g.
Liebes and Katz, 1990; Livingstone, 1991; Schlesinger et al., 1992; Livingstone
and Lunt, 1994). Certainly, there is a shared concern with the way in which
power relations are reproduced through mediated meanings, and it may be that
the broad theoretical framework and elements of research method are held in
common too. However, despite this, a distinction of the kind I have suggested
certainly shows itself in the recent history of reception research. Pursued too
emphatically, to mutual exclusion, it undoubtedly has the effect of reducing the
richness and intellectual reach of analysis; but some allowance for divergent
concerns may be a necessary prerequisite for achieving optimum linkage.
With this in mind, I want to suggest that there are three main aims which
have been variously pursued by reception researchers. These are: 1) confirma-
tion of the effective transmission of dominant political and cultural values; 2)
the ‘counter-evidencing’ to this of levels of immunity and/or resistance
among audiences; and 3) the indication of complexity and variety in the
production of mediated meanings.
It is worth pointing out straightaway that work taking the third line of
approach can quickly seem rather lacking in point unless it connects itself to
one of the first two perspectives or becomes an element in some other
conceptualized scheme of research (for instance, on ‘comprehension’, on
‘knowledge’, on ‘mediation’) of a kind which, I shall indicate later, is now
emerging in media studies. It is also worth pointing out that these aims
indicate only the underlying hypotheses upon which investigations are pur-
sued. Although there has often been vigorous debate about the way in which
these hypotheses might or might not have affected the ‘findings’ of audience
research, there are numerous instances of reception researchers not quite
finding out what they expected to and, indeed, sometimes having radically
to revise their ideas as a result.
1) Propagation of Dominant Values
As I noted earlier, the concept of ‘ideology’ has been central to a concern with
the media as acting in the interests of the powerful by disguising, displacing
 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 285
or mystifying political and social inequalities. The questions posed for
research then become ones about the ‘reproduction’ of ideology — how its
effects are exerted upon media readerships and audiences, who ostensibly
attend to the media of their own free will and derive their ‘own’ pleasures and
understandings from so doing. The most direct and crude theory of ideological
reproduction has often been called the ‘false consciousness’ theory. From this
point of view, people are essentially to be seen as the dupes of the media’s
strategies of misinformation and beguilement. Certain ways of looking at the
world and of evaluating it are virtually ‘implanted’ in them by the sheer
representational pervasiveness and energy of media portrayal. If we want a
solution to the apparent paradox whereby people seem to acquiesce in
_ political and social systems which confine them to economic and cultural
inequality, then, the argument goes, we need look no further than this. The
media in many countries are often perceived as no more than gigantic
ideological machines, serving very effectively to regulate the production of
opinion and sentiment in the audience/public, whilst preserving the appear-
ance of freedom and choice.
For a reception researcher, one big problem with such a view is the way in
which it presumes a largely passive, victimized audience, rather gullibly
replicating ‘top-down’ messages. A more interactive perspective seems
warranted by any approach which takes serious account of interpretation
and its varied sourcing. From this perspective, the question would be:
‘Given that people work to make meanings from what they see and hear
using their various interpretative schemas, how is it that what they finally end
up making is so often conducive to maintaining inequalities and is so often
antagonistic to clear, critical analysis of the way things are?’ There are a
number of assumptions made here, perhaps the biggest of which is indicated
by that ‘so often’; but as a hypothesis with which to enter a phase of reception
study, variants of this question have been widely used and continue to inform
work in the area. The broader concern with the social distribution of inter-
pretative schemes and frameworks of understanding fits in better with the-
ories, such as those of Antonio Gramsci about ‘hegemony’ (Gramsci, 1968),
which attempt a more subtle explanation than ‘false consciousness’ affords of
just how the political regulation of meaning and value is achieved at specific
historical moments. Theories of ‘hegemony’, about the complexity of the
competing social forces out of whose competition and combination a (tem-
porary) dominance is achieved by one group, necessarily register not only
control but also resistance and opposition as part of their interactive view.
When the emphasis given to the latter outweighs that given to the former, then
reception studies shift to what I regard to be a different general aim.
2) Counter-evidencing of Immunity/Resistance
This more recent goal of reception studies, arising partly out of perceived
problems (theoretical and empirical) with the one discussed above, places its
emphasis with a significant difference. Rather than positing an audience
politically and culturally victimized by the strategic appeal of the media,
and then seeking to determine the limits of this process, it suggests not
only that things are more complex but that they are a good deal healthier.
Either through a scepticism or an active opposition to certain dominant media
286 John Corner

formats or political/cultural values (most likely a mix of both), audiences are

hypothesized to be subjecting media output to a whole range of interpretative
transformations. Some of these are self-consciously applied, others not, but
the overall tendency is to ‘block’ any processes of reproduction. On this view
then, one which stresses a degree of audience independence and perhaps
draws on a modified hegemonic theory (see above) to do so, media do not
achieve anything like ideological control. Just how much control they do
achieve, over whom and how, then become important questions, requiring
empirical attention (though not necessarily always getting it!).
Another significant question raised here concerns how far the media are
seen to be attempting social control and for what reason. For to note that
control is not being achieved assumes that it is being tried for.
Within some ‘counter’ studies (see Fiske, 1987) assumptions about the
control dimension of media culture itself are considerably modified so that
media messages are regarded to be far less homogeneously ‘bad’ in their
broad political character than theories of ideology routinely suggest. Mixed
among the ‘bad’ elements, even within the same programme or item, there are
seen to be many other elements whose implications for politics and for culture
are either far less easy to judge or which are reckoned to have an emancipa-
tory, democratic dynamic. They are, in fact, ‘good’ elements. Again, just what
the mix is assumed to be has important consequences for whatever general
evaluations emerge from this kind of perspective, which should not be
confused with those ideas, outlined above, emphasizing the resistance of
the audience to an output seen essentially as manipulative in intent and
‘bad’ in orientation. When taken together with ideas about immunity and
resistance, however, such a view clearly (and sometimes radically) brightens
up the picture.
3) Indications of Complexity
Work aiming primarily to show the complexity of reception processes only
carries any force when placed against theories taking a more simple view.
Since, in the last few years, there has been a refinement of ideas in audience
research, it is no longer really enough just to point to variety and complexity
(for instance, among audience responses to news programmes or for soap
operas), thereby disengaging inquiry from questions about the social relations
in which the media are embedded. Nevertheless, many recent studies of
reception (including those undertaken for postgraduate qualification)
appear, if only in part, to have become a little becalmed intellectually as
refinement of the analytic engagement with local data has displaced an
interest in the more general social consequences of the interpretative pro-
cess. The semi-institutionalizing of ‘audience studies’ as a distinct sub-branch
of media research, with its own agenda, has perhaps contributed to this
unfortunate tendency.
These three aims represent what I see as the main strands of reception
research to date, but there has also been a vein of work much more concerned
with investigating ‘comprehension’ than investigating either influence, resis-
tance or complexity and variety on their own. Questions of a psychological or
socio-pyschological character have often been important in setting the agenda
here (Hoijer, 1990; Livingstone, 1991). In recent studies, question of com-
 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 287
prehension have been taken up within reformulated perspectives on influence.
These perspectives do not work either within the terms of ideological
_ Teproduction or of ideological resistance, though they connect with some of
the concerns expressed by such notions. The aims are much more to do with
tracing the character of mediation and the role of the media in the construction
of public knowledge, disposition and attitude, often in relation to specific
themes (e.g. Gamson and Modigliani, 1989; Corner et al., 1990; Livingstone
and Lunt, 1994). Such an approach registers the importance of work devel-
oping outside of media studies on the conditions of ‘common knowledge’
(Neumann et al., 1992). It might be useful, following sociological precedents,
to regard this emerging perspective as a very openly ‘constructionist’ one,
_ seeking to explore empirically the processes and conditions by which knowl-
edge-making through the media is achieved. This takes complexity for
granted but attempts to retain a hold on questions of ‘influence’ (for a review
of various formulations, see Corner, 1995), pushing these questions well
beyond the dichotomy of power/resistance.

b) Concepts
There have been two main areas of conceptual focus in reception analysis,
both of them carrying implications for the questions of power which I
discussed above. There has been an attempt to theorize the interpretative
process in a way which gives due attention both to the signifying force of
media forms and to audience activity, and there has been an attempt to
theorize the social relations of interpretative difference in a way which
places that difference in the context of a coherent general account of social
structure and social action. A number of terms have been coined to help
thinking in both these areas. In what follows I shall concern myself only
with those which seem to me to have been influential or useful (unfortunately,
not at all the same thing!).
The idea of ‘decoding’ was most widely used in the first phase of reception
analysis in Britain. This term was essentially a usage drawn from the notion of
‘code’ in semiotics. Hall (1973) offered the most influential and widely cited
account of ‘encoding/decoding’ processes, but Eco (1972) had drawn atten-
tion to decoding differences too, and the need to research them in empirical
inquiry. The problem with ‘decoding’, now widely acknowledged (see Hall,
1994) is that it suggests a relatively straightforward, single-stage process by
which media depictions are translated into meaning. Acts of interpretation do
not have this kind of unity, however; they are multi-levelled and anything but
straightforward. Talking of ‘decoding’ an item of foreigm news or a situation
comedy risks radically oversimplifying how communication works. One of
the factors it is likely to ignore is the difference between arriving at an
understanding of what a particular media item means and giving that knowl-
edge a significance in the context of previous knowledge, attitudes and
dispositions. Variations between individuals are likely to occur in respect of
both these activities but a variation in understanding is not the same thing as a
variation in assessment and response and it does not carry the same implica-
tions for a political and social analysis. In some research, the rather fuzzy use
288 John Corner

of the term ‘ideology’ often acted to block researchers from recognizing the
need for more differentiation here.
A related kind of problem has appeared in the extensive use of the term
‘polysemy’. Again, this is a usage drawn from European semiotics. However,
within British cultural studies it was used first in the early papers by Hall,
including the highly influential ‘encoding/decoding’ paper (Hall, 1973). The
term indicates the way in which media items are open to different interpreta-
tions; it is yet another notion which pulls away from the older, ‘closed’, linear
view of communication as involving a determinate meaning which is
‘transmitted’, no matter how accurately or not it is received. Here, the
problem has been a slippage from the idea of a putative openness, the specific
limits on which empirical research then needs to specify (e.g. what different
meanings in this case, for whom, under what circumstances?) towards an
openness which remains generalized — a potential indeterminacy in all
communication. The problem with this ‘unclosed’ view of things is that it
is likely to become far too optimistic about the real range of options and
variations which actually occurring public communication can support (see,
for instance, discussion in Lewis, 1983; Condit, 1989; Corner, 1991; Morley,
1992; Livingstone, 1994).
The notion of ‘preferred reading’, much discussed in the literature, was an
attempt to conceptualize the relationship between potential openness and real
closure in meaning production. Again, it was a term influentially developed in
Hall’s early papers (for instance, in Hall, 1973). Hall’s argument was that,
although there were, indeed, a number of ways in which an item of media
output might be interpreted, in fact there was one way which was actually
‘preferred’ by the textual organization itself. This was a way in line with the
interests and values of dominant economic and political power. It could not be
guaranteed that audiences ‘took’ this meaning (as I have noted earlier, Hall
was keen to break with any idea of linear flow) but it might be expected to
exert considerable pressure on interpretative action. Once again, the term fell
foul of the complexities attending any study of meaning. Radical semioticians
(e.g. Lewis, 1983) asked how it could possibly be established that a ‘preferred
reading’ (or ‘preferred meaning’) inhered in media material itself, given that
meaning was to be seen as a product of interpretative action. Even if it was
pointed out that media output contained the cues, the significatory data, for
such interpretative work (which is, of course, the case) this still left the
question begged as to how one particular ‘reading’ of these cues and data
could be established above others. Furthermore, it often seemed that the term
‘preferred reading’ really pointed to something like ‘latent ideological mes-
sage’ rather than anything to do with interpretation of the explicit visual and
verbal content of the communication (a scene in a soap opera, say, or an item
in a current affairs programme). As in thinking about ‘decoding’ and
‘polysemy’, usage of ‘ideology’ often contributed to the confusion over
‘preferred meaning’, blurring together the literal and the figurative, the
explicit and the implicit dimensions of communicative/interpretative activity.
Put like this, many of the concepts of reception research appear to have
been rather unsatisfactory, with few of them surviving sustained critical
scrutiny. Allowing for the fact that the research strength of certain studies
which used these concepts is partly responsible for showing up their limita-
 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 289
tions, I think that this is, indeed, the case. The most recent work in the field
has found it largely necessary to distance itself from earlier conceptualization,
whilst acknowledging the value of at least some of the inquiries informed by
it. I shall attempt to assess possibilities for the future at the end of this article.
The second area attracting conceptual interest has been the classification of
interpretative variety and the causal connections which interpretation has with
broader social factors. As so often, Hall was a major influence. He drew on a
basic typology of political meaning-systems suggested by the sociologist,
Frank Parkin (1971). In Hall’s version (1973), this typology consisted of
three categories, Dominant, Negotiated and Oppositional. In a self-evident
way, these pointed to the broad possibilities for ‘top-down’ public commu-
' nication. It is either received within the dominant terms (the ‘preferred
reading’, an example of successful ideological closure), is negotiated in
relation to other values and ideas held by the receiver (some parts are
‘accepted’, others not), or directly contested in relation to other ideas and
values. It was this scheme which David Morley attempted to carry through
into his Nationwide study (1980). Although he found it useful as a guideline,
he also recognized its mixture of vagueness and rigidity. Later critics have
often pointed to the problems of having a category called ‘negotiated’ (aren’t
all interpretations in some respects negotiated?) and of determining precisely
what is to count as ‘oppositional’ (only readings which self-consciously
‘oppose’ at the level of values and ideas that which they have construed as
the intended meanings of the item?). Without further comment, we can see the
conceptual mess which arises here as a result, once again, of the apparent
inability of much work using the term ‘ideology’ to think clearly about the full
range of factors involved in meaning-making.
That the various interpretations made by audience members were not purely
individualistic but had a strong group character was a necessary factor in any
sociological perspective on ‘reception’ and a precondition of any attempt to
explain why interpretative variation occurred. The classification of variety
raises a number of problems, however. Although factors of class, race, gender
and age are likely to bear on the reasons why people interpret things
differently, it is far too crude to use them on their own as designations (e.g.
classifying interpretations as ‘working-class’, ‘female’ or ‘youth’). Morley
himself was very aware of the way in which other economic, cultural and
socio-biographical factors cut across these categories, sometimes heavily
mediating their influence. wins
Specific research projects have mostly constructed their categorizations in
respect of the topic under research (e.g. to include both nuclear workers and
environmentalists in the case of research on the safety of nuclear power
(Corner et al., 1990); to include women who have suffered violence in real
life in the case of research into depictions of sexual violence (Schlesinger et
al., 1992). However, this ‘narrow’ approach to category development is not
without its problems (just how homogeneous might nuclear workers be in
their attitudes towards the industry?) and it leaves the broader political and
social questions about interpretation relatively unaddressed. ion
Notions such as ‘interpretative community’ or ‘reading formation’ have
been used in the attempt to connect with the wider social and cultural pattern
(see Fish, 1980; Bennett and Woollacott, 1987) but these imprecise terms are
290 John Corner

the subject of continuing debate (see Schroder, 1994). Precisely how an

‘interpretative community’ is identified in respect of its interpretative
resources and its material social positioning raises the problem that we can
all be said to be members of a number of different such communities (of
income level, of occupation, of region, of class, of leisure interest, etc.). This
means that the notion is very much a relative one — which must be referenced
in relation to those particular types of media product and/or mediated themes
the reception of which is under inquiry. It has been argued that the idea of
‘reading formation’ at least acknowledges the extent to which interpretative
subsystems are subject to social change and are not to be seen as the stable
properties of particular groups. While this may be true, it seems to me to have
the effect of creating an even more diffuse context within which to plot the
social determinants of reception. Again, I shall take account of possible
developments at the end of this chapter.

c) Methods
Given the difficulties I have noted above with theories and concepts, it follows
that the question of what methods to use in investigating reception will itself
be a fraught one. The very idea of reception study requires that audiences be
asked questions, general or specific, about their viewing and that the
responses to these questions be analyzed for indications as to the kind of
interpretative ‘moves’ made and, if possible, the links between these ‘moves’
and other features of respondents’ social position and social consciousness.
But how to do this?
The first issue concerns the selection of respondents and the mode of
inquiry used to elicit information from them. There has been considerable
debate over the relative merits of using individuals and groups (see Lewis,
1984; Richardson and Corner, 1986). Interpretations do not lose their ‘social’
character as a result of being offered in individual interview but the dynamics
of group comment allow in general for a more expansive discourse, including
the expression of disagreement. Groups, however, do not so easily allow the
asking of follow-up questions to one speaker and their interpersonal
dynamics may also cover some differences and heighten others (see Richard-
son and Corner, 1986; Brunt and Jordin, 1988). With both individuals and
groups, questions are raised about the kinds of social categories which are,
first of all, used to define them and then perhaps used as a route to explaining
the social origin of their accounts. I have already referred to the problem of
taking small groups, assembled for research purposes, as representative of
broad social categories, thereby blocking the recognition of certain points of
convergence and variation lying outside these categories. This problem has
attracted a good deal of concern (e.g. Lewis, 1984; Brunt and Jordin, 1988;
Richardson and Corner, 1986; Seiter et al., 1989), with the relative merits of
preconstituted and researcher-constituted groups being debated. Clearly,
respondents retain many elements of their primary social identity no matter
what the specific physical and social context within which inquiries take
place — in their home or in a university office; on their own or in a group;
with those they know well or with strangers. However, making allowance for
 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 291
the variables introduced by the way in which the research collects its evidence
is vitally important.
A number of researchers have questioned the use of the ‘experimental’
research design in which sample viewers are shown taped material shortly
before questioning and/or discussion. This has been seen to put an unaccep-
table level of distortive pressure on the way in which interpretations are
arrived at. Nevertheless, some such method is virtually the only way of
taking the analysis down to the level of specific communicative instances
and the organization of image and speech within these. To move towards a
more ‘naturalistic’ research setting is certainly to move closer to the kind of
ethnographic practices of anthropology (where, typically, the researcher
spends a lengthy period of time closely observing, and talking with,
researched subjects ‘on their own ground’) but there are some important
questions of media/audience interaction which then become unaddressable
in this wider research context. I have noted elsewhere (Corner, 1991) how the
term ‘context’ is inclined towards infinite stretch in reception studies and how
it covers both matters of time and place as well as matters of ‘mental context’
(the particular ideas, assumptions and associative schemas brought to bear in
interpretation). This presents reception researchers with a need to decide, if
only provisionally, which particular aspects at what level of generality they
wish to make their primary focus. In the course of research, changes can be
made either by choice (other factors seem more interesting) or necessity
(those initially chosen prove unproductive or unresearchable). Only through
such a self-conscious closure of initial research design, and then its develop-
ment in practice, can adequate levels of analytic reliability and clarity be
sustained.
A final methodological issue to note here is the question of how respon-
dents’ accounts should be used to provide evidence of interpretation. The
temptation to select ‘telling quotes’ from the range of speech transcribed is
only too obvious. Not only does this run the classic risk of simply confirming
researcher hypotheses but it is also likely to ignore the possibility of incon-
sistency and contradiction in the accounts of individual respondents, never
mind about inconsistencies and contradiction between group members.
Despite the requirements of space, the citing of as complete a transcript as
possible provides the only useful guard (and only then a partial one) against
selectivity and analytic skew. However, the use of computer-applied controls
on data selection and citation can also radically improve consistency and
reliability. For instance, by subjecting the whole of the data collected to a
systematic analysis in relation not only to frequency counts but also to
positioning variants (e.g. location of given factors in overall response, co-
occurrence with other factors) the worst pitfalls of impressionism and circu-
larity can be avoided. This need not impede at all the proper use of research
imagination. In addition, it is essential for researchers to show themselves to
be fully aware of the special circumstances in which the speech they collect is
produced and the different functions it may serve for speakers other than
simply ‘reflecting’ their views.
One of the most important recent developments in reception research
methodology has been the introduction of various forms of practical
exercise into respondent group sessions. These have either required listing
292 John Corner

or sorting exercises to be carried out in a way which allows schemas and

categories to be assessed in application (Philo, 1990; Buckingham, 1993) or
they have involved simulated editing and news writing, allowing awareness
and response to show itself in the ability to construct (sometimes imitative,
sometimes alternative) accounts (see McGregor and Morrison, 1995). Not all
research foci lend themselves to this kind of exploration and such intensive
methods need particular care in the securing of validity (and generalizability)
for their findings, but the benefits of these approaches as a complement to
more conventional methods are likely to be increasingly recognized.

Public Information and Popular Culture: Two Case Studies

I have covered a wide range of themes above, more than enough to suggest
that reception studies are a challenging, problematic but also very important —
one might say unavoidable — area of contemporary media research. Of course,
it is in the interconnection of theory, concepts and methods within any one
piece of research that the real work of inquiry begins and the true character of
the problems and possibilities emerges. With this in mind, I want to look at
two widely cited studies which I have found particularly interesting, both in
developing my own research and in teaching reception studies to undergrad-
uate and postgraduate students. These studies have common elements, but
they work with what are finally very different agendas, pushing out to catch at
distinctive aspects of the relationship between the representations of televi-
sion and the realm of everyday life. The first is a tightly focused inquiry into
how viewers interpreted one edition of a nightly news programme; the second
is a broader case study, now something of a classic in the field, of the kinds of
engagement and response elicited by the internationally successful soap opera
of the 1980s, Dallas. In considering them, I shall make use of my subdivisions
— theory, concepts and methods — before offering a more general assessment
of their findings.

1) Justin Lewis — ‘Decoding Television News’

Lewis’ study (1984) is a remarkably intensive investigation into the reception
of just one television programme — an edition of ITN’s News at Ten. It sets out
to register variations in ‘decoding’ and to connect these with what are
perceived to be points of communicative ambiguity or uncertainty in the
news programme itself.
a) Theory
Lewis is keen to start with the accounts of viewers rather than with analysis of
output. He regards research which proceeds the other way as too likely to let
its own ‘reading’ obstruct or skew a clear sense of what comes through from
respandens He shows himself to be very aware of the limitations of reception
analysis:
I should point out at this juncture that audience research can never hope to reveal
the length and breadth of the meaning systems (or extra-textual contexts) used
 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 293
when someone watches a T.V. programme. These involve a variety of assump-
tions, from the meaning of particular camera shots to general conceptions about
the way the world works.
(p. 20)
With this in mind, his attention is directed towards the most specific kind of
‘sense’ got from the news items. Since his focus is on the processes of sense-
making from television rather than on the substantive issues and values
mediated in the reports, he also largely ignores the question of ‘ideological
reproduction’ and the attendant requirement to relate interpretative variations
to data about the political and social position of respondents. Too neat a
disengagement here raises problems (don’t people’s political dispositions
have a bearing on how they comprehend news as well as how they respond
to it?), but it provides Lewis with a research frame refreshingly free of the
assumptions and confusions often found in ideological analysis (see above).
His focus on the sense-making activities of viewers, precisely because it is so
particularistic, is then correlatable to specific formal features of the news
broadcast — its presenter introductions, its mix of speech and image, its
sequence of shots, the accounts from location reporters, the way the item is
concluded, etc. So Lewis’ ideas about public communication, though they
start off with questions about viewing activity, return to an engagement with
message structure.

b) Concepts
Given his ‘reconstructive’ approach to analysis, working back from the
meanings which respondents gave to what they saw and heard rather than
attempting to assess whether or not certain meanings were ‘transmitted’,
Lewis employs a number of terms to conceptualize the processes involved.
Two of these — ‘lexia’ and ‘theme’ —- are especially interesting, not only
because of their level of originality but because they indicate Lewis’ commit-
ment to studying the interpretation process in as close detail as possible. The
term ‘lexia’ is drawn from Barthes’ literary criticism (Barthes, 1975) but
Lewis uses it to suggest the basic units of meaning out of which a news
item’s sense is constructed by viewers. This unit is viewer-relative; it is a unit
of meaning as perceived by the viewer not a unit located by researcher
analysis. Thus, in the reception of any one news item by a group of view-
ers, viewer accounts will probably vary in the ‘lexias’ they indicate. This is
the result of differences in the visual and verbal elements viewers register in a
news item (a matter to some extent of levels of attention and of selective
perception) and also differences in the meanings they attribute to what they do
see and hear. So, for instance, some viewers would notice a shot of an
expensive car in the pictures accompanying a particular story, turning this
into a lexia about ‘wealth’, others would not register it at all. Shots of workers
at a factory gate might be registered as significant by all viewers, but some
might construct a lexia of ‘ordinary workers’ whilst others might construct
one of ‘union activists’. This could contribute to widely different interpreta-
tions of the item as a whole.
By ‘theme’ Lewis points to a category of meaning at a higher level than
‘lexia’. Viewers generate themes from the different parts of news items by
294 John Corner

combining ‘lexia’ to produce propositional meanings regarding what the item

is about, what is or has happened. Lewis notes that there will often be more
than one theme produced in the viewing of even a brief news item, and that it
is possible for there to be not only diversity but also a degree of tension and
conflict between themes (leading to a need for viewers to ‘figure out’ an
overall significance, or remain rather confused).
Lewis holds both ‘lexia’ and ‘theme’ within an even broader category of
meaning, which he calls ‘narrative context’. This refers to the particular
history within which a particular news item is set by viewers and which
provides an important, outer framing for interpreting it. For many items,
the broader ‘story’ within which they are located may be available to viewers
primarily if not solely through previous news coverage, while for others
viewers will have a range of sources of knowledge to bring to bear. One
might expect that foreign news stories, like Middle-East peace negotiations,
generally present more problems for viewers and involve more media-depen-
dency in the narrative contexts which surround them than domestic stories,
like industrial disputes. However, the kinds of narrative context into which
even domestic stories are set vary considerably between viewers, producing in
some cases a degree of ‘misunderstanding’ to which Lewis’ attention is
drawn, as I shall illustrate below. (It is interesting to note that, although he
is keen not to presume too much about what items mean in advance of what
respondents say about them, Lewis subsequently feels able to categorize
certain interpretations as ‘wrong’. In his judgement, these do not produce
an accurate understanding of what a report said and showed).
c) Methods
There is a relatively straightforward approach here. Lewis takes 50 viewers
and conducts individual interviews with them following video screenings of
the News at Ten edition. He starts in an open-ended way, but then moves to
more specific questions relating to the items, accompanied by relevant follow-
ups. By not using groups (in this study, he has no interest in the social
patterning of ‘opinion’) he is able to generate more continuity of account
from his respondents and, perhaps, achieve a more sustained engagement with
programme form and content, though I have noted above that the ‘individuals
or groups?’ issue has a number of aspects to it. His use of the interview
transcripts is mainly to illustrate the range of ‘lexias’, ‘themes’ and ‘narrative
contexts’ which his viewers generated from what they saw and heard and to
connect these with formal features of the journalistic exposition.
Assessment of Findings and their Implications
I have suggested that, by closing down his focus, Lewis is able to produce a
study strong in convergent documentation around his chosen news broadcast.
Indeed, his account of how meaning is produced through ‘decoding’ runs
some risks of oversimplification by being so narrowly aligned to specific news
items viewed just before respondent questioning. Furthermore, his categories
of meaning production provoke questions about definition and interrelation-
ship (for instance, how do you identify separate ‘lexia’?; how interactive is
the connection between ‘lexia’ and ‘theme’ in meaning-building?). However,
the clarity and coherence which he is able to get into his account and the
 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 295
variations he is able to show, and partly to explain, more than make up for the
limitations, though these need to be recognized as such.
One of his examples concerns an item about a British Conservative minister
making a speech to Conservative party members at a regional rally. The
minister received vigorous applause from the audience, both on being intro-
duced and after his speech. In the item, the newscaster and then the location
reporter suggest that the main explanation for this applause lies in the fact
that, inside his Party, the Minister had been through a lengthy period of
criticism for his policies but had now apparently regained the support of
ordinary Party members. This explanation refers to a ‘narrative context’ of
quite long-term shifts in internal party debate, it has very little specifically to
do with what the Minister said at the rally. However, many of Lewis’
respondents failed to connect with this broader context and interpreted the
applause ‘narrowly’, as indicating simply a high level of satisfaction with the
speech itself. The ‘lexias’ and ‘themes’ they constructed did not pick up on
the wider political meanings. Why? Partly, Lewis suggests, because this wider
explanation is given by voice-over in the introduction to the story, at a time
when viewers are ‘re-focusing’ from the previous item. If they are not already
alert to political meanings at this level, then it is unlikely that such a way of
communicating them will affect their interpretations. Moreover, the account
given of the rally works as a self-contained narrative, accompanied and
supported by pictures. Within the causal terms of the visible story, an
‘obvious’ reason for the applause is what was said in the speech from which
extracts have been seen and heard. Of Lewis’ 50 respondents 41 made
reference to the content of the speech in discussing the item, despite the
fact that, from the journalists’ point of view, what was said is virtually of
no significance compared to the function of the occasion as a test of grass-
roots’ attitudes towards the Minister.
Lewis cites many other examples where different routes are taken in
interpretation, leading sometimes to very different destinations. In a move
which is completely original within this tradition of research, Lewis then turns
his attention back to the television broadcast itself and asks how it might have
been organized so as to minimize such variation. He offers a version of the
Minister’s speech story which is far more grounded in narrative values. In this
version, an element of suspense is built up (how will the Minister be
received?), footage of the speech itself is omitted and the story reaches a
climax with the applause being shown at the same time as the broader
explanation for it is offered in voice-over. ;
There are a number of objections one could make to this type of practice —
might it not be too condescending to narrativize the item so strongly, with a
‘teaser’ element? Might it not be an unacceptably ‘heavy’ way to offer
journalistic interpretation — running it directly across images of the unfolding
event rather than cueing it in the introduction? a
Whatever the judgement here, Lewis provides a lucid and convincing study
of some of the factors involved in the constructive process of news compre-
hension. He traces many of these back to conventions of news exposition and
offers suggestions as to how the conventions might be revised! Written over
ten years ago, this is a study which still fully repays close reading and
discussion.
296 John Corner

2) Ien Ang — Watching Dallas

Ang’s study (1985), carried out in Holland, poses and explores the question of
interpretation in a very different way from Lewis’s. Although the production
of meaning and knowledge is still central, the issues raised by the research
converge around matters of imagination and pleasure, and then around the
relation of these to political factors. Dallas was a US-made TV soap series
about a rich Texas family. It became a huge international success in the late
1970s and early 1980s, drawing widespread attention to itself as an unprece-
dented type of popular cultural phenomenon. Ang’s data concerns Dallas in
general, not any one particular episode, and her access to viewer interpretation
is not through transcribed speech but through the 42 letters she received in
response to an advertisement placed in a magazine.
a) Theory
The theoretical context which Ang identifies for the study is provided by the
conflict between two positions on the relationship between ideology and
popular culture. One position puts emphasis on the conservative character
of popular culture and regards the imaginative relationships which it typically
initiates with its audiences — through the stereotyped characterizations,
melodramatic plots and sentimental values of its fictions — as placing con-
straints on critical self-awareness and therefore on the pursuit of equity and
democracy. The other is more keen to note the disjunction between fantasy
pleasures and real attitudes and behaviour, the extensive range of themes and
impulses which popular entertainment displays and the active, selective and
transformative way in which audiences ‘work’ it into their own lives, often
using it to provide emotional release.
How does the viewing experience of the letter-writing respondents, includ-
ing some who dislike Dallas as well as many who are fans of it, bear on this
divide?
In searching for an answer, Ang adds a range of supplementary questions
both about how the series works as communication and about the political and
cultural implications of its popularity. One of the most important of these
questions concerns how ‘realism’ figures in the perception and enjoyment of
Dallas, for the question of how viewers see the series to be related to the real
is obviously important in determining the character, ‘conservative’ or ‘pro-
gressive’, of its imaginative dynamics.
b) Concepts
In her study, Ang attempts to document and investigate aspects of the
‘melodramatic imagination’. This requires paying close attention to the way
in which the letter-writers express their ‘bond’ with the programme (or their
inability to form one). It is interesting to note that interpretative variation,
though it figures quite strongly in her data (different reasons for watching,
different ‘favourite’ characters, etc.) does not have the same significance it
had in Lewis’ study. There, it was connected to a theory about social
comprehension, which finally was returned back to questions of ‘faulty’
exposition. Lewis is interested in picking up on specific referential and
propositional meanings. In Ang’s study, the question of meaning is addressed
 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 297
most often at the level of the imaginative significance given to dramatic
action. This certainly connects with matters of primary understanding but
puts the emphasis on the way understanding is turned into pleasure. Here,
considerable individual variation is only to be expected (one person likes
character X, another loathes him, etc.). Ang is finally more interested in
convergence than in variation, and in particular she is interested in the
relations between pleasurable viewing and ‘realism’. She discusses the
different ways in which a dramatic fiction might be said to be ‘realistic’
and suggests that, for many viewers, it is at a very generalized level of
engagement with the emotional pattern carried by its narratives (‘emotional
realism’) that the success of Dallas can be seen to operate.
c) Methods
The use of letter material rather than the questionnaire return or transcribed
speech is an important difference. Its strength is that it provides respondents
with an opportunity to ‘think through’ their views. One of its weaknesses is
that, unlike the one-to-one interview (see Lewis above) it allows for no
clarificatory or supplementary questions and, unlike focus groups, it allows
no opportunity for views to be exchanged and perhaps contested. Moreover,
sociologically it carries with it the considerable risks of self-selection and
perhaps quite radical unrepresentativeness. The more the data is pressed
beyond an exploratory use in the generation of hypotheses, the more these
risks become limitations. Nevertheless, Ang is able to provide extensive
documentation for the themes she wants to explore. This is helped by the
way in which her concern with questions of general imaginative engagement
does not require her to offer the same degree of analytic attention to the detail
of interpretative process that other studies have found necessary in order to
support their theories.
Assessment of Findings and their Implications
Ang’s study documents a number of factors that come into play when viewers
watch popular series drama on television. The appeal of the melodramatic
form and the essentially ‘tragic’ set of sentiments informing it are well
explored. She is able to engage with the much-debated issue of ‘realism’ by
reference to the ways in which viewer-respondents perceive life in Dallas to
relate to ‘real life’. She is also able to open up questions about the way in
which gender is a factor in viewing, since, without being too categoric, it is
possible to see series like Dallas as offering distinctive imaginative satisfac-
tions and points of identity for women. In many respondents, she notes an
element of guilt, as if the pleasures they clearly get from watching the series
are in contradiction with evaluations about its cultural worth which, to some
extent, they hold themselves. In others, she notices an apparently dismissive
attitude towards ‘high taste’ and an uncomplicated celebration of the series.
However, in both cases she often finds respondents to be articulating points of
tension which they have not fully resolved. The two different perspectives on
ideology and popular culture which I noted above are reworked here as ways
of explaining this tension. MER Pe .
In fact, Ang suggests two different and conflicting ideologies. There is a
‘mass culture’ ideology which regards popular entertainmen t as aesthetically
298 John Corner

trashy and/or socially harmful (this is the kind of view, she notes, which is
often put forward by intellectuals) and a ‘populist’ ideology which works with
a commonsensical assertion of the validity of ‘what you like’ (not surpris-
ingly, this view is often supported by the television industry itself). There 1s
finally an ambivalence about where Dallas can be placed in relation to the
interplay between these ideologies. Part of this ambivalence stems from the
wish to preserve the difference between ‘fantasy’ and ‘real life values and to
be sensitive to the positive, recreative and restorative functions of the
‘melodramatic’. Part of it stems from the desire to retain a theory about the
way in which subjectivity and self-awareness (in this case, particularly the
subjectivity and self-awareness of women) can be ‘regulated’ by elements of
imaginative life drawn from fiction. Fictions can be both oppressive and
liberating and they can be both at the same time. Although such a conclusion
might be too equivocal to provide a strong finish to such an original study, it is
an equivocation which much research in cultural studies and feminist studies
has found it hard to resolve. Moreover, like much good research, Ang’s
project provides data and ideas which have a value well beyond her own
attempt at drawing them all together.

The Future(s) for Media Reception Study

Work on ‘reception’ has become a necessary part of contemporary media

research, routing it back to elements of the ‘classic’ sociological tradition
after a period in which structuralist marxism and semiotics often appeared to
be conducting a study of ‘ideology’ so precise that the need for investigation
of what audiences. thought and felt was frequently not recognized and some-
times denied. Though it is contentious in its implications, the view that we are
now in a phase of postmarxist, poststructuralist media research, in which the
very use of the term ‘ideology’ calls attention to itself as requiring operational
definition, is hardly disputable. However, in its reconnection with the audi-
ence, reception analysis brings with it a more complex sense of what is
involved in media meaning-making, in the types of imaginative engagement
which audiences have with media output and in the formation and nature of
‘subjectivity’ and ‘identity’. This is a big gain. Certainly, no study of media
influence, be it of advertising, of political broadcasting, of drama-documen-
tary, or of soap opera or whatever, can afford to ignore the kinds of close
documentation of the interpretative process and of response which reception
studies can provide.
The ‘turn’ to reception has recently run the risk of subdividing itself off from
other aspects of media research and developing its own agenda. While this is
an all too common practice in academia, such a movement will not help
improve the quality of media investigation. Reception studies and ideas about
reception need to be connected both to a close interest in media form and
content and to the broader questions of political, social and economic organi-
zation. If this interferes with their ‘tidiness’ as an academic activity, so much
the better. One result of a ‘semi-detached’ reception analysis is a certain lack
of consequentiality in the findings themselves and an uncertainty of tone,
 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 299
perhaps even a diffidence, in the research conclusions. I noted earlier how this
has begun to be noticeable in some recent studies.
My discussion has highlighted a number of problems which reception
studies have run into and often have still to solve. Not the least of these is
the need for much greater precision and clarity in the conceptual vocabulary.
There is also the requirement to move definitively beyond the stage of pilot-
study impressionism and to produce work which has good levels of verifia-
bility and replicability in its findings. As I have indicated more than once,
generalizability is also a problem — so many studies have simply ignored the
possible differences between their own sample groups and the general popula-
tion categories about whom their conclusions are formulated. This might
' mean attempting to get a stronger element of quantitative analysis (with the
use of statistical sampling and of response coding) into reception research.
There is still enormous opportunity for experiment and innovation here. I have
suggested that with the decline both of the ideological paradigm and the
inverse simplicities of ‘resistance’, a more measured analysis of mediation
processes is likely to develop, connecting with interpretative variety but
seeking to relate this to production, textual or other kinds of contextualizing
data.
At the moment, there is a strong tendency towards going ‘wider’ in
analysis, embracing a broader range of variables and attempting to engage
with these as far as possible as they occur in the settings of ‘everyday life’ (a
key phrase in current study which, once a useful counter against formalism, is
now dangerously close to being a cliché). Although its honourable model is
field anthropology, given the difficulties of getting access to data there is more
than a touch of ‘mission impossible’ about some expressions of this ambition.
This is especially so when it is accompanied by a wish somehow to get greater
ethnographic ‘depth’ into the study at the same time. The sheer scale of effort
needed to document so comprehensively is then followed by the formidable
requirement to assess the significance of diverse materials within a coherent
framework of analysis.
An opposite tendency, to which I have been attracted myself, is to engage
quite tightly with the interface of signification and comprehension (see also
Hoijer, 1992). This is, to some extent, to follow the route out of Morley taken
by Lewis in the work I discussed above. It runs the risk of not attending to a
large number of things which undoubtedly influence interpretation, but it has
the benefit of having a good chance of saying something clear and interesting
about what it does look at. Some critics might see it as a concern for the
‘micro’ at the cost of the ‘macro’, but this is not necessarily true since even
highly focused research can move between these two notional levels (for
instance, in looking at how viewers interpret two conflicting news headlines
a researcher can tap into much more general factors of interpretative disposi-
tion and even of material circumstance). Moreover, there is still so much that
we do not know about how mediated knowledge and mediated pleasures are
produced.
I want to finish this discussion by looking briefly at a few of the research
problems around ‘reception’ which I am currently confronting myself. Some
of these problems are familiar ones, identified earlier in the article. Others are
relatively new and result from the nature of the research topic and the wish to
300 John Corner

go at least a little way beyond previous work. My colleagues and I are looking
at how television news reports ‘the economy’ and how this reporting figures in
the construction of popular understanding of what the economy 1s, how it is
performing and how it might perform.
Clearly, such an inquiry connects directly with the much broader issue of
how news services relate to public knowledge and opinion. This issue 1s
absolutely central to the functioning of mediated democracy and it is being
posed and answered in different ways all over the world. We can see the news
as a ‘resource’, which is variously used by viewers in the construction of their
‘own’ attitudes, but it would be very odd indeed to ignore the extent to which
it also acts as an ‘influence’, providing data and evaluations which can shape
the direction of public understanding and perhaps also the movement of
popular feeling.
In the case of economic news, we have a specific problem of comprehen-
sion, since economics is an abstract and often technical area and questions of
understanding take on a different character from that which they might have if
the research were to be on, say, news about the royal family, let alone on
series drama or talk shows. Moreover, we think the comprehension of
economic matters is distinctly ‘relational’ in so far as it routinely involves
ability to understand shifts in a number of features of the economy, in a
context where it is the relation between these shifts (e.g. interest rates and
inflation) which is often of most significance. However, to split off compre-
hension from the social contingencies of evaluation and response, seeing it as
a separate technical-cognitive matter, would be reductive. It would desocia-
lize the processes at work. We need to be sensitive to the difference between,
say, a person not understanding the relationship between inflation and
unemployment claimed in a news report and, say, a person disagreeing
with the claim. This takes us back to the arguments in Lewis, and his
valuable insistence on primary understanding. However, we need to be
sensitive, too, to the way in which evaluative dispositions affect selective
attention and interact with the matter of what is ‘understood’, what is
‘misunderstood’ (again, the need for caution here is obvious) and what is
not understood at all. If we could get some sense of how these processes relate
to particular form and themes of economic news reporting, then the resulting
knowledge would have value. It would have value because contesting claims
about the public function and effect of news have an importance internation-
ally and, although there has been good work done, there is still a lack of clear
data and analysis on the topic.
In trying to open up questions in this area, what sort of use might we
best make of viewers? There is some likelihood that comprehension and
evaluation of the economy will have a pattern of variation by social class and
occupation as well as by other factors, such as political affiliation and perhaps
age. Yet, if we select individuals or convene groups defined by these
categories, we have to be wary of falling victim to a circularity of inquiry.
Circularity would occur if our analysis prioritized common features of
response in the groups or between similarly categorized individuals (thereby
marginalizing differences) and then regarded these features to be primarily the
product of the social factors indicated in the categories. We need to test any
such potential correlations by reference to differently constituted groups,
 Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods 301
including ‘mixed’ groups. This might suggest phased research, in which we
_ develop our ideas about viewer comprehension across separate stages of
fieldwork, reviewing and identifying for appropriate ‘test’ the emerging lines
of analysis at each stage.
We shall need to show certain news tapes to groups to get the tightness of
alignment between specific reports and understandings that we require; but we
also need to document something of the more general attitudes and ideas
which people have about the economy and economic news, not simply in their
responses to specific items of programming we choose to show. If we do not
do this, there may be a danger of local linkages between chosen items and the
responses they received displacing our attention to the broader relations
- involved. Our problem is that we want to be specific and focused but not to
lose sight of these framing factors. Could a broader view, a view which is
connected with the affective aspects of the economy, what people feel about it
as well as with what they know about it, be obtained by the use of viewing
diaries, perhaps not written but spoken onto cassette, kept at home by
respondents? What problems are introduced by admitting this kind of data?
Knowledge about the range of sources of information which people draw on
when interpreting television accounts is also necessary. We can sometimes
find this indicated in respondent speech, but a more direct approach — perhaps
questionnaire-based — might be the best way of pressing forward here.
One final question. We have carried out our news content analysis with
quantitative attention to a number of factors, including the co-occurrence of
certain terms and the frequency and positioning of certain words of descrip-
tion and evaluation. How can this approach be usefully applied to the
transcripts of respondent speech? As I have indicated earlier, it can certainly
be used as a check against the selective impressionism which has sometimes
been a factor in reception study, particularly small-scale projects. However,
can the range of search and selection packages now available for computer
use allow us not just to be more confident in our analysis but also to explore
aspects of perception and interpretation not accessible through non-electronic
sorting? (Lunt and Livingstone, 1995, usefully consider the relatiorship
between focus group method and emerging techniques, including computer-
assisted ones, in social science analysis. See also Hoijer, 1990, on the general
problem of the validity of data in reception research).
I put the above largely as a series of questions so as to bring out the
exploratory and indeed challenging character of reception studies as it moves
into the late 1990s, working its way beyond some of the earlier ideas and
trying to generate new ones at the same time as keeping itself informed by
related work going on elsewhere in the social sciences. Such an emphasis on
problems might sound desperate, an indicator of the impossibility of progress;
but any real development in our knowledge of media processes will have to
subject itself to an equivalent conceptual and methodological scepticism. In
this particular case, after a lot of discussion and a pilot study, we think we
have got provisional answers to many of these questions, enough at any rate to
allow us to progress our inquiries with an acceptable mixture of confidence
and caution.
Most researchers would, I think, agree that our economy study is quite
ambitious in scope, although its main focus is on the particular processes
302 John Corner

involved in viewing a specific kind of media output. In this latter respect, it

might be described as ‘narrow’ within the terms I outlined above.
The ‘narrow’ route is not so favoured as the ‘wide’ one at the moment (as I
noted, there is an interest in doing justice to the scale and complexity of the
culture within which the media are situated), though it remains to be seen
just how productively researchable the latter will turn out to be. The signs are
that, in the next few years, reception analysis will become the focus of a good
deal of polemical urging; to turn its attention this way or that, to become more
aware of this or that. Such urgings will to some extent reflect the growing
significance attached to the processes of consumption within late modern
societies but also the continuing requirement to engage with the power(s)
of the media; their various capacities to ‘influence’ viewers. Though in need
of intellectual re-invigoration, the reception approach has exerted a dynamic
and positive effect upon the ideas and methods of international media
research. I hope to have demonstrated how impossible it would now be for
media theory to retreat from it or ‘go round it’, despite the problems, the
wrong routes taken, the sometimes rather careless conceptualization. The only
way forward lies straight on and through.

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 15
On the Continuing Problem of
Media Effects'
Sonia Livingstone

The Scope and Context of Media Effects Research

Introduction
The mass media occupy a high proportion of our leisure time: people spend,
on average, 25 hours per week watching television,” and they also find time
for radio, cinema, magazines and newspapers. For children, watching televi-
sion takes up a similar amount of time to that spent at school or with family
and friends. While school, home and friends are all acknowledged as major
socializing influences on children, a huge debate surrounds the possible
effects of the mass media and findings both in favour and against effects
are controversial. The question of effects is typically raised with an urgency
deriving from a public rather than an academic agenda and with a simplicity
which is inappropriate to the complexity of the issue (we do not ask of other
social influences what is the effect of parents on children or do schools have
an effect which generalizes to the home or do friends have positive or
negative effects?).
The possibility of media effects is often seen to challenge individual
respect and autonomy, as if a pro-effects view presumes the public to be
a gullible mass, cultural dopes, vulnerable to an ideological hypodermic
needle, and as if television was being proposed as the sole cause of a range
of social behaviours. Such a stereotyped view of research tends to pose an
equally stereotyped alternative view of creative and informed viewers
making rational choices about what to see. Overview articles often describe
a history of progress over the past seventy years of research which alternates
between these two extremes — first we believed in powerful effects, then
came the argument for null effects, then the return to strong effects, etc. —a
history whose contradictions become apparent when old research is re-read
with new eyes. Contemporary media studies sometimes defines itself
through its rejection of the language of effects research — criticizing the
laboratory experiment, the logic of causal inference, and psychological
306 Sonia Livingstone

reductionism. This rejection is, I will suggest in this chapter, in part justified
and in part overstated.

The Effects Tradition

The ‘effects tradition’ focuses predominantly but not exclusively on the
effects of television rather than other media, on the effects on the child
audience especially, on the effects of violent or stereotyped programmes,
and on effects on individuals rather than on groups, cultures or institutions.
The question of media effects as more broadly understood includes relations
between media, politics and the public, the use of media for public health
campaigns or for propaganda or educational uses, among many other issues.
However, given the volume of research within the effects tradition as
narrowly defined, the present chapter will not include these broader issues.
Since the 1920s thousands of studies of mass media effects have been
conducted and I could exceed my allotted space merely listing the references
to the research conducted during the past ten years! Rather than aiming for
breadth, I will describe selected studies in depth to give a grounded sense of
the approaches taken by effects researchers. The reader may refer to the
excellent summaries of the field in Wartella (1991), Roberts and Bachen
(1981), Katz (1980), McQuail (1987). Critiques of effects research are
offered by McGuire (1986), Freedman (1984), Cumberbatch (1989a), Row-
land (1983), and Kubey and Cziksentmihalyi (1990), while arguments for
effects may be found in Comstock (1975), Stein and Friedrich (1975),
Andison (1977), and Bryant and Zillman (1986).
The sheer mass and variety of effects research makes comparisons across
studies difficult. Yet the numerous dimensions on which effects studies differ
can also serve to map out the parameters of the field. These include empirical
design (experimental, correlational, field study, etc.), and type of effect studied
(short-term or long-term effects, media-induced change or reinforcement
effects, effects on beliefs or behaviour, cognitions or emotions, etc.), target
population studied (children, adolescents, young offenders, etc.) and type of
media studied (films, violent cartoons, adverts, news reports, etc.). Differ-
ences between studies must also be understood in their historical context: the
media have themselves changed over the past 50 years of research, in terms of
technology, content, availability and relation to the changing practices of
everyday life.
Despite the volume of research, the debate about media effects — whether it
can be shown empirically that specific mass media messages, typically
those transmitted by television, have specific, often detrimental effects on the
audiences who are exposed to them — remains unresolved. This is partly
because the debate is more about the epistemological limitations of social
science research than it is about the media in particular, and partly because the
debate is motivated more by a public and governmental agenda of education,
censorship and regulation (Rowland, 1983) than by an academic agenda
concerning media theory (Roberts and Bachen, 1981).
 On the Continuing Problem of Media Effects 307

Media Effects: a Matter of Change or Reinforcement?

If by media effects we mean that exposure to the media changes people’s
behaviour or beliefs, then the first task is to see whether significant correla-
tions exist between levels of exposure and variations in behaviour or beliefs.
‘Change’ theories — on which this chapter will focus — generally presume that
the more we watch the greater the effect. Most research does show such a
correlation (Signorelli and Morgan, 1990), albeit a small and not always
consistent one. The next question concerns the direction of causality. For
example, having shown that those who watch more violent television tend to
be more aggressive (Huesmann, 1982), researchers must ask whether more
aggressive people choose to watch violent programmes (i.e. selective expo-
sure), whether violent programmes make viewers aggressive (i.e. media
effects), or whether certain social circumstances both make people more
aggressive and lead them to watch more violent television (i.e. a common
third cause). To resolve this issue, the effects tradition has generally adopted an
experimental approach, arguing that only in controlled experiments can
people be randomly assigned to experimental and control conditions, thereby
controlling for any other variables in the situation. Only then can causal
inferences be drawn concerning any observed correlation between the experi-
mental manipulation (generally media exposure) and resultant behaviour.
In research on media violence, some researchers offer a bidirectional
argument, concluding that there is evidence for both selective viewing and
media effects (Huesmann et al., 1984). Undoubtedly, many viewers choose
selectively to watch violent or stereotyped programmes (after all there has
always been a market for violent images). However, it does not necessarily
follow that there are no effects of viewing such programmes or that motivated
viewers can successfully undermine any possible effects. Many remain
concerned especially for the effects of violent programmes on children and
so-called vulnerable individuals, irrespective of whether they chose to watch
them.
However, if by media effects we mean that the media do not generate
specific changes but rather reinforce the status quo, then empirical demonstra-
tion of media effects becomes near impossible. It is difficult to know what
beliefs people might have espoused but for the media’s construction of a
normative reality, and difficult to know what role the media plays in the
construction of those needs and desires which in turn motivate viewers to
engage with the media as they are rather than as they might be. Nonetheless,
arguments that the media support the norm, suppress dissent and undermine
resistance, or remove issues from the public agenda, are central to theories of
ideology (Thompson, 1990), propaganda (Jowett and O’Donnell, 1986) and
cultivation (Gerbner et al., 1986; Noelle-Neumann, 1974). Similarly, it is
extremely difficult to test the argument that the media, in combination with
other social forces, bring about gradual social changes over the long term, as
part of the social construction of reality. Yet for many, these ‘drip, drip’
effects of the media are likely to exist, for television is ‘telling most of the
stories to most of the people most of the time’ (Gerbner et al., 1986: 18).
There are, then, difficulties in conducting empirical research on both change
and reinforcement conceptions of media effect. As we shall see, the findings
308 Sonia Livingstone

of the field are in many ways inconclusive. It has been argued, consequently,
that the media effects debate can never be resolved and so research should
cease. This raises two related questions. Firstly, can any general conclusions
be drawn from effects research to date concerning both the overall balance of
findings and promising future directions. Secondly, if the issue will not go
away — as the history of effects research and public concern throughout this
century suggests — how should the question of effects be reformulated?

The Contested Findings of Experimental Effects Research

The Classic Experiment

Let us first consider the prototypical effects study. As part of a series of
experiments during the 1960s, Bandura and colleagues (Bandura et al., 1961;
1963) investigated the notion that children imitate the behaviours they see on
television, particularly when enacted by admired role models or when the
behaviours viewed are rewarded. Four- to five-year-old children were shown a
five-minute film in the researcher’s office and then taken to a toy room and
observed for twenty minutes through a one-way mirror. Children had been
randomly assigned to watch one of three films, each involving a boy picking a
fight with another boy and attacking some toys. In the first, the attacker won
the fight and was rewarded by getting all the toys to play with; in the second,
the attacker is beaten by his opponent and is punished; in the third, the two
children play together with no aggression. In addition, a fourth group of
children was observed with no prior exposure to a film. The results showed
that those children, especially the boys, who had seen the rewarded aggressive
model spontaneously performed twice as much imitative aggression as all
other groups (including kicking a large ‘Bobo’ doll), but no more non-
imitative aggression. When interviewed afterwards, these children were
found to disapprove of the model’s behaviour and yet they were influenced
to imitate him because his aggression led to success.
Turner et al. (1986) argue that there are significant parallels between the
situation in Bandura’s experiment and that of the domestic viewing situation:
children may and often do identify with characters who are rewarded for their
aggression in television programmes. More aggressive children are more
likely to watch violent television (Huesmann and Eron, 1986), thus enhan-
cing the likelihood of an effect. Being arbitrarily provoked before viewing
also enhances the effect. Borden (1975) argues that such findings are an
artefact of the demand characteristics of the experiment (that children sense
what is expected of them and try to please), for children are more likely to
imitate the aggressive behaviour if an adult in the test situation is seen to
approve. Yet arguably, in the context of the playground, and sometimes in the
home, aggressive behaviour is indeed approved by others, especially by and
for boys. Does it make sense to suggest that the ‘real’ child has been taken
over by one influenced by social desirability if such influences also occur
elsewhere?
 On the Continuing Problem of Media Effects 309

What Kinds of Violence Portrayals are Effective?

As, increasingly, real television programmes, rather than artificial extracts,
are shown to viewers, questions about types of portrayal can be addressed.
The greatest antisocial effects are found to be associated with the news,
particularly the portrayal of justified and realistic violence with no negative
consequences (such as when police control a riot). Cartoons, containing no
justified violence and the negative consequences of aggression, are much less
effective (Hearold, 1986). Whether or not the consequences of violence are
shown — even if children can connect a portrayed action to its consequences
(Collins, 1983) — seems less important than whether the programme provides
a justification for the violence and whether the portrayal is realistic (Dorr,
1983; Hodge and Tripp, 1986). As there is some suggestion that these
conclusions are reversed for very young children, the need to differentiate
children of different ages is critical.

What About Positive Effects of Television?

The bulk of effects research is concentrated on harmful media effects, with
some exceptions (Davies, 1989). There are far fewer studies of the prosocial
eifects (such as helping, kindness, cooperation) which might result from
viewing positive images of social relations. Interestingly, the results for
such studies are far less controversial, although the same methodological
problems apply. Generally researchers conclude that while, unfortunately,
few prosocial television programmes exist, they have broadly beneficial
effects and these effects are more substantial than for harmful effects.
Comparing across many experiments, Hearold (1986) found that the overall
effect size is around an extra 20 per cent of antisocial responses following
violent or stereotyped content compared with an extra 50 per cent of prosocial
responses following prosocial content, after a single viewing session.

How Big are the Effects of Television?

Hearold (1986) conducted a meta-analysis of 1043 media effects reported in
230 studies with over 100,000 subjects over the past 60 years. In general, the
correlations between viewing and effect vary between 0.1 and 0.3. These are
small effects, and findings which meet the criteria for statistical significance
are not necessarily socially significant. It is a matter of judgement whether
effects which account for some 5 per cent of the variation in the behaviour
concerned are important or not and whether they are more or less important
than other factors. A satisfactory explanation of social _phenomena, such as
violence, stereotypes, consumerism or prejudice, will involve understanding
the combined and interactive effects of multiple factors, of which television
may be one such factor, although probably not a major one.

How Long Do the Effects Last?

Few experiments follow up media effects over time. Those which do tend to
show a drop in effect size of about one quarter over the two weeks following
310 Sonia Livingstone

exposure, but the effects are still present (Hearold, 1986). Hicks (1965)
showed that a Bandura-type experiment resulted in aggressive behaviours
being well remembered, although little performed, six months after view-
ing. However, given the daily nature of television exposure, one might argue
that persistent effects are less important than immediate and cumulative
effects. ;
One advantage of correlational studies is that, although they cannot easily
discriminate either causal direction or the operation of underlying causes, they
can follow up their respondents over several years. Eron et al. (1972),
Huesmann et al. (1984) and others generally show a positive correlation
between viewing at one time and aggression some years later, even when
parental, family, and socio-economic variables are taken into account.

Common Criticisms of Experimental Research

The artificiality of effects experiments has been heavily criticized (Cumber-
batch, 1989b; Freedman, 1984; Noble, 1975) — for example, for their use of
artificial stimuli rather than real programmes (which was especially true of
earlier but not of more recent studies), and for their measurement of short-
term effects, with few follow-up studies. The operationalization of dependent
measures — the definition of aggressive behaviour, the use of experimental
analogues of everyday aggression — is problematic, although Friedrich-Cofer
and Huston (1986) argue that studies which use observations of naturally
occurring interpersonal aggression find similar results to those which use
staged aggression (hit the ‘Bobo’ doll) or analogue aggression (push the
‘hurt’ button). There has been concern also about the ‘demand characteris-
tics’ of experiments, although Friedrich-Cofer and Huston (1986) report
evidence that the demand characteristics of the situation are more likely to
inhibit displays of aggression than promote them.
While the ‘artificiality’ of the experimental situation has come under fire,
the laboratory (in practice, typically a research office or playroom with one-
way mirror), like the living room or the classroom, is a social situation whose
dynamics and meanings must be considered (Wuebblen et al., 1974). Situa-
tions involving real people are only artificial in the sense that we live through
variously artificial situations in other areas of our lives, although of course the
experimental laboratory — as a social situation — is highly unusual. Given that
people act under certain constraints in every situation, usual or not, explana-
tion depends on clarifying in what ways the results obtained in an experiment
are a consequence of factors in the laboratory situation (intended or otherwise,
i.e. manipulated or confounding factors), and generalizability depends on how
far these same factors may occur or not in everyday life.

Can We Draw Any Conclusions?

Most reviews of the literature agree that viewers learn both prosocial and
antisocial attitudes and behaviour from television portrayals (Comstock and
Paik, 1991; Liebert et al., 1982; Roberts and Bachen, 1981; Rubinstein, 1983).
Children can learn new prosocial or aggressive behaviours from a single
 On the Continuing Problem of Media Effects 311
exposure; violence portrayed as punished is less likely to be imitated; violent
images in the news affect older children more, while younger children are
more affected by cartoons; boys, younger children and more aggressive
children are more influenced by antisocial content; and so forth. Most would
also agree that, having learned these behaviours, viewers can be shown to re-
enact these or related behaviours under experimental conditions.
However, none of this need imply, and it certainly does not show, that
beliefs or behaviours learned under experimental conditions can be general-
ized to viewers’ everyday lives, whether routinely or on occasion. Indeed,
results which are relatively consistent in the experimental literature have
generally been poorly replicated under naturalistic conditions, although
relatively few studies have attempted this. One might argue that in principle
the experiment is such an unusual situation that the results cannot be general-
ized (the most cynical would say that all children learn from experiments is
what researchers expect of them). Judgements differ over whether the social
characteristics of the experimental situation sufficiently parallel everyday
situations in which both viewing and aggression occur. This leads us then
to field experiments, which study the possible changes in children’s ordinary
behaviour as a result of an experimental intervention into an everyday setting,
and to naturalistic experiments, where real life, on occasion, provides the
conditions for an experimental test with no intervention required.

Different Research Designs, Different Results

A central problem for effects research is the lack, at least in contemporary

western society, of a group of people who have not been exposed to the media
in their lives but who in all other respects are similar to those who have been
exposed to the media. Cultivation analysis tries to overcome this problem by
comparing those who have watched a large amount of television compared
with those who have watched less television in their lives (Signorelli and
Morgan, 1990). One reason why experimental studies, especially field studies,
tend to show small effects is that only the effects of exposure to, typically, a
single programme can be tested against a control group who are not shown
that programme. Yet the everyday lives of both experimental and control
groups involve years of exposure to a similar television diet. Such a weak
manipulation of exposure differences is likely to underestimate rather than
overestimate effects:
if as we argue, the messages are so stable, the medium is so ubiquitous, and
accumulated total exposure is what counts, then almost everyone should be
effected . . . . It is clear, then, that the cards are stacked against finding evidence
of effects.
(Gerbner et al., 1986: 21)

With Whom Can We Compare Television Viewers: the Problem of

Control Groups
Interestingly, naturalistic experiments — studies with ‘real’ control groups
which were either conducted during the 1950s or on data from the 1950s —
312 Sonia Livingstone

tend to show rather minor effects, although of course, labelling effects as

‘minor’, especially when they are cumulative, is a matter of judgement about
what is socially important. Two kinds of study will be illustrated below: the
first involved analyses of social statistics from the 1950s; the second com-
pared those with and without television and was conducted during the 1950s.
Hennigan et al. (1982) reasoned that, if television violence was making its
audience more aggressive and violent, then this should be reflected in the
crime statistics. Fortunately for them, the introduction of television across
America during the 1950s was interrupted by the Federal Communications
Commission between 1949 and 1952, so that there existed cities equivalent in
other respects which gained television at different points in time. Analysis of
the crime statistics for both categories of city before and after the freeze on
introduction of television, showed no impact whatsoever on the incidence of
violent crimes. However, they found that:
in 1951, larceny increased in a sample of 34 cities where television had just been
introduced, relative to a sample of 34 cities where the FCC freeze prevented
access to television broadcasts. In 1955, larceny theft increased in the 34 cities
that had just gained access to television, relative to the 34 cities that had been
receiving broadcasts for several years.
(p. 473)

The observed increase was of the order of 5 per cent. They suggest that
explanations other than that of a media effect are hard to support. For
example, it may be that television content makes the police and public
more crime-conscious and so increases reported statistics, but why would
this occur just for property crime? Hennigan et al. (1982) explain their
findings by noting that the overwhelming majority of television programmes
portray middle-class characters enjoying comfortable material lifestyles while
poorer characters receive more negative portrayals. Combined with the expo-
sure to television advertising, they suggest an effect of increasingly materi-
alistic values, frustration at inequalities, and, for some, the resort to crime.
This explanation fits the findings of Himmelweit et al. (1958) from their
comparison of children with and without television, matched for age, sex,
social class and intelligence, during the 1950s. They also compared the
responses of a smaller sample in Norwich both before and one year after
the city received television transmission, again pairing those with and without
television. As a multimethod, naturalistic experiment conducted with nearly
2000 children, this study has been given considerable weight in the literature.
Yet the study did not find large effects. Of a range of findings, some key
points can be summarized. While they reported similar thoughts about jobs,
values and success before television entered their homes, after a year of
having television children reported more ambitions, more ‘middle-class’ job
values, and more concern with self-confidence and success than did the
control sample, although their actual job expectations were unchanged. The
lower ability 13-14-year olds, irrespective of social class, were most affected
in these values.
As fits the subsequent experimental findings that stereotyping effects are
stronger than aggression effects (Hearold, 1986), Himmelweit et al. (1982)
found no evidence that viewing made children more aggressive, but found that
 On the Continuing Problem of Media Effects 313
teenage girls became more concerned about marriage compared to those
without television. Younger and lower ability children were the only ones
to gain information from television while the schoolwork of brighter children
tended to fall behind, as in Gerbner et al.’s (1982) theory of mainstreaming.
Children with television stopped listening to the radio (this may no longer
apply now that audiences experience several media simultaneously), and they
read fewer books once they had acquired television (especially those of
medium ability). Children’s lives became more structured, with less hanging
around doing ‘nothing in particular’ and more time spent with their family.
This need not imply more togetherness, and again will change as families gain
_ multiple sets (Livingstone, 1992). :

Laboratory and Field Studies Compared

Following research such as that discussed above, the possibilities for natural
experiments all but disappeared as television became part of everyday life in
the west. Drawing conclusions from the more recent effects research is
problematic partly because laboratory and field experiments tell a different
story.
In her meta-analysis of numerous effects studies, Hearold (1986) examined
the relationship between research design and effect size. She judged every
study for its “ecological validity’ (or generalizability to everyday life), taking
into account the authenticity of the treatment, viewing and measurement
setting and outcome behaviour. Thus, Bandura’s ‘Bobo’ doll experiment
(Bandura et al., 1963) was considered low on ecological validity, while
Friedrich and Stein’s (1973) field experiment was considered high.
In this latter study, several complete syndicated television programmes
(violent, neutral or prosocial) were shown to different groups of children
over a four-week period, outcome behaviours were not direct modelling of
the programme but the naturalistic observation of a diverse set of anti-, and
prosocial behaviours during free play, and the settings for showing pro-
grammes and measuring outcomes were natural to the children (their nursery
classroom). However, the study showed no effects of television except that
children initially high in aggression remained aggressive and less self-con-
trolled if exposed to violent television but declined in aggression if they
watched neutral programmes. Thus the study provides clearer support for
reinforcement effects rather than for media-induced change.
Most of the studies re-analyzed by Hearold, contrary to common opinion,
made fair attempts at an ecologically valid design, but the more ecologically
valid studies also had lower internal validity (being less likely to have
random assignment to conditions, less control over external and confound-
ing variables, etc.). There is, consequently, a trade-off to be faced in
choosing between laboratory and field experiments. Most problematically,
Hearold found that, overall, the more ecologically valid the study the
smaller the effect size. Compared with the effect size for laboratory
experiments and for naturalistic correlational studies, the effect size for
field experiments is low for the effect of prosocial programmes on prosocial
314 Sonia Livingstone

behaviour, and it all but disappears for the effect of antisocial programmes
on antisocial behaviour. i :
We are faced with a less than ideal situation, as four incompati ble conclu-
sions could be drawn: that the laboratory experiment demonstrates the
existence of causal effects while the null effect of field experiments reflects
their poor design and conduct; that the laboratory experiment is too artificial
to be generalized to everyday life while the absence of effects under natur-
alistic conditions justifies this ‘no effects’ conclusion; that research findings
depend on the method used, so no general conclusions are justified and
researchers set out to show what they want to show; or that we can only
draw conclusions from studies designed to examine causal processes under
naturalistic conditions and so more and better field studies, with high internal
and external validity, must be conducted.

Aren’t All the Findings Contradictory?

Broad generalizations about the overall balance of evidence tend to be bland
and cautious. For example, as a broad generality, it is still true, over thirty
years later, that the fairest conclusion from research is that:
for some children, under some conditions, some television is harmful. For some
children under the same conditions, or for the same children under other
conditions, it may be beneficial. For most children, under most conditions,
most television is probably neither particularly harmful nor particularly benefi-
cial.
(Schramm et al., 1961: 11)

Twenty-five years after Schramm et al.’s conclusion, Huesmann and Mala-

muth (1986) concur with many other summaries of the field when they claim
that: “it seems fair to say that the majority of researchers in the area are now
convinced that excessive violence in the media increases the likelihood that at
least some viewers will behave more violently’ (p. 1) while ‘a significant
minority of dedicated researchers have remained unconvinced that media
violence significantly influences real life behaviour’ (p, 2). Yet many would
support Cumberbatch’s (1989a) claim that ‘little consensus exists . . . [and]
research which has examined audiences is rarely able to demonstrate clear
effects of the mass media’ (p. 1). Much hangs, of course, on Huesmann and
Malamuth’s qualification that effects are only more ‘likely’ for ‘some’, and on
Cumberbatch’s requirement that ‘clear’ effects must be demonstrated. The
apparent debate — over the balance of evidence for the effects of the media —
could be seen as relatively consensual, for many on both sides would probably
agree with Schramm et al.’s (1961) conclusion.
However, as I shall argue below, academic research on media effects is
often assessed against a political rather than a scientific agenda. This has
resulted in a double standard when assessing the literature: critics note the
many failings of media effects research while accepting many other, equally
dubious (or adequate) findings from social science. For example, is the
evidence for poverty as a cause of crime better in principle or practice than
that for television causing crime? There is also an interpretative bias among
critics such that results in favour of effects are scrutinized closely, whereas
 On the Continuing Problem of Media Effects 315
null effects are accepted at face value. Greenwald (1975) notes that while
biases in the research publication process mean that findings of media effects
are more likely to be published than null findings, this is because experiments
are heavily biased against finding effects, while null findings could indicate
methodological incompetence or invalidity rather than an absence of effect.
An unbiased assessment of the literature, therefore, would scrutinize both
positive and null findings, using similar criteria to those applied to other social
science domains, and would not draw conclusions on the basis of what one
wants to believe.
Effects research, like any other field in the social sciences, will not find the
single definitive study which resolves debate. We need, therefore, to draw
many diverse findings into a larger pattern and balance them against each
other by locating studies in their particular contexts. It is inappropriate to
suggest that, as findings contradict each other, empirical research can always
undermine itself and should be abandoned. Rather, apparently contradictory
findings can pinpoint loci for future research. For example, what does it tell us
that the findings for media effects differ for children of different ages or for
girls compared to boys or for different kinds of violent representations? The
challenge for research is to construct a more complex picture, drawing on
existing findings and based on the differences, contradictions and parallels
among diverse studies — treating these as informative — rather than attempting
to smooth over ‘confusing’ or ‘confounding’ differences in the construction of
a generalized conclusion.

Moral Panics about Media Effects

The bland and cautious conclusions which researchers offer regarding media
effects do not satisfy the strength of public feeling on the issue. There have
been moral panics about the power of the media throughout history (Pearson,
1983). Since the 1950s, many of these have focused on television and, latterly,
videos. While moral panics are not necessarily unfounded, in those triggered
by specific cases research tends not to support a strong link to the mass media
(although the emergence of a moral panic is itself a media effect that most
accept). Broader-based panics are also often unsupported by research. Him-
melweit et al. (1958) reported teachers’ belief that television made children
more tired, unimaginative, unable to concentrate and lacking in initiative, and
yet no such effects were found when those with and without television were
compared. Psychiatrists (Sims and Melville-Thomas, 1985) report that violent
offenders are often triggered to act by violent media images, yet Hagell
(1994) found few differences in the media consumption of offenders and
non-offenders. :
Arguably, the fervour and contention surrounding the interpretation of
effects findings derives not from genuine contention about those findings
but from the broader significance of the media effects debate in which the
mass media provide a scapegoat for cultural anxieties and for which the actual
evidence is almost irrelevant. For example, the concern over children and
television may reflect cultural pressures towards constructing childhood as a
316 Sonia Livingstone

period of innocence, as a private sphere of protected and uncontaminated

leisure in which children can acquire the moral strength to deal with society
and in which adults can ground their values and ideals (a related argument has
been made about women) (Holland 1992; Pearson, 1983). Adolescents, on the
boundary between child and adult, particularly require policing for the knowl-
edge they may acquire and the sexual or disruptive behaviours they may
enact. This connects with a further fear of the irrational masses, the suppo-
sedly growing and unstable underclass whose destructive tendencies must be
kept under control and not provoked (who must be ‘protected’. from them-
selves). All of these groups, it is feared, are especially influenced by emo-
tional and visual images, and, with the apparent loss of community and
tradition, are increasingly difficult to control. Middle-class, adult fears and
anxieties concerning ‘the other’ may be dictating an agenda of public policy
which finds it convenient to scapegoat the mass media.

Interdisciplinary Debates
Other debates can also be identified as motivating the strong feelings which
frame — and confuse — the media effects debate. Underlying the often intense
debate over the effects of the mass media is a debate about the relation
between academic research and public policy (Katz, 1978) and a related
debate about the epistemology of social science research (Gitlin, 1978).
Rowland (1983) traces the detailed history of relations between academic
effects research, government policy and funding, and public concern, This
history of debates over the administrative and epistemological frameworks for
communications research also can be understood as part of a broader
‘legitimate crisis’ for late twentieth-century social science (Habermas, 1988).
Part of the problem is one of disciplinarity. The effects tradition is largely a
social psychological one, meaning that it is concerned with phenomena at the
interface between the individual and society, typically construed as a concern
with the effects of social institutions on individuals, and with identifying a set
of causal processes proposed by ‘middle-range’ theories which may be
dependent upon, but not fundamentally constituted by, their social context.
While other traditions of both social psychology and media effects have and
continue to exist, the dominant tradition has shaped not only the field of
effects research but the emergent discipline of mass communications more
broadly. Hence many of the debates over effects are also (or, are really)
debates over the theories, methods, and assumptions of the discipline. Yet
for the educationalists, policy-makers, psychiatrists, lawyers, social workers
and parents who have an interest in media effects, the academic debate is
evidence of the failure of a discipline rather than of the fascinating negotiation
of a discipline’s form and focus.

Policy and Knowledge

Public debate about media effects is less concerned with what social science
actually shows and more concerned with which policies research may or may
 On the Continuing Problem of Media Effects 317
not support. Irrespective of the evidence, certain types of effects seem more
intuitively acceptable than others — for example, prosocial rather than anti-
social effects, or desensitization to violence rather than incitement to vio-
lence. There is similarly strong (or poor) evidence for each of these types of
effect, yet they are regarded differently depending on their policy implica-
tions. The liberal concern is that identifying television as a problem distracts
attention from real problems of social deprivation and inequality: the need to
improve the conditions of many children’s lives should not be obscured by
scapegoating television. Yet the complicated conclusion is that aggression and
crime, to take a common example, are multiply caused. Policies to alleviate
social deprivation need not necessarily undermine other policies addressing
the separate problem of media violence and its minor but not non-existent
impact on crime. In fact, probably rather few policy implications would
follow from identifying television as a cause of crime, while many follow
from a focus on poverty. Britain already has more media content regulation
than much of Europe, so the most one could do is maintain existing censorship
practices, establish media-literacy programmes in schools, persuade parents to
establish different domestic routines or appeal to the better instincts of
producers.
There are, moreover, difficulties in relating media effects research to the
legal, policy or political domain. Linz et al., (1986) note that research
generalizations concerning media violence and pornography, for example,
do not fit the legal arguments required to establish either that violent porno-
graphic materials should be censored, or that their producers/suppliers be held
liable for any violent acts which they may have incited. Social science cannot,
for ethical reasons, test whether exposure to media violence results in illegal
violent behaviour, only that it may result in aggressive behaviour analogous to
illegal behaviour. Nor can social scientists provide evidence concerning a
specific individual, only that concerning a class of individuals. Even if we had
a highly accurate test to identify individuals likely to aggress, it would falsely
identify a large number of ‘innocent’ individuals as well, making policy
intervention very difficult.

Where Next? The Future of Media Effects Research

So large a research field as that of media effects will inevitably pursue many
future directions at once, and it would be premature to speculate on their
likely success. In this final section I will discuss two possibilities. The first is to
draw on a currently lively domain of audience research, that of audience
reception (see also Corner, this volume), and develop links with media
effects. The second is to call for more, and more complex, research on media
effects, of either similar or new kinds.

Audience Interpretations and Media Effects

The ways in which viewers selectively interpret what they see, depending on
their own experiences and sociocultural background (Livingstone, 1990;
318 Sonia Livingstone

Morley, 1992), is often taken to undermine media effects. While audience

reception research has yet to establish how and when programmes constrain
viewers’ selections and interpretations, it is argued that the relative freedom
of viewers to make sense of television in different ways has substantial
implications for media effects (Katz, 1980). Text analysts do not, indeed
cannot, have an authoritative view of the text: one analyst argues that the
western is about violence, for another westerns are about family and commu-
nity loyalty. Which effects one should measure depends on audience inter-
pretations of the genre, and whether these concern violence or the
reinforcement of traditional values.
Sense-making depends on the domestic viewing context. One million
Americans were terrified into believing that the Martians were taking over
New Jersey after the broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, partly
because they did not hear the opening announcement of the drama and so
interpreted the programme as an extended emergency news report (Cantril,
1940). As viewers increasingly watch bits of programmes across multiple
channels (Newcomb, 1988), the carefully constructed meanings of whole
programmes (for example, the final punishment meted out to the bad guys
which provides a moral framework for a crime film) may not actually be
watched.
However, the argument for active viewing should not allow us to conclude
that responsibility for viewing lies solely with the audience (as broadcasters
would like to argue). Viewers may not relate to programmes for the same
reasons that researchers or the public may be concerned about them. For
example, boys may enjoy action adventure for its excitement, fast cutting
and male heroes, and yet be affected by the message that conflicts are best
resolved through aggression rather than negotiation, or that women can only
admire from the sidelines. The identity needs of young boys may make them
select programmes with heroic role models, but this need not imply a
psychological or cultural predisposition to the violence or sexism which
accompanies these role models in the programmes.
The need to understand how audiences make sense of television is parti-
cularly important in relation to children. Both research (Huesmann and
Malamuth, 1986) and common sense suggest that habits and ideas learned
early in life are self-perpetuating and so disproportionately influence future
development. Yet children’s resources for making sense of television — in
terms of both comprehension and interpretation — are very different from
those of adults and vary considerably according to the development of the
child. For example, children younger than about 7/8 years old do not share an
adult understanding of narrative, genre, reality and fantasy (Collins, 1983;
Dorr, 1986). Adult arguments about the narrative, generic or fantastic framing
of programme events such as violence bear little relation to children’s actual
understanding of and interest in what they view (Hodge and Tripp, 1986). ©

Linking Interpretations and Effects: An Example

Philo (1990) explored the contribution of media representations to diverse
audiences’ understandings of the British miners’ strike of 1984/5. The news
 On the Continuing Problem of Media Effects 319
concentrated overwhelmingly on portraying the strikers as violent, and half of
those interviewed believed that the picketing was violent, giving the news as
the source for their beliefs. Yet all those with personal experience of the
strike, whether on the side of miners or police, agreed that the strike was
mainly peaceful. Philo argues that, in common with other studies of the news
audience, people rapidly forget the facts, the details of date, number, location
etc. (Graber, 1988), yet they learn and apply the explanatory frameworks
provided by the news unless they have contradictory personal experience.
However, as only half of the sample believed the picketing to be violent, an
alternative explanation may focus on the prior differences (e.g. political
beliefs) between those who did and did not believe the picketing to have
been violent (Cumberbatch et al., 1986). These researchers may offer compa-
tible suggestions: neither political beliefs nor personal experience account for
all the variation in viewers’ judgements of the strikes, and so both may play a
role in mediating media effects, for both provide viewers with interpretative
frameworks which are compatible with or which contradict the media repre-
sentation, and which may therefore either reinforce or undermine media
effects. The data, as always, underdetermine the theory.
However, selective viewers must get their cultural frameworks from some-
where. While it has proved difficult to demonstrate that the media does affect
our interpretative frameworks, it is also difficult to construct an argument
about the origins of these frameworks which does not involve the media, for
the media have permeated most if not all aspects of everyday life, and sources
_ of symbolic culture are ever less separable from one another. To argue that
viewers routinely test media representations against personal experience is to
assume that experience is itself unmediated. Yet most domestic and many
workplace experiences are permeated by the mass media. Parents relate to
children in front of the television, they discuss politics or morals or decisions
in the context of television images and often as stimulated by a television
agenda (Liebes, 1992). Schools increasingly incorporate television into class-
room activities, legitimating it as a source of information.

The Call for More Studies

Following the apparent inconclusiveness of effects research, two implications
are commonly drawn. Although these are apparently opposing, in fact they
converge. The first suggests that we should stop doing effects research and
instead ask different, more interesting, more productive questions. The second
suggests that we should do more, and better, effects research. Both responses
acknowledge that simple questions are inappropriate, and that simple answers
to complex questions have not been and are unlikely to be forthcoming.
However, if we search for complex answers to complex questions, we must
accept a considerable distance between the ‘findings’ of social scientific
research and the ‘conclusions’ desired by policy-makers and the public. _
For those developing the effects tradition, the questions can be easily laid
out. There is a need for more cross-cultural research, as most studies are
American, and so the generality of findings to countries with different media
and cultural histories is in question. There is a need for a closer look at
320 Sonia Livingstone

problematic findings: for example, many studies of the antisocial effects of

violent content show clearer or stronger findings for boys than for girls,
without asking what is going on for the girls (the reverse is true for prosocial
effects; Hearold, 1986). There is a need for better methodologies: field
experiments conducted with better experimental controls and a longer fol-
low-up period would, for many, provide the most convincing evidence,
whether it turned out to be for or against effects. There is a need for
replication as much effects research is dated: children brought up in the
1990s, indeed, the media themselves, are very different from children, and
media, in the 1970s or the 1950s. There is a need for a more integrated
approach, combining the many relevant variables rather than selecting only
a few for investigation. There is a need for better theory, so that we are no
longer faced with choosing between bottom-up models which combine
numerous variables in an apparently ad hoc manner or a plethora of mid-
dle-range theories such as agenda setting, the spiral of silence, cultivation
analysis, knowledge gap theory, and so forth (Fejes, 1984; McQuail and
Windahl, 1982) whose mutual relations have not been worked out. And so
forth.
For other research traditions, asking new questions involves the rejection of
the effects paradigm, as narrowly defined. Such approaches assert that the
search for simple cause-effect links is inappropriate in media studies, for one
should expect (rather than control for) diversity and variation in social
phenomena, and these should be discovered using naturalistic methods. The
starting point here is that the media and everyday culture are mutually
defining and interdependent rather than independent determinants of social
behaviour.
Those working in the ethnographic tradition (Bausinger, 1984; Silverstone,
1994), in the uses and gratifications tradition (Rosengren et al., 1985), in the
audience reception tradition (Livingstone, 1990; Morley, 1992) would all
make such arguments, claiming that it is the particularity and diversity of
specific daily practices, subcultural interpretations, patterns of media involve-
ment, that are significant, and that such specific practices, interpretations and
patterns can only be understood through the local cultural contexts in which
they are observed. For example, there may be a public concern about the
effects of violent content on children, but such researchers (and, indeed, many
of those in the effects tradition) would resist the attempt to offer any general
conclusions. Any ‘effects’ would depend on the type of effects (e.g. fear,
aggression, understanding), on the significance of the effects (long- or short-
term, small or large), on the particular children (vulnerable or not, boys or
girls, different ages or cultural/economic backgrounds), on the media content
(cartoons, the news, films, comics, pornography), on the mode of involvement
(active or passive, fan or casual viewer, playful or serious), and so on.
These researchers are, nonetheless, still motivated by an underlying con-
cern with effects, although this may be masked by use of implicit rather than
explicit causal claims (e.g. arguments for the construction of reality, media
shaping, or media-related changes). For example, the suggestion that sub-
cultures re/generate their own meanings to resist dominant meanings of
television and to facilitate oppositional uses of media is implicitly an anti-
effects argument. Yet we do not know how much and under what circum-
 On the Continuing Problem of Media Effects 321
stances subcultures resist or reinterpret compared with joining in with
normative or mainstreaming processes.
Most media researchers believe that the media have significant effects, even
though they are hard to demonstrate, and most would agree that the media
make a significant contribution to the social construction of reality. The
problem is to move beyond this platitude. Katz (1980) advocates contextua-
lizing relations between media and audiences in terms of active viewers, the
primary group, everyday contexts of conversation, etc. He argues not that the
multiplicity of factors which mediate between television and viewers under-
mine media effects but rather that it is only through such complex mediations
that any effects could occur at all. On this view, the study of effects
necessarily involves the study of active audiences, interpretative commu-
nities, parent-child relations, living-room culture, developmental processes,
historically changing media cultures, and so forth.
Part of the continued concern with media effects, aside from the occasional
moral panics engendered around key issues (censorship, parental responsi-
bility, new media, etc.), is a concern with changing cultural understandings
and practices. In other words, the effects many believe exist are different from
those we have been seeking. Maybe it is time to accept that violent images, for
example, have in general little direct effect on viewers’ actions, and time for
more research on the enculturating role of the media — the (changing)
contribution of media to culture, how the media construct and validate
certain audience desires over others (especially for those for whom iden-
tity-definition is fluid, such as children and adolescents), how the media
serve to legitimate violent solutions, the celebration of an aggressive mascu-
linity and a passive femininity, the relentless promotion of consumerism as
necessary for well-being and social identity, the symbolic annihilation of
diverse or dissident representations of political strategies or subcultural
interests.
Many of these questions have been examined in terms of media content;
recently, there is a growing body of work on the often unexpected and
complex relation between content and audience reception; more recently
still, there are in-depth studies of the role of television in the practices and
assumptions of everyday life. However, we lack an adequate theorization of
the link between this work and the (reconceptualized) question of effects. The
study of enculturation processes, which work over long time periods, and
which are integral to rather than separable from other forms of social
determination, would ask not how the media make us act or think but rather
how the media contribute to making us who we are.

Notes

1 I would like to thank the many colleagues and students with whom I have
discussed the ideas expressed in this chapter. ;
2 Source: BARB, cited in The Guardian, January 23, 1995.
322 Sonia Livingstone

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 16
Gender and/in Media
Consumption
len Ang and Joke Hermes

Introduction

In the evening [Mr Meier] gets involved in conversation, otherwise he would at

least have watched the regional news; so he does not see the results again until
after the news. In a way he wanted to go to bed early, and that is what he told his
wife. But now he has a faint hope of being able to see the Mueller goal on the
Second Channel sports programme. However he would have to switch channels.
He tells his wife she looks tired. She is surprised he cares, but she does go up to
bed. He fetches a beer from the kitchen. Unfortunately his wife comes back to get
a drink. Suddenly the penny drops. ‘My God! The sports programme! That’s why
you sent me to bed!’ He doesn’t want to get involved, and quickly goes to the
toilet. In the meantime it happens. His wife shouts, ‘Hey Max Schmeling is on!’
He doesn’t react. He can’t stand Schmeling because he has something to do with
Coca-Cola. He deliberately doesn’t hurry. When he comes back United’s game is
in progress. He is just in time to see the second, rather third-rate, goal. (...) In
the afternoon (the next day) a neighbour tells him that his club has lost again,
which is what he thought anyway, because when there is no wind he can hear the
crowd in the stadium from the balcony and there has been no shouting. He goes
for a walk with his wife and their younger children; some acquaintances delay
him. When he comes home his elder son is watching the sports review after
having slept till midday. Meier gets angry because he has wasted his day, and
even more so when his son asks, ‘Have you heard, United won 2-0!’ As if he was
an idiot! He gives his son the Bild, and the son says, ‘I thought you didn’t read
that.’ Offended, the father goes to his room, while the mother sits down next to
her eldest son and watches the sports programme with him. It does not interest
her, but it is an attempt at making contact.
(Bausinger, 1984: 348-49)

This fascinating ethnographic account of the Meier family’s dealings with the
weekend sports coverage clarifies the thoroughly convoluted and circumstan-
tial way in which concrete practices of media consumption are related to
gender. Mr Meier, the male football fan, ends up not watching his favourite
team’s game on television, while his wife, who doesn’t care for sports, finds
326 Jen Ang and Joke Hermes

herself seating herself in front of the TV set the very moment the sports
programme is on. Gender is obviously not a reliable predictor of viewing
behaviour here. The scene illuminates the fact that media consumption is a
thoroughly precarious practice, structured not by psychological or sociologi-
cal predispositions of individual audience members but by the dynamic and
contradictory goings-on of everyday life. The way gender is implicated in this
practice is consequently equally undecided, at least outside of the context in
which the practice takes concrete shape.
How gender is related to media consumption is one of the most under-
theorized questions in mass communication research. In this article, we hope
to offer some theoretical clarification about this important question. As
Liesbet van Zoonen (in this volume) has pointed out, work in this area has
until now almost exclusively concentrated on women, not men, and media
consumption. This bias unwittingly reflects a more general bias in society, in
which women are defined as the problematic sex (Coward, 1983). This is a
pity, since not only femininity but also masculinity has recently been subject
of increasingly critical inquiry (Kaufman, 1987; Seidler, 1989). More impor-
tantly, we will argue here that limiting ourselves to women audiences as an
empirical starting point for analysis would risk reproducing static and essen-
tialist conceptions of gender identity. While much work in this area, most of it
feministically inspired, has provided us with extremely useful insights into
women’s media uses and interpretations, we would argue that it is now time to
develop a mode of understanding that does more justice to variability and
precariousness in the ways in which gender identities — feminine and mascu-
line subjectivities — are constructed in the practices of everyday life in which
media consumption is subsumed. In our view, recent poststructuralist feminist
theory can help us conceptualize more properly how gender might be articu-
lated in practices of media consumption. In other words, this article’s main
argument is that the subject of gender and media consumption should be
rephrased in gender in media consumption.

The Academic Emancipation of Female Audiences

Feminist critics have displayed continuous concern about the relation of

gender and media consumption. The concern has often focused upon the
supposedly detrimental effects of popular media forms on women’s con-
sciousness. More specifically, the popularity among women of specifically
‘feminine’ genres such as soap operas and romance novels has often been
explained in terms of their ‘fit’ with women’s subordinate position in society.
Early feminist accounts of women’s media consumption are full of renditions
reminiscent of the crude, hypodermic needle model of media effects. In The
Female Eunuch, for example, Germaine Greer (1971) bitingly criticizes
romance novels for reinforcing a kind of ‘false consciousness’ among their
women readers:
It is a male commonplace that women love rotters but in fact women
are
hypnotized by the successful man who appears to master his fate; they long
to
give their responsibility for themselves into the keeping of one who can
admin-
 Gender and/in Media Consumption 327
ister it in their best interests. Such creatures do not exist, but very young women
in the astigmatism of sexual fantasy are apt to recognize them where they do not
exist. . . Although romance is essentially vicarious the potency of the actual
fantasy distorts actual behaviour. The strength of the belief that a man should be
stronger and older than his woman can hardly be exaggerated.
(Greer, 1971: 180)
In a similar but more earnest fashion, Sue Sharpe (1976) and Gaye Tuchman
et al. (1978) see the mass media as a major cause of the general reproduction
of patriarchal sexual relationships. Sharpe (1976: 119) posits that
‘[t]hroughout the media, girls are presented in ways which are consistent
with aspects of their stereotyped images, and which are as equally unrealistic
and unsatisfactory’, while Tuchman (1978: 6) proposes that, since mass media
images are full of traditionalist and outmoded sex-role stereotypes, they will
inevitably socialize girls into becoming mothers and housewives, because
“girls in the television audience “model” their behaviour on that of “tele-
vision women”’’.
Sustaining such early accounts are two related, unwarranted assumptions:
first, that mass media imagery consists of transparent, unrealistic messages
about women whose meanings are clearcut and straightforward; second, that
girls and women passively and indiscriminately absorb these messages and
meanings as (wrong) lessons about ‘real life’. These assumptions have been
considerably surmounted in later work, whose development can be character-
ized as gradually eroding the linear and monolithic view of women as
unconditional victims of sexist media. This happened first of all through
more theoretically sophisticated forms of textual analysis. Rather than seeing
media images as reflecting ‘unrealistic’ pictures of women, feminist scholars
working within structuralist, semiotic and psychoanalytic frameworks have
begun to emphasize the ways in which media representations and narratives
construct a multiplicity of sometimes contradicting cultural definitions of
feminity and masculinity, which serve as subject positions that spectators
might take up in order to enter into a meaningful relationship with the texts
concerned (see e.g. Mulvey, 1975, 1990; Kuhn, 1982; Modleski, 1982; Cow-
ard, 1984; De Lauretis, 1984; Moi, 1985; Doane, 1987; Baehr and Dyer, 1987;
Pribram, 1988; Gamman and Marshment, 1988; and many others). These
studies are important because they pay more detailed attention to the parti-
cular textual mechanisms that are responsible for engendering spectator
identifications.
For example, in her influential analysis of American daytime soap operas,
Tania Modleski (1982) concludes that the soap opera’s narrative character-
istics construct a textual position for viewers that can be described as follows:
The subject/spectator of soap operas . . . is constituted as a sort of ideal mother,
a person who possesses greater wisdom than all her children, whose sympathy is
large enough to encompass the conflicting claims of her family (she identifies
with them all), and who has no demands or claims of her own (she identifies with
no one character exclusively ... The spectator/mother, identifying with each
character in turn, is made to see ‘the large picture’ and extend her sympathy to
both the sinner and the victim . . . By constantly presenting her with the many-
sidedness of any question, by never reaching a permanent conclusion, soap operas
undermine her capacity to form unambiguous judgments.
(Modleski, 1982: 92-93)
328 Jen Ang and Joke Hermes

Here, a much more intricate and complex analysis is given of the textual
operations of a popular genre such as the soap opera. Soap operas do not
simply reflect already existing stereotypical images of women, but actively
produce a symbolic form of feminine identity by inscribing a specific subject
position — that of the ‘ideal mother’ — in its textual fabric.
However, while such analyses of gendered spectatorship have provided us
with better insight into the way in which media texts address and interpellate
their viewers/readers, they generally do not problematize the way in which
concrete viewers actually confront such interpellations. In fact, Modleski
seems to imply that the ‘ideal mother’ position is an inescapable point of
identification for soap opera viewers in their sensemaking of the genre.
Indeed, as Robert C. Allen (1985: 94) has suggested, ‘although Modleski
seems to present the mother/reader as a textually inscribed position to be
taken up by whoever the actual reader happens to be, she comes close at times
to conflating the two’. In other words, text-oriented feminist analyses have
often run the risk of being reductionist in their theoretical generalizations
about gender and media consumption, a reductionism that stems from insuffi-
ciently distinguishing semiological and sociological levels of analysis. In the
useful terminology of Annette Kuhn (1984), what is conflated here is the
analysis of spectatorship, conceived as a set of subject positions constructed
in and through texts, and the analysis of social audiences understood as the
empirical social subjects actually engaged in watching television, filmgoing,
reading novels and magazines, and so on.
Janice Radway (1984) has been one of the first to recognize the pitfalls of
textual reductionism. In her well-known study Reading the Romance, she
claims that ‘the analytic focus must shift from the text itself, taken in
isolation, to the complex social event of reading . . . in the context of ...
ordinary life’ (1984: 8). In her view, then, textual analysis needs to be
complemented by inquiry into how female audiences ‘read’ texts. In such a
perspective, socially situated women are given some maneouvre space in their
dealings with media texts; their responses cannot be deduced from textual
positionings. ‘Reading’ is itself an active, though not free, process of con-
struction of meanings and pleasures, a ‘negotiation’ between texts and readers
whose outcome cannot be dictated by the text (Hall, 1982; Gledhill, 1988).
This line of argument foregrounds the relevance of ‘ethnographic’ work with
and among empirical audiences.
A more extensive review of this ethnographic move in the study of media
audiences is given elsewhere in this volume (e.g. the chapters by Livingstone,
Corner, Fiske). In this context, it is sufficient to highlight the value of what is
now commonly called ‘reception analysis’ by pointing at a recent study by
Ellen Seiter et al. (1989). Through extensive interviews with female soap
opera viewers in Oregon, Seiter et al. have unearthed a much more ambiguous
relationship of viewers with the position of the ‘ideal mother’ which Modleski
deems essential to the soap opera’s textual operations. While the taking-up
of
this position could indeed be recognized in the responses of some of
Seiter et
al.’s middle-class, college-educated informants, it was consciously resisted
and vehemently rejected by most of the working-class women interviewees.
Their findings have led Seiter et al. to draw the following conclusion:
 Gender and/in Media Consumption 329
The ‘successful’ production of the (abstract and ‘ideal’) feminine subject
is
restricted and altered by the contradictions of women’s own experiences.
Class, among other factors, plays a major role in how our respondents make
sense of the text. The experience of working-class women clearly conflicts in
substantial ways with the soap opera’s representation of a woman’s problems,
problems some women identified as upper or middle-class. (.. . ) One of the
problems with the spectator position described by Modleski is that the ‘ideal
mother’ implies a specific social identity — that of a middle-class woman, most
likely with a husband who earns a family wage. This textual position is not easily
accessible to working-class women, who often formulate criticism of the soap
opera on these grounds.
(Seiter et al., 1989: 241)

This insightful juxtaposition of textual analysis and reception analysis makes

clear that textually inscribed feminine subject positions are not uniformly and
mechanistically adopted by socially situated women viewers/readers. Textual
generalizations about ‘the female spectator’ turn out to foreclose prematurely
the possibility of empirical variations and heterogeneity within actual
women’s responses. Reception analysis makes clear however that women
audiences do indeed actively negotiate with textual constructions and inter-
pellations in such a way that the meanings given to texts — and consequently
the positions eventually taken up by viewers/readers — are brought in accor-
dance with the women’s social and subjective experiences. As a result,
differences in readings between women with different social positions are
brought to the surface.
In summary, then, feminist work addressing issues of gender and media
consumption has evolved considerably from the early emphasis on ‘unrea-
listic’ images of women and their inevitably conservative effects on female
audiences. The assumption of a priori, monolithic reproduction of sexism and
patriarchy has gradually made way to a view in which the media’s effectivity
is seen as much more conditional, contingent upon specific — and often
contradictory — textual mechanisms and operations on the one hand,’ and
upon the active and productive part played by female audiences in construct-
ing textual meanings and pleasures on the other. The latter trend, especially,
has solicited a more optimistic stance towards women’s role as media
consumers: they are no longer seen as ‘cultural dupes’, as passive victims
of inexorably sexist media; on the contrary, media consumption can even be
considered as empowering (although never unproblematically), in so far as it
offers audiences an opportunity for symbolic resistance to dominant meanings
and discourses and for implicit acknowledgement of their own social sub-
ordination (cf. Brown, 1990).
If early feminist criticism felt comfortable to speak authoritatively for the
‘silent majority’ of women, the more recent work is characterized by an
awareness of the necessity to let ‘other’ women speak. If anything, this
development signals a growing awareness among feminists of the proble-
matic relationship between feminism and women (Ang, 1988). As a political
discourse, feminism in whatever form (see van Zoonen, in this volume) has
generally postulated an ideal of the feminist subject, fully committed to the
cause of social change and ‘women’s liberation’. However, in the face of the
tenacious resistance displayed by large groups of women against feminist
330 Jen Ang and Joke Hermes

politics (think only of the pro-life movement in the United States) it is clear
that feminism cannot presume to possess the one and only truth about women.
Indeed, as Angela McRobbie has pointed out, ‘to make such a claim is to
uncritically overload the potential of the women’s movement and to under-
estimate the resources and capacities of “ordinary” women ( ... ) to
participate in their own struggles as women but quite autonomously’
(McRobbie, 1982: 52). It is recognition of this that has led to the increasing
popularity of validating — and sometimes celebrating — ‘ordinary’ women’s
experiences through research, including their experiences as audiences for
media and popular culture.
We do not wish to enter into the debate whether this move towards
emphasis on audience creativity, which has been a more general recent trend
within contemporary cultural studies, should be seen as ‘encouraging cultural
democracy at work’ (Fiske, 1987: 286) or as researchers’ wish fulfilment
(Gitlin, in this volume; see also Morris, 1988). Instead, we would like to
take a step back and look more dispassionately at some of the theoretical
absences in the trajectory that work on gender and media consumption has
taken so far. In doing this, we do not aim to retreat from politics; rather, we
intend to complicate the political dilemma invoked here — a dilemma framed
by van Zoonen in this volume in terms of the dangers of relativism and
populism — through a radical denaturalization of the ways that ‘gender’ and
‘media consumption’ have commonly been coupled together in research
practice. We will come back to the political issue in our postscript, in which
we will defend our commitment to a radically postmodern approach to
(feminist) politics, and the role of particularistic ethnographic work therein.

The Dispersion of ‘Women’

Let us return, for the sake of argument, to Seiter et al.’s project on women
soap opera viewers. In this project, working-class women emerge as being
more critical or resistant to the preferred meanings proposed by soap opera
narratives than middle-class women (although they were found to express
their criticisms in limited and apologetic ways, e.g. in terms of lack of realism
and escapism) (Seiter et al., 1989: 241/2). In other words, the project shows
that, at the empirical level, women cannot be considered as a homogeneous
category: class makes a difference.
However, one could cast doubt on the interpretive validity of the differ-
entiations made by Seiter et al., based as they are on macro-structural,
sociological criteria (i.e. social class). Although these authors are careful in
not overgeneralizing their data, there are problems with their correlating
different types of reading with the different class backgrounds of their
informants. For example, in another account of differences between work-
ing-Class and middle-class women watching soap operas, Andrea Press (1990)
seems to contradict Seiter et al.’s interpretations. Drawing her conclusions
from interviews with female viewers of the prime-time soap opera Dynasty
Press finds that it is middle-class women who are the more critical viewers.
While working-class women speak very little of differences between
the
 Gender and/in Media Consumption 331
Dynasty characters and themselves — which in Press’ view indicates their
acceptance of the realism of the Dynasty text — middle-class viewers ‘con-
sciously refuse to be taken in by the conventions of realism which characterise
this, like virtually all, prime-time television shows’ (Press, 1990: 178).
Although Press too is reluctant to overgeneralize, she does in her conclusions
emphasize ‘the difference between middle-class women, who invoke [ideol-
ogies of femininity and the family] in order to criticize the show’s characters
in their discussions, and working-class women, who invoke them only to
affirm the depictions they view’ (Press, 1990: 179/80). This conclusion is at
odds with Seiter et al.’s, who contrarily found their working-class informants
to be very critical of the discrepancy between textual representation and their
_ personal experience.
In this context, it is impossible to explain satisfactorily the apparently
contradictory conclusions of these two research projects, although several
considerations present themselves as possible factors: differences in opera-
tionalization of social class; differences in locality (Press conducted her
interviews in the San Francisco Bay Area), representational differences
betweeen day-time and prime-time soap operas, differences in interview
guidelines, differences in theoretical preoccupations in interpreting the tran-
scripts, and so on.
At the very least, however, the contradiction highlights the ability of too
easily connecting particular instances of meaning attribution to texts with
socio-demographic background variables. Particular accounts as dug up in
reception analysis are typically produced through researchers’ staged con-
versations with a limited number of women, each of them marked by
idiosyncratic life histories and personal experiences. Filtering their responses
— the transcripts of what they said during the interviews — through the
pregiven categories of ‘working-class’ or ‘middle-class’ would necessarily
mean a reductionist abstraction from the undoubtedly much more complex
and contradictory nature of these women’s reception of soap operas. An
abstraction which is produced by the sociologizing perspective of the
_ researchers, for whom sociological categorizations such as working-class
and middle-class serve as facilitating devices for handling the enormous
amount of interview material this kind of research generally generates.
What we are objecting to here is not the lack of generalizability that is so
often levelled at qualitative empirical research conducted with small samples.
If anything, the richness of data produced in this kind of research only
clarifies the difficulty, if not senselessness, of the search for generalizations
that has long been an absolute dogma in positivist social research.” Nor do we
object to these researchers’ endeavours to understand the way in which class
position inflects women’s reception of media texts. On the contrary, we
greatly welcome such attempts to place practices of media consumption
firmly within their complex and contradictory social contexts (we will return
_ to this issue below).
What we do want to point to however is the creeping essentialism that lurks
behind the classificatory move in interpreting certain types of response as
originating from either working-class or middle-class experience. Such a
move runs the danger of reifying and absolutizing the differences found,
resulting — in the long run — in the construction of a simple opposition
332 Jen Ang and Joke Hermes

between two discrete class and cultural formations. Consequently, as John

Frow (1987) has commented in relation to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) important
contribution to the sociology of taste distinctions, class experience comes to
be considered as ‘inevitably and inexorably entrapped within the cultural
limits imposed on it’ (Frow, 1987: be “
Pushed to its logical extreme, this would not only lead to the positing of
fixed differences between working-cl ass women and middle-cla ss women, but
also the projection of unity and coherence in the responses of the two groups
(although neither Seiter et al. nor Press make any explicit gestures in this
direction). In our view, this form of social determinism implies a premature
explanatory closure, which precludes recognition of multiplicity and trans-
gression in the way women belonging to both groups can make sense of
media. Thus, inconsistencies and variances within informants’ accounts —
familiar to any researcher who has worked with depth-interview transcripts
— remain unaccounted, or are even actively repressed.* But differences
between women are not so neatly categorizable as the sociological picture
would suggest. On the contrary, the closer we look, the more likely we are to
find complexity and contradiction in any one response.
Again, our critique is not meant to imply a denial of the existence of class
differences. What we do want to question, however, is ‘our ability to decide
ahead of time the pertinence of such differences within the study of the
effectivity of cultural practices’ (Grossberg, 1988b: 388). Thus, rather than
treating class position as an isolatable ‘independent variable’ predetermining
cultural responses, it could best be seen as a factor (or vector) whose impact
as a structuring principle for experience can only be conceptualized within the
concrete historical context in which it is articulated. Class never fully contains
a social subject’s identity. Otherwise we can never account for either variety
or change and disruption in the social experience and consciousness of people,
as well as for the possibility of experiences that cut across class-specific lines,
in which class is of secondary, if not negligible relevance.
As for class (or, for that matter, race or ethnicity), so for gender, as we have
noted earlier, most research that sets out to examine gender and media
consumption has concentrated exclusively on women audiences. What is
implicitly taken for granted here is that gender is a given category, that
people are always-already fully in possession of an obvious gender identity:
women are women and men are men. Even the tentative but laudable attempts
to do justice to differences between women (as in terms of class) do not go as
far problematizing the category of ‘women’ itself. As a result, as Virginia
Nightingale has remarked, studies of women as audiences are undergirded by
the basic assumption of women as ‘objectifiable, somehow a unified whole, a
group. The qualities that divide women, like class, ethnicity, age, education,
are always of less significance than the underlying qualities attributed to
women, such as the inability to know or say what they want, the preoccupa-
tion with romance and relationships, the ability to care for, to nurture, others’
(Nightingale, 1990: 25). Or, as Annette Kuhn has put it, ‘the notion of a
female social audience ( ... ) presupposes a group of individuals already
formed as female’ (Kuhn, 1984: 24).
Such a presumption is troublesome for both political and theoretical
reasons. Not only does exclusive concentration on women as
audiences
 Gender and/in Media Consumption 333
unwittingly reproduce the patriarchal treatment of Woman as the defined (and
_ thus deviant) sex and Man as the invisible (and thus normal) sex — in this
sense, Andrew Ross’ (1989) call for a properly audience-oriented study of
pornography as a traditional ‘men’s genre’ is long overdue;> more fundamen-
tally, the a priori assumption that there is a continuous field of experience
shared by all women and only by women tends to naturalize sexual difference
_ and to universalize culturally constructed and historically specific definitions
of femininity and masculinity.
The commonsense equation that women are women because they are
women is in fact an empiricist illusion. As Denise Riley has forcefully argued:

‘[W]omen’ is historically, discursively constructed, and always relatively to other

categories which themselves change; ‘women’ is a volatile collection in which
female persons can be very differently positioned, so that the apparent continuity
of the subject of ‘women’ isn’t to be relied on; ‘women’ is both synchronically
and diachronically erratic as a collectivity, while for the individual, ‘being a
woman’ is also inconstant, and can’t provide an ontological foundation.
(Riley, 1988: 1/2)

The pertinence of this argument asserts itself rather exemplarily in the

_cortinuing trouble posed by the category of ‘women’ for marketers, those
whose business it is to address, reach and ‘catch’ women as consumers. It is
well known that any marketing strategy aimed at women is less than perfect;
marketers have learned to live with the fact that the dream of guaranteed
successful communication — which amounts to knowing exactly how to
identify ‘women’ — can never be fulfilled. Indeed, as one commentator has
observed, ‘marketers lurch from one stereotype to another as they try to focus
in on the elusive female consumer’ (Canape, 1984: 38). Market researchers’
- ongoing attempts notwithstanding to come up with new categorical typifica-
tions of women — happy housewife, superwoman, romantic feminist —
‘women’ remains a ‘moving target’ for marketers and advertisers (cf. Bar-
tos, 1982).
What we can learn from the pragmatic wisdom of marketers is that we
cannot afford taking ‘women’ as a straightforward, natural collectivity with a
constant identity, its meaning inherent in the (biological) category of the
female sex. In social and cultural terms, ‘women’, as much as ‘class’, is
not an immutable fact, but an inescapably indeterminate, ever-shifting cate-
_ gory (Haraway, 1985; Riley, 1988; Scott, 1988). _
_ Against this background, we would argue against a continued research
emphasis on women’s experience, women’s culture, women’s media con-
sumption as if these were self-contained entities, no matter how internally
differentiated. This is not to deny that there are gender differences or gender-
specific experiences and practices, it is however to suggest that their meanings
are always relative to particular constructions in specified contexts. For
example, in examining the consumption of a ubiquitous genre such as
women’s magazines, we should not only attend to both female and male
self-identified readers (and arguably non-readers as well), but also pay
attention to the multiple feminine and masculine identifications involved.
We would argue then that the theoretical question that should guide our
research practice is how gender — along with other major social axes such
334 Jen Ang and Joke Hermes

as class and ethnicity — is articulated in concrete practices of media con-

sumption. We will elaborate on this question in the next section.

The Prison House of Gender and Beyond

Recent poststructuralist feminist theory has powerfully questioned the essen-

tialist and reductionist view of sexual difference underlying the assumption of
fixity of gender identity (male or female).° Poststructuralism asserts first of all
that subjectivity is non-unitary, produced in and through the intersection of a
multitude of social discourses and practices which position the individual
subject in heterogeneous, overlaying and competing ways. A person’s sub-
jectivity can thus be described in terms of the multiplicity of subject positions
taken up by the person in question. Moreover, poststructuralism claims that an
individual’s subjectivity is never finished, constantly in re-production as it
were as s/he lives out her/his day-to-day life and engages herself/himself with
a variety of discourses and practices encountering and positioning her/him. In
this sense, a female person cannot be presumed to have a pregiven and fixed
gender identity as a woman. Rather, an individual’s gendered subjectivity is
constantly in process of reproduction and transformation. Being a woman can
mean many different things, at different times and in different circumstances.
The en-gendering of the subject, in other words, goes on continuously through
what Teresa de Lauretis has called ‘the various technologies of gender (. . . )
and institutional discourses ( ... ) with power to control the field of social
meaning and thus produce, promote, and “implant” representations of
gender’ (De Lauretis, 1987: 18).
To describe this process more concretely, we can make a distinction
between gender definitions, gender positionings and gender identifications.
Gender definitions, produced within specific social discourses and practices in
which gender is made into a meaningful category (what De Lauretis calls
‘technologies of gender’), articulate what is considered to be feminine or
masculine in culture and society. Different discourses produce different
definitions within specific contexts. For instance, Catholic religious discourse
defines woman as virgin, mother or whore. It is contradicted by radical
feminist discourse that defines women as oppressed human beings, victims
of male exploitation. Such discourses, and the gender definitions they pro-
duce, are never innocent; nor are they all equally powerful, coexisting in a
happy plurality. They rather often contradict and compete with each other. In
our societies, dominant gender discourses work to maintain relations of power
between males and females in that they assign different roles, opportunities,
ideals, duties and vulnerabilities to ‘men’ and ‘women’ that are classified as
normal and are very difficult to break out of. This, of course, relates to
the
concept of gender positionings.It is at this level that work in textual analysis,
as described in the first section of this chapter, has made its valuable
contribution. How and to which extent discursively constructed gender-
differentiated positions are taken up by concrete females and males,
how-
ever, depends on the gender identifications made by actual subjects. It
should
be pointed out that this is not a mechanical and passive process: assuming
this
 Gender and/in Media Consumption 335
would imply a discourse determinism analogous to the textual determinism
criticized above. How processes of gender identifications should be theorized
and examined, however, is one of the most underdeveloped aspects of the
poststructuralist theory of subjectivity. When, how and why, in other words,
do male and female persons keep identifying with positions that are defined as
properly masculine or feminine in dominant discourses?
Unfortunately, as must have become clear from our summary of develop-
ments in the field above, it is especially the passage from gender positionings
to gender identifications that is theoretically relevant for work on gender and
media consumption. To comprehend better the mechanisms of this process, it
is useful to take up the suggestion made by Henriques et al. (1984; see also
Hollway, 1989) that there must be an ‘investment’, loosely speaking, an
emotional commitment, involved in the taking up of certain subject positions
by concrete subjects. As Henriques et al. put it:

By claiming that people have investments (. . . ) in taking up certain positions in

discourses, and consequently in relation to each other, I mean that there will be
some satisfaction or pay-off or reward (these terms involve the same problems)
for that person. The satisfaction may well be in contradiction with other resultant
feelings. It is not necessarily conscious or rational. But there is a reason... I
theorize the reason for this investment in terms of power and the way it is
historically inserted into individuals’ subjectivity.
(Henriques et al., 1984: 238)

The term ‘investment’, which Henriques et al. derived from the Freudian
term Besetzung (cathexis), is adequate because it avoids both biological or
psychological connotations such as ‘motivation’ or ‘need’, and rationalistic
ones such as ‘choice’.’ The term also gives some depth to the notion of
‘negotiation’ that was put forward earlier to conceptualize text/reader rela-
tionships. Investment suggests that people have an — often unconscious —
stake in identifying with certain subject positions, including gender posi-
tions, and that the stake in these investments, and it should be stressed that
each individual subject makes many such, sometimes conflicting investments
all the time, should be sought in the management of social relations. People
invest in positions which confer them relative power, although an empower-
ing position in one context (say, in the family) can be quite dispowering in
another (say, in the workplace), while in any one context a person can take up
both empowering and dispowering positions at the same time.
Furthermore, given the social dominance of gender discourses based upon
the naturalness of sexual difference there is considerable social and cultural
pressure on female and male persons, to invest in feminine and masculine
subject positions respectively. This leads to what Hollway (1989) calls the
recursive production of social relations between men and women, which is not
the same as mechanical reproduction because successful gender identifica-
tions are not automatic nor free of conflicts, dependent as they are on the life
histories of individual people and the concrete practices they enter into, such
as practices of media consumption. In other words, what this theoretical
perspective suggests is that the construction of gender identity and gender
relations is a constant achievement to which subjects themselves are
complicit. In the words of De Lauretis (1987: 9), ‘[t]he construction of
336 JIen Ang and Joke Hermes

gender is the product and the process of both representation and self-repre-
sentation’. ’
A number of audience studies that have focused on the issue of gender and
media consumption can usefully be recounted in the light of this theoretical
perspective. For example, Janice Radway’s (1984) interpretation of romance
reading provides a good example of how some female persons inadvertently
reproduce their gendered subjectivity through all sorts of positions they take
up and identify with in the course of their lives. Radway concluded that the
women she interviewed used the act of reading romances as a ‘declaration of
independence’ from one position accorded them by dominant patriarchal
discourse: the position of ever-available and nurturing housewife and
mother. At the same time, however, they submit to patriarchal discourse in
their very reading, by investing so much energy in the imaginary (and
wishful) reconstruction of masculinity as they interpret romances as stories
about male transformation from hard and insensitive machos to loving and
caring human beings. Such an analysis highlights how one and the same
practice — reading romances — can contain contradictory positionings and
investments, although ultimately ending up in reproducing a woman’s gen-
dered subjectivity (as Radway would have it).
However, there is still a sense of overgeneralization in Radway’s interpreta-
tion, in that she has not sufficiently specified the social circumstances in which
her informants performed their romance reading. In this sense James Curran
(1990: 154) is right in his observation that ‘Radway’s tour de force offers an
account of romance addicts’ relationship to patriarchy but not to their flesh and
blood husbands’. This does not invalidate Radway’s analysis, since patriarchal
discourses are effective in more encompassing ways than solely through direct
face-to-face encounters, but her account does acquire a somewhat functional-
ist, adynamic quality the moment she transposes the analysis of how gender
identifications are implicated in romance reading (a practice) to an explanation
of individual romance readers (concrete historical subjects).
Ann Gray (1987, 1992), who studied how women relate to television and
popular culture in the home, has pointed to similar contradictions in women’s
gender identifications, but she places them more concretely in their particular
life histories. Not having had many opportunities in education and the job
market, the women of Gray’s study got married in order to leave their parents’
homes and get settled on their own. By the time their children had grown up
and they had a little more room to reflect on their lives, the patterns had been
edged in. Marriage and motherhood seemed an escape at first but turned out to
be a trap that was inescapable for most, despite their awareness of inequalities
between men and women. The books and television programmes they prefer
are tailored to female escapism and this, according to Gray, is how these
women use them. Gray’s account makes clear how the apparent inevitability
of the reproduction of femininity is fact a result of the sedimented history
of previous positionings and idenurications in which these women find
themselves caught, although they keep struggling against it through new
investments that are available to them, such as consuming ‘feminine’ media
genres and using the VCR to tape their favourite soap operas in order to be
able to watch alone or with their women friends, thereby evading the
derogatory comments of their husbands (Gray, 1987).
 Gender and/in Media Consumption 337
One can also account for many women’s gendered use of the telephone —
for maintaining household activities, maintaining family relationships, for
gossip’ and ‘chatter’ — along these lines (Rakow, 1988). Sherry Turkle’s
(1988) analysis of the ‘masculinization’ of the computer and the concomitant
computer reticence’ among some of the girls she studied, provides another
example. Although all these studies did limit themselves empirically to
women’s responses, they can most usefully be seen as illustrating that gender
does not simply predetermine media consumption and use; on the contrary,
what they illuminate is that it is in and through the very practices of media
consumtion — and the positionings and identifications they solicit — that
gender identities are recursively shaped, while those practices themselves in
turn undergo a process of gendering along the way.
This, then, is what we mean by the articulation of gender in practices of
media consumption. The concept of articulation refers to the process ‘estab-
lishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a
result of the articulatory practice’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 105). In
concrete terms, the concept can theorize how neither gender nor media
consumption have necessary or inherent meanings; only through their articu-
lation in concrete historical situations do media consumption practices acquire
meanings that are gender-specific. Furthermore, the concept is more accurate
than ‘construction’ or ‘production’ because it connotes a dynamic process of
fixing or fitting together, which is however never total nor final. The concept
of articulation emphasizes the impossibility of fixing ultimate meanings
(Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; see also Hall, 1986).
To clarify the importance of seeing gender and media consumption in terms
of their articulations, let us give just one more example, derived from David
Moriey’s study of the gendering of television viewing habits in a number of
working-class families in London. What sets Morley’s study apart from the
examples above is that he does not take individual women (and men) as
empirical units of analysis, but a structured relational context, namely the
modern nuclear family (see also e.g. Lull, 1988; Morely and Silverstone,
1990). One of the observations he makes is that there is nothing inherently
masculine about the wish to watch television with full concentration (as some
of the men he interviewed reported), and that there is nothing inherently
feminine in the tendency of the women in the study to watch distractedly.
Instead, Morley interprets this empirical gender difference as resulting from
‘the dominant model of gender relations within this society’ which ‘is one in
which the home is primarily defined for men as a site of leisure — in distinction
to the “industrial time” of their employment — while the home is primarily
defined for women as a sphere of work (whether or not they also work outside
the home). [As a result] . . . men are better placed to do [television viewing]
wholeheartedly, and ... women seem only to be able to do [it] distractedly
and guiltily, because of their continuing sense of their domestic responsibil-
ities’ (Morley, 1986: 147).
However, put this way Morley’s argument still sounds too mechanical, in
that he tends to collapse gender positionings and gender identifications
together. After all, it is not likely that the gendered pattern will be found in
all (London working-class) families all the time, despite the force of the
dominant discourse. (To assume this would only reproduce the
338 Jen Ang and Joke Hermes
the
objectification of working-class culture that we criticized above.) Thus,
articulation of concentration/masculine and distraction/feminine in. some
family homes only comes about in concrete situations, in which personal
investments, social circumstances and available discourses are intercon-
nected in specific ways within the families concerned. Articulations, in other
words, are inexorably contextual.
Moreover, such articulations have to be made again and again, day after
day, and fact that the same articulations are so often repeated — and thus
lead to the successful reproduction of established gender meanings, gender
relations and gender identities — is not a matter of course; it is, rather, a matter
of active re-production, continual re-articulation.” But in each family, there
may be moments in which the woman becomes a much more involved
television viewer, whereas her husband would lose interest in the set. No
articulation is ever definitive or absolute. Under certain conditions, existing
articulations can be disarticulated, leading to altered patterns of media
consumption, in which women and men take up very different positions.
For example, experiences such as illness, children leaving the home, extra-
marital affairs, political upheavals and so on may disrupt daily life in such a
way to break down existing patterns. This is how change comes about.
The concept of articulation, then, can account for what Laclau and Mouffe
(1985: 114) call ‘the presence of the contingent in the necessary’. Moreover,
the unfinished and overdetermined nature of articulations also helps to explain
what Riley (1988: 103) calls ‘the temporality and malleability of gendered
existence’. She points out, rather ironically, that it’s not possible to live
twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex,
which is another way of saying that women are only sometimes ‘women’,
female persons steeped in an overwhelming feminine subjectivity. In other
words, even though, according to De Lauretis (1987: 2), the social subject is
‘constituted in gender’, in everyday life gender is not always relevant to what
one experiences, how one feels, chooses to act or not to act. Since a subject is
always multiply positioned in relation to a whole range of discourses, many of
which do not concern gender, women do not always live in the prison house of
gender.
Indeed, the currency of non-gendered or gender-neutral identifications
should emphatically be kept in mind in our search for understanding the
variability and diversity of media consumption practices, both among and
within women and men. How, otherwise, to understand women who like
watching the weekend sports programme, the news, or hard-boiled detec-
tives, men reading women’s magazines or watching Cagney and Lacey,
couples watching pornography or reading travel guides together, and so on?
Indeed, it is questionable whether we should always foreground the articula-
tion of masculinity and femininity in analyzing media consumption prac-
tices. For example, in his analysis of the cross-cultural reception of
Dynasty, Kim Schrgder (1988) concludes that the pleasure of regularly
watching Dynasty, for his male and female interviewees alike, has to do
with the pleasure of solving narrative enigmas, what he calls ‘the weekly
reconstruction of self-confidence’. Similarly, we might ask whether the
pleasure of watching sports is really in all its aspects that different for men
and for women; we might consider that discourses of nation and nationalism
 Gender and/in Media Consumption 339
may play a more significant role in sports viewing than discourses of gender
(Poynton and Hartley, 1990). Of course, this doesn’t mean that gender
positionings are totally absent from either Dynasty or sports programmes;
what we do want to point out however is that non-gendered identifications
may sometimes take on a higher priority than gendered ones, allowing for a
much more complex and dynamic theorization of the way media consumption
is related to gender.
In this sense, we oppose Susan Bordo’s (1990) dismissal of the idea of
gender neutrality as purely ideological. ‘In a culture that is in fact constituted
by gender duality (. . . ) one cannot simply be “human”’, she states (Bordo,
1990: 152). But, if we acknowledge that culture is not a monolithic entity but
a shifting set of diverse practices, we must assume that partiality of gender is
a structuring principle in culture. Furthermore, the taking-up of positions in
which gender is not necessarily implicated — for example that of professional,
hostage, teacher, or citizen — always transcends the ‘simply human’; these are
overdetermined social positions in which identities may — temporarily — be
articulated in non-gendered ways, dependent upon context.'! Indeed, given
the dominant culture’s insistence on the all-importance of sexual difference,
we might arguably want to cherish those rare moments that women manage to
escape the prison house of gender.

The Instability of Gender in Media Consumption

Our theoretical explorations have led us to recognize the fundamental

instability of the role of gender in media consumption practices. We cannot
presume a priori that in any particular instance of media consumption gender
will be a basic determining factor. In other words, media consumption is not
always a gendered practice, and even if it is a gendered practice its modality
and effectivity can only be understood by close examination of the meanings
that ‘male’ and ‘female’ and their interrelationships acquire within a ’parti-
cular context.
What we have tried to clarify, then, is the importance of recognizing that
there is no prearticulated gender identity. Despite the force of hegemonic
gender discourse, the actual content of being a woman or a man and the
rigidity of the dichotomy itself are highly variable, not only across cultures
and historical times, but also, at a more micro-social and even psychological
level, amongst and within women and men themselves. Gender identity, in
short, is both multiple and partial, ambiguous and incoherent, permanently in
process of being articulated, disarticulated, and rearticulated.
The consequences of this particularist perspective for research into gender
and media ‘consumption are not too difficult to spell out. In our view, the
ethnographic turn in the study of media audiences is, given its spirit of radical
contextualism and methodological situationalism (Ang, 1990b), well suited to
take on board the challenge of problematizing and investigating in which
concrete situations which gender positions are taken up by which men and
women, with what identificatory investments and as a result of which specific
articulations. But, in order to do this, the ethnographic project needs to be
340 Jen Ang and Joke Hermes

radicalized even more, since not only gender but also media consumption
cannot be conceptualized in static terms. To be sure, this claim gives this
article a final destabilizing twist. j
The current emphasis on the social experiences of audience subjects as a
starting point for understandin g practices of media consumption 1s ethnogra-
phy’s major contribution to audience studies. However, in their focus on
women’s reception of women’s genres most existing studies of gender and/
in media consumption have not pushed the ethnographic thrust far enough.
Since the main interest of these studies, as we have seen, has been in text/
reader relationship, they tend to decontextualize the reception process from
the ongoing flow of everyday life. But in our media-saturated world media
audiences can no longer be conceived as neatly demarcated categories of
people, collectively set in relation to a single set of isolated texts and
messages, each carrying a finite number of subject positions. This insight
can only lead to a more radical ‘anthropologization’ of the study of media
consumption, in which the text is radically decentred and the everyday
contexts in which reception, consumption and use take place are more
emphatically foregrounded (e.g. Radway, 1988; Silverstone, 1990; Morley
and Silverstone, 1990; Ang, 1990b).
To do justice to such a perspective, then, we need to go beyond the
boundaries of reception analysis and develop new forms of ‘consumption
analysis’. In everyday life, media consumption cannot be equated with
distinct and insulated activities such as ‘watching television’, ‘reading a
book’, ‘listening to a record’, and so on. Since people living in (post) modern
societies are surrounded by an ever-present and ever-evolving media-envir-
onment, they are always-already audiences of an abundance of media provi-
sions, by choice or by force. Thus, media consumption should be
conceptualized as an ever proliferating set of heterogenous and dispersed,
intersecting and contradicting cultural practices, involving an indefinite
number of multiply positioned subjects: ‘everyone is constantly exposed to
a variety of media and forms, and participates in a range of events and
activities’ (Grossberg, 1988a: 20/21).
Hermann Bausinger (1984) has summed up a list of phenomenological
considerations which illuminates the enormous complexity of the field
opened up here, although the list is also helpful in beginning to map the
terrain. To understand day-to-day media use in contemporary society, Bau-
singer states, it is necessary to take the whole ‘ensemble’ of intersecting and
overlapping media provisions into consideration. Audiences piece together
the contents of radio, television, newspapers, and so on. As a rule, media texts
and messages are not used completely or with full concentration. We read
parts of sports reviews, skim through magazines, and zap from channel to
channel when we don’t like what’s on TV. Furthermore, media use, being an
integral part of the routines and rituals of everyday life, is constantly
interrelated with other activities such as talking, eating, or doing house-
work. In other words, ‘mass’ communication and ‘interpersonal’ communica-
tion cannot be separated. Finally, according to Bausinger, media use is not a
private, individual process, but a collective, social process. Even when read-
ing the newspaper one is often not truly alone, but interacting with family,
friends, or colleagues. In short, comprised within the deceptively simple term
 Gender and/in Media Consumption 341
‘media consumption’ is an extremely multifarious and differentiated con-
glomerate of activities and experiences.
_ Against this background, we need to perform an even further particulariza-
tion in our research and interpretive endeavour. Since media consumption
takes place ‘in the complex and contradictory terrain, the multidimensional
context, within which people live out their everyday lives’ (Grossberg, 1988a:
25), no two women (or men) will have exactly the same experiences in ‘the
ever-shifting kaleidoscope of cultural circulation and consumption’ (Radway,
1988: 361), although of course specific overlapping interests and commonal-
ities in past and present circumstances are not ruled out. In such a context, we
must accept contingency as posing the utter limit for our understanding, and
historical specificity as the only ground on which continuities and disconti-
nuities in the ongoing but unpredictable articulation of gender in media
consumption can be traced. In other words, such continuities and disconti-
nuities only emerge post facto. Within this horizon, ethnography’s task would
be the production of accounts that make these historically specific continuities
and discontinuities explicit, thereby lifting them out of their naturalized day-
to-day flow.'?
This brings us back to the hazardous episode of daily life in the Meier
family with which we opened this article. In unexpectedly ending up watching
the sports programme, Mrs Meier simultaneously places herself outside the
gendered discourse of ‘televised football is for men’, and reproduces the
traditional definition of femininity in terms of emotional caretaking by using
the viewing of the game as a means of making contact with her son. It is not
impossible that such accidental events will lead Mrs Meier to eventually like
football on television, thereby creating a gender neutral zone within the
family’s life with the media. After having finished doing the dishes while
watching a favourite soap opera on a small black and white TV set in the
kitchen, she might watch the sports programme in the sitting room because
she and her husband have become involved in a debate over the technical
qualities of United’s new goalkeeper (thereby developing a ‘masculine’
interest in sports). Or else, she might watch the game for human interest
reasons (which would be a ‘feminine’ subject position). At the same time,
whether she takes up a masculine, feminine or gender neutral position in
relation to TV football, this very development would only reinforce Mr
Meier’s investment in a discourse which sees masculine preferences as
natural.

Postscript: on Feminist Critique

It is clear that our exposition of the instability of gender/media consumption

articulations draws a great deal from postmodern theory, energized as it is by
a wariness of generalized absolutes and its observance of the irreducible
complexity and relentless heterogeneity of social life (see also Corner, in
this volume). However, doesn’t this stance make theory and politics impos-
sible? Doesn’t postmodern particularism inevitably lead to the resignation that
all there is left viable are descriptions of particular events at particular points
342 Jen Ang and Joke Hermes

in time? And doesn’t radical endorsement of particularity and difference only

serve to intensify an escalating individualism? If we declare ‘women’ to be an
indeterminate category, how can a feminist politics still assert itself? ;
These questions are certainly valid and understanda ble, although we think
they need not have to remain unanswered. For one thing, we believe that the
dangers of easy categorization and generalization, so characteristic of main-
stream traditions in the social sciences (including mass communication theory
and research), are greater than the benefits of a consistent particularlism. The
earlier feminist tendency to speak for and on behalf of ‘women’ as if this were
a unified category with a uniform identity has already been eroded by a
gradual acknowledgement of differences between different sorts of women,
positioned in different relations of class, ethnicity, generation, sexual orienta-
tion, and regionality. But postmodern feminism, building up a poststructur-
alist theory of subjectivity, goes further than this sociological differentiating
move by adopting a more profound sense of gender scepticism, thereby
eradicating any pregiven guarantee for female unity. In this sense, postmo-
dern feminism is itself a critical reaction to the normative and moralist
absolutism in earlier feminisms: ‘a critical vision consequent upon a critical
epee in unhomogeneous gendered social space’ (Haraway, 1988:

As Jane Flax (1990: 56) has noted, ‘[fJeminist theories, like other forms of
postmodernism, should encourage us to tolerate and interpret ambivalence,
ambiguity, and multiplicity’. She even adds to this that ‘[i]f we do our work
well, reality will appear even more unstable, complex and disorderly than it
does now’ (Flax, 1990: 56/7). In political terms, this means that we can no
longer afford to found a feminist practice upon the postulation of some fixed
figure of ‘women’ without risking to be totalizing and excluding the experi-
ences and realities of some. Arguably, such unifying feminist politics will
only be ultimately unproductive: the fact that many women today refuse to
call themselves feminists is symptomatic of this. Another example would be
the sharp contrast between the critical feminist condemnation of Steven
Spielberg’s film The Color Purple as white middle-class cooptation of Alice
Walker’s novel, and the impressive positive responses to the film from black
women viewers (Bobo, 1988; Stuart, 1988). This example also clarifies the
political importance of local, contextualized ethnographic studies: the produc-
tion of ‘situated knowledges’ whose critical value lies in their enabling of
power-sensitive conversation and contestation through comparison rather than
in epistemological truth (Haraway, 1988).
Indeed, any feminist standpoint will necessarily have to present itself as
partial, based upon the knowledge that while some women sometimes share
some common interests and face some common enemies, such commonalities
are by no means universal. Asserting that there can be no fixed and universal
standards for political ‘correctness’ does not mean relativist political reticence
nor submission to a pluralist free of all. On the contrary, it is an acknowl-
edgement of the fact that in order to confront ‘sexism in all its endless variety
and monotonous similarity’ (Fraser and Nicholson, 1990: 34), a flexible and
pragmatic form of criticism might be more effective than one based upon
predefined truths, feminist or otherwise. What is at stake here then is not
relativism, but a politics of location:
 Gender and/in Media Consumption 343
[Location is about vulnerability; location resists the politics of closure, finality,
Onn ) ‘simplification in the last instance’. (. . . )We seek [knowledges] ruled
by partial sight and limited voice — not partiality for its own sake but, rather, for
the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make
possible (... ) The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in
particular [and through] the joining of partial views and halting voices into a
collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite
embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions — of views from some-
where.
(Haraway, 1988: 590)

Notes

1 For example, several authors have pointed to the fact that feminine subject
positions constructed in mass cultural texts do not simply reproduce patriarchal
definitions of femininity, but also offer utopian opportunities for fantasmatic trans-
gression. Allison Light, for example, sees in romantic fiction ‘explorations and
productions of desires which may be in excess of the socially possible or accepta-
ble’ (Light, 1984: 7). See also Modleski (1982), McRobbie (1985), Kaplan (1986),
Ang (1990a).
2 This is not to say that generalizations as such should at all cost be avoided
(indeed, this would make the production of knowledge virtually impossible); it is
merely to point to the importance, in understanding social phenomena, of comple-
menting the generalizing tendency with an opposite, particularizing one (see Billig,
1987).
3 Frow’s (1987) criticism of Bourdieu comes despite the latter’s explicit rejec-
tion of objectivist sociology and its ‘substantialist’ conception of reality, and his
commitment to apply a relational mode of thinking in his analysis of cultural
differentiation. See e.g. Bourdieu (1989).
4 See Potter and Whetherell (1987) for the importance of paying attention to
inconsistency and variation in discourse analysis.
5 It won’t come quite as a surprise that what we know about men and media
consumption has for a greater part been written by or about homosexual men (Dyer,
1980; Easthope, 1986; Gross, 1989).
6 For an introduction to poststructuralism and feminism, see Weedon (1987).
7 It is exactly these terms that were used by uses and gratifications theorists to
describe individuals’ media uses and consumption.
8 Personal communication of Joke Hermes with Ann Gray, July 1990.
9 In our view, this would be a viable way of theorizing the mechanisms of
‘routines’ and ‘regularities’ in everyday life.
10 Obviously, genres such as the news and travel literature, and certainly porno-
graphy, do contain gendered subject positionings in the way they substantially and
formally address their spectators. But such positionings cannot be assumed to exhaust
the textual effectivity of these genres. Here, work in the field of textual analysis can
offer us much more detailed insight. For example, Charlotte Brunsdon (1987) has
explored this issue in her analysis of the British crime series Widows.
11 That such positions are often in the second instance articulated in gendered
terms, for example in the stereotyping of professional women as unfeminine or in the
call for treating male and female hostages differently (as, for example, in the Gulf
crisis), is precisely the result of the hegemonic work of patriarchal discourse. It is
important for feminism to disarticulate such discursive genderings.
 344 Jen Ang and Joke Hermes

12 For conceptualizations of ethnography as story-telling, see e.g. Clifford and

Marcus (1986); Van Maanen (1988); Geertz (1988).
13. Nicholson (1990) is an excellent collection of articles pro and contra the
feminism/postmodernism connection.

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17
Understanding the Disney
Universe
Janet Wasko

Introduction

For over 60 years, the Disney company has produced stories, characters and
images that reinforce the key elements in mainstream American culture.
Disney theme parks, films, comics, books, toys and other products are
sources of pleasure for many young children who learn and reinforce ideas
and values that last a lifetime. Furthermore, many adults join their chidren in
these forms of leisure, dutifully introducing them to the same stories, char-
acters, values and ideals, or revisiting these sites on their own, renewing the
pleasure and satisfaction experienced as children.
While Disney appears to be an important source of entertainment for many
children and adults, it is crucial to understand the process by which Disney’s
fantasy is deliberately manufactured. As the Disney products continue to be
popular worldwide, the company itself has received attention for its marketing
strategies, merchandising expertise, international expansion, worker training
programme, etc. It is considered unique among corporations, perhaps partially
because of the very product it produces: fantasy.
In Mass Mediated Culture (1973), Michael Real argued that the term
‘Disney Universe’ was appropriate because: 1) the Disney organization
used this term; 2) it signified the ‘universality’ of Disney’s products; and 3)
the Disney message created ‘an identifiable universe of semantic meaning’.
The pervasiveness that Real observed in the 1970s is readily apparent in the
1990s, as Disney products are almost literally everywhere. It was said that, in
the 1930s, the image of Mickey Mouse was a global phenomenon. However,
aggressive marketing of a multitude of Disney products in new channels of
distribution all over the world has contributed to a proliferation of Disney
images and characters that could hardly have been imagined in the 1930s.
Today Disney represents a far more dominant player in the entertainment
business than in the 1970s, when Real presented his analysis. Indeed, with the
$19 billion takeover of Capital Cities/ABC in July 1995, Disney may become
the world’s largest media company, with $16.5 billion in annual revenues
 Understanding the Disney Universe 349
(more on these developments later). While the company obviously has moved
far beyond the arena of ‘children’s programming’, it still maintains that
special reputation for ‘family entertainment’. If a programme or product is
by Disney, parents rest assured that it is ‘wholesome entertainment’. This
reputation is even further enhanced by increasingly more vivid and overt
portrayals of violence and sexual content in other media fare. Thus, Disney
is able to remain extremely influential, if not dominant, in the marketing of
children’s and family entertainment.
Furthermore, as Real and others have observed, the Disney company has
created a self-contained universe which presents consistently recognizable
values through recurring characters and familiar, repetitive themes. The
‘classic’ Disney is represented by its products (from films and television
programmes, to theme parks and resorts), as well as in the philosophy of
the company.
It is possible, then, to identify a Disney Universe, and to study something
called Disney — the company, its parks, products and policies, the individuals
who manage and work for the company, as well as Disney characters and
images, and their meanings for audiences/consumers.
Although, in some academic circles, the study of Disney in particular, or
pepular culture in general, is still perceived as an irrelevant, frivolous or
“Mickey Mouse’ occupation, Disney has been the focus of study in a wide
variety of disciplines, with countless books, essays and articles on Walt
Disney, his contribution to animation, and the history of the Disney company
and its products.
In the 1930s, the Frankfurt school often used Disney characters such as
Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck as examples in their debate about the culture
industry (Hansen, 1993). In addition to Michael Real’s study, the Disney
empire attracted the attention of communication scholars in several classic
studies in the 1970s: Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s How to Read
Donald Duck (1975) and Herbert Schiller’s discussion in The Mind Managers
(1973).
More recently, a boom in Disney studies has been reported, as more
scholars are directing their attention to the Disney phenomenon (Heller,
1994; Willis, 1993; Arizona Republic, 1994; Smoodin, 1994). Analysis has
featured rhetorical, literary, feminist and psychoanalytic critiques, often
stressing social issues, such as race and gender representation in connection
to Disney characters and themes. Anthropologists, architects, historians and
geographers also are seriously discussing the impact of Disney's worlds
(especially the theme parks), considering aesthetic, cultural and social issues.
Indeed, the Disney example offers a relatively neat and compact case in
which to utilize interdisciplinary analytic tools. The continued extension and
popularity of the Disney empire seems especially ripe for the integration of
political economic analysis with insights drawn from cultural analysis and
audience studies, or, in other words, analysis emphasizing the economic as
well as the ideological, production as well as consumption. In the case of
Disney, this approach is expressed in the notion of manufacturing fantasy.
Therefore, this article presents some background on the Disney company, a
general reading of the Classic Disney ideology and preliminary results from a
study of Disney audiences. In the process, an overview of the various ways
350 Janet Wasko

that Disney has been studied is presented, suggesting that an interdisciplinary

approach can help us further understand the significance of Disney as a major
contributor to consumer culture in the USA, and perhaps the quintessential
symbol of American culture internationally.

The Disney Empire

The History of Walt and his Company

Histories of Walt Disney and the Disney company abound. The story of Walt
and his midwestern, conservative ideals has been told and retold, creating its
own set of myths about the creator of Mickey and the company (see, for
instance, Thomas, 1976; Maltin, 1973; Finch, 1975; Holliss and Sibley, 1988).
For the most part, these histories have been more or less sanctioned by the
company and given access to the Disney Archives, a carefully controlled
collection of documents pertaining to the company and its founder. These
generally positive biographies represent classic examples of the ‘great man’
approach to history. As one observer has noted, Walt Disney’s biographies are
often imbued with ‘the pseudo-religious aura which has come to surround his
name before and since his death’ (McReynolds, 1971).
Other historical treatments of Disney are much less complimentary, adding
discussions of his anal compulsive personality, his anti-union, iron-fisted
employment policies, his 25 years of undercover work for the FBI, and his
key role in the creation of a blacklist in Hollywood in the 1940s (Elliot, 1993;
Schickel, 1986).
Most of the Disney histories acknowledge that the company struggled for
years to achieve financial success, even while attracting critical acclaim and
praise. What differs in these historical interpretations is the role of Walt
Disney, who often was considered a business as well as creative genius.
Doug Gomery has recently offered a reinterpretation of Disney’s business
history, debunking the ‘great man’ approach and pointing out that Walt was
no real genius. Gomery’s brief history illustrates that the Disney company was
influenced by technical change, typical business cycles and the devastating
effects of war. The Disneys operated a marginal, niche company for three
decades, taking advantage of technological change (sound and colour), but
finally succeeded when the creation of Disneyland turned the operation into a
theme park company. Gomery concludes that ‘The Disney company is simply
another capitalist enterprise with a history best understood within the chan-
ging conditions of twentieth-century America’ (Gomery, 1994).

The Disney. Decade and Team Disney

The current Disney company continues that legacy, drawing on valuable
assets and past policies, as well as exemplifying the ups and downs of typical
capitalist enterprises. The company has introduced a few new strategies,
however, which must be understood in the context of the entertainment
business in the 1990s (see Wasko, 1994),
 Understanding the Disney Universe 351
Since the new ownership/management team took over in 1984, the Disney
empire has extended its tentacles even more widely and more tenaciously
(Grover, 1991; Taylor, 1987; Knowlton, 1989). As with most of the major
companies in Hollywood, Disney’s expansion has not depended solely on
motion pictures, but also on a wide array of business activities in which the
new management team (led by CEO Michael Eisner and calling itself ‘Team
Disney’) has aggressively exploited the Disney name and its characters,
boldly proclaiming the 1990s as ‘The Disney Decade’.
Team Disney rejuvenated the sagging corporation through new policies:
reviving the Classic Disney (especially with the release of major animated
features), modernizing Disney characters (through more diverse product
lines), rabid cost-cutting (especially on feature films), price increases at the
theme parks, technological development (computer animation, etc.), synergis-
tic expansion, and strategic corporate partnerships (Knowlton, 1989).
Despite some setbacks (both personal and corporate) during 1994, the
company leaped into the limelight with the dramatic takeover of Capital
Cities/ABC in July 1995, as mentioned previously. The move not only
stunned the Wall Street and the media, it greatly enhanced the company’s
position in television, sports programming and international marketing, as
well as adding publishing and multimedia to its operations. Disney now owns
the top-rated US network (ABC), 10 television and 21 radio stations, plus
ownership interests in several highly valued cable channels, ESPN and
ESPNZ2 (80 per cent), Arts and Entertainment (37.5 per cent) and Lifetime
(50 per cent). The deal extended Disney’s global reach even further, adding
Capital Cities/ABC’s extensive foreign activities. For instance, ESPN Inter-
national reached 70 million homes in 130 countries in 1995.
The Walt Disney Company is now a $16.5 billion corporation, encompass-
ing a wide array of domestic and international investments, which overlap and
reinforce each other. As one financial analyst noted after the takeover,
‘Disney is the benchmark that all other entertainment companies are going
to have to value themselves off’ (Robins and Peers, 1995).
To understand the company’s diversity of activities, as well as the inter-
connections between them, it is useful to look more closely at the corporation.
The following is a brief profile of The Walt Disney Company, before the
Capital Cities merger, when it was organized as three major segments: Filmed
Entertainment, Walt Disney Attractions, and Consumer Products (see Table
Lik),

Table 17.1 Income and revenues for The Walt Disney Company, 1994.
Operating income Revenues

Filmed entertainment $856.1 million $4,793.3 million

Theme parks and resorts 684.1 million 3,463.6 million
Consumer products 425.5 million 1,798.2 million

Source: The Walt Disney Company, 1994 Annual Report, p. 48.

352 Janet Wasko

Filmed Entertainment
The Filmed Entertainment division covers a wide range of products and
distribution outlets, including film, home video, television, cable TV and
recorded music. These businesses raised more revenues than any other
division of the company in 1994 (nearly $4.8 billion). :
During takeover discussions in the early 1980s, the value of the Disney film
library was estimated to be $400 million, but the same reports observed that if
‘exploited’ more aggressively, the library would be worth even more. Team
Disney has been aggressive, to say the least. Disney films were rescued from
the vaults, and released on video, resulting in quick cash for the new manage-
ment team. The company continues to exploit its film library, carefully
releasing already amortized products in new forms, and promoting them
through their other business activities.
New products have been developed as well. The new management team
embraced the formula initiated by the old guard, releasing some of its
strongest box-office hits on the Touchstone label — untainted by the family-
oriented, PG-rated Disney name. In addition, a new label (Hollywood
Pictures) was introduced in 1990, expanding Disney’s presence at the box-
office. During the 1980s and 1990s, Disney has regularly led the Hollywood
majors in division of box-office revenues.
Recently, Disney has added even more film labels: Miramax, a successful
independent distribution company, was acquired in 1993, and an independent
production company, Merchant-Ivory, in 1994. These two acquisitions extend
the Disney film empire into markets for adult and foreign films, again
providing diversification beyond the family-oriented market.
Through its Buena Vista Home Video label, Disney/Touchstone films, as
well as other products, are distributed on videocassette. Thanks to the video
release of popular animated features such as Aladdin and Snow White, Buena
Vista was the top video company in the USA for six consecutive years. Disney
also has expanded internationally, with gross revenues increasing four-fold
from 1986 to 1990, and branches in 64 markets in 1994. Disney claimed to
hold up to 60 per cent of the family video market in some European markets
in 1994,
If there was one weakness in the Disney empire in the early 1990s,
however, it seemed to be finding successful formulas for prime-time network
television fare. While The Golden Girls was a tremendous success, the
company held only part interest in the series. Disney continued looking for
other hits, but basically failed with shows such as Lenny and The Fanelli
Boys. Finally, the company hit pay dirt with Dinosaurs, Blossom and Home
Improvement, and has continued to search for new hits with All American
Girl, Thunder Alley, Ellen and Boy Meets World.
Team Disney has done much better in syndicated programming, with 18
hours of first-run programming on syndicated television each week by the fall
of 1990. The company will profit handsomely from the introduction of Home
Improvement, Blossom and Dinosaurs into syndication in late 1995.
Meanwhile, other syndicated products include Live with Regis and Kathie
Lee and Siskel and Ebert, Aladdin and The Disney Afternoon — an animation
package featuring half-hour shows, such as Dark Wing Duck, Duck Tales, etc.
 Understanding the Disney Universe 353
The Crusaders is the Disney version of infotainment, except that the usually
‘objective’ reporters become involved in ‘solving’ the personal or social
problems they report.
Disney’s pay cable service, The Disney Channel, is the second largest pay
TV network, claiming around 10 million subscribers at the end of 1994. While
the channel carries non-Disney shows, much of its programming is new or
revived Disney fare.
The Disney Channel represents only one example of the synergistic policy
of the company, as explained by Ron Grover in The Disney Touch (1991):
By late 1988, the Disney Channel was ... achieving Eisner’s goal of cross-
promotion for other company ventures. Kids watching Winnie the Pooh or
Mickey Mouse cartoons became a target market for Disney toys. Showing
episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club, which had been filmed at the Disney-
MGM Studios Theme Park, enticed 14-year-olds into pressuring their parents
to take them to Orlando. When Who Framed Roger Rabbit was aired on the
channel, specials on EPCOT Center were also run, along with anniversary shows
celebrating the parks.

Before the takeover of Capital Cities/ABC, Disney already owned one broad-
cast outlet, KCAL-TV (formerly KHJ-TV) in Los Angeles. An interesting
wrinkle for the Disney. company, which has usually stayed out of the arena of
news and information production, was the introduction of an innovative 3-
hour prime-time news format. Of course, the station carries Disney’s syndi-
cated programmes and The Disney Afternoon.
Hollywood Records is Disney’s recorded music branch, featuring a wide
range of products, from hip-hop groups like Organized Konfusion to sound-
track albums from Disney films.
Finally, Disney has ventured into the realm of the stage, with the purchase
of a Broadway theatre, where the theatrical version of Beauty and the Beast
has been presented. The show has been so successful that the company plans
to take it on tour around the USA and to other countries.

Theme Parks and Resorts

Disney is constantly expanding its theme parks and real estate holdings, which
represent a sizeable investment and a hefty share of the revenues. The Disney
empire currently includes six major theme parks, plus additional parks and
tourist attractions.
The company still operates Disneyland, in Anaheim, California, which
launched its theme park activities in the 1950s; but the more extensive
facility is The Walt Disney World Destination Resort, located on 29,000
acres of land that Disney owns near Orlando, Florida. At the beginning of
1990, the complex included the Magic Kingdom, Epcot Center, the Disney-
MGM Studios Theme Park, eight hotels, a night-time entertainment complex
(Pleasure Island), shopping village (Disney Village Marketplace), conference
centre, campground (Fort Wilderness), golf courses, water parks and other
recreational facilities. The park’s facilities attracts millions of tourists as well
as more serious visitors, as Walt Disney World represents the second most
popular destination for corporate meetings.
354 Janet Wasko

Tokyo Disneyland, which opened in April 1983, is built on 600-acre landfill

in Tokyo Bay. The park has been a tremendous success, nearly equalling
attendance at the original Disneyland. However, the Disney company only
collects 10 per cent of the admissions, 5 per cent of food and merchandise
sales and 10 per cent of corporate sponsorships, as the park is owned by the
Oriental Land Company. Still, by 1984 the park was generating $40 million
annually for Disney (Grover, 1991).
The European version of Disneyland opened in April 1992 with the usual
Disney fanfare. The company had received a good deal of help from the
French government, which offered 5000 acres of land at ‘rock-bottom
price’, millions on upgrading and improving the highway system and
suburban rail line, and reduced interest rates on $1 billion in loans.
However, the park reported a loss of $87.7 million during its first year,
prompting a major debt restructuring, which eventually cost Disney around
$750 million and increased the company’s financial commitment to the
park. Some analysts observed that the source of Euro Disney’s financial
problems had less to do with public sentiment than the Disney company’s
‘abrasive and aggressive management style in planning, building and
financing the resort’. Despite the problems plaguing the park, by 1994
Euro Disney ranked as Europe’s biggest paid tourist attraction (King,
1994).
The next Disney theme park was supposed to be Disney’s America, a 3000-
acre theme park, originally intended to be built near Washington DC, and
focusing on key moments in US history. With hotels, shops, golf courses and
residential units, the park was promoted as a boon to development, employ-
ment and the local economy in Virginia. However, despite Disney’s usual
political strategies (including arrangements for a $163 million bond issue to
improve roads in the area), the site was abandoned in September 1994, after a
barrage of criticism about the risks to the actual historical sites in the area, as
well as the increased urban sprawl, traffic, and air pollution that the project
would bring. Still other critics worried about the treatment of American
history by the company that has made millions and billions of dollars
primarily from the manufacture of fantasy.
With the expansion of Disney’s theme park activity, the company has
become heavily involved in real estate and hotel management. In addition
to the existing parks and hotel complexes, there are plans for another park in
Europe, expanding the Disney-MGM Studios park, a second theme park in
southern California and Tokyo, and extensive hotel expansion to include
16,300 rooms. The company also is developing its own cruise lines, with
voyages designed with stopovers at its Florida complex.
The company is not shy about the synergistic potential of their constantly
expanding real estate empire. As noted in its Form 10K filed with the SEC in
1990: ‘. . . the Company believes its theme parks and resorts benefit substan-
tially from the Company’s reputation in the entertainment industry for
excellent quality and from synergy with activities in other business segments
of the Company.’
 Understanding the Disney Universe 355

Consumer Products
Disney’s | third division is Consumer Products, which, according to the
company’s annual report, *.. . licenses the name of Walt Disney, its char-
acters, its visual and literary properties and its songs and music to various
consumer manufacturers, retailers and publishers throughout the world’. This
description does not adequately describe the deliberate and coordinated
proliferation of Disney merchandise worldwide.
While Disney’s merchandising activities are legendary, Team Disney
emphasized the exploitation of ‘old’ Disney characters, as well as new
ones. While there are conflicting reports of the revenues gleaned from such
activities, the company itself reported that an estimated $14 billion in Disney
products were sold around the world in 1994. Another source claimed in 1987
that 3000 companies manufactured over 14,000 Disney-licensed products
(Koepp, 1988).
Until the 1960s/70s, relatively little merchandising activity took place in
Hollywood, except for Disney. Merchandising started almost simulta-
neously with the success of Mickey Mouse’s Steamboat Willie. Although
various histories claim that Walt Disney was not necessarily interested in
licensing his characters, merchandising activities still provided needed
revenue to continue producing expensive animated films (Schickel, 1986).
In 1929 the company was offered $300 to put Mickey Mouse on writing
tablets, and, by January 1930, Mickey appeared in a comic strip distributed
by King Features. During the 1930s, the company began to flood the
market with Disney products. ‘Mickey’s likeness soon appeared on every-
thing from soap to ice-cream cones to Cartier diamond bracelets ($1,250)’
(Solomon, 1989).
During the height of the depression, the Disney merchandising bonanza
supposedly saved the Lionel Co. with the sale of 253,000 Mickey Mouse
handcars and the Ingersoll Waterbury Co. with the sale of 2.5 million Mickey
Mouse watches. By 1934, annual profits on films and merchandise brought in
over $600,000 for the Disney company. Mickey is still claimed to be the most
popular licensed character in the world, appearing on more than 7500 items,
not including publications (Solomon, 1989).
Indeed, the Walt Disney Co. represents the premiere merchandising com-
pany in Hollywood. The company has been at the merchandising business
longer than most other film companies and has a reputation for licensing and
producing only quality products. Not only does Disney actively create
licensable properties, but the company is able to reinforce their merchandiz-
ing efforts throughout their extensive business empire. As one of Disney’s
executives explains, ‘When you combine the right film with the right pro-
ducts, there’s a terrific synergy that takes place’ (Hulin-Salkin, 1989).
The Consumer Products division supervises an extremely wide array of
outlets in which Disney characters are featured. Publishing activities include
comic books, children’s books and other printed material. The company
reported that 120 different Disney magazines and comics were published in
16 different countries in 1988. The addition of new comic book titles typically
follows the release of new Disney films (example: Roger Rabbit was added in
1990). The publishing arm also handles Disney Books by Mail, plus arranges
356 Janet Wasko

long-term deals with other publishers. Disney Audio Entertainment produces

book and audio cassette read-alongs, which proved especially lucrative for
The Little Mermaid — more than one million copies were sold in only 6 months
after its release (Grover, 1991). “i
Records, audio products and music publishing offer further opportuniti es to
feature Disney properties, and are especially lucrative for animated features,
given the important role of music in these films. Disney sells music-related
products through domestic retail sales and direct marketing (catalogues,
coupon packages and television).
In 1988, Disney spent $61 million on Childcraft, a New Jersey company
that owned two of the biggest mail-order lists in the country. By 1990, the
company was mailing over 45 million Disney, Childcraft (direct-mail sub-
sidiary) and Just for Kids! catalogues. Products offered included infant
merchandise, featuring Disney character brands (the Disney Babies Brand
with Baby Mickey, Baby Donald and friends). The company represents 10 per
cent of the $2.2 billion infant products market.
In addition, Disney Educational Productions creates films, videos and
filmstrips for schools, libraries and other institutions, as well as educational
toys, play equipment and classroom furniture for children, plus posters and
teaching aids. Disney also licenses its properties to software producers
through the Disney Software Licensing division and has increased its com-
puter and CD products in recent years.
The Consumer Products division is in charge of retailing activities,
which also contribute to the synergistic emphasis of the Disney empire.
Over 300 Disney Stores around the world provide centralized sources for
Disney merchandise. These retail outlets are consistent with the Disney
philosophy: “The core strategy behind The Walt Disney Co.’s retail
endeavor, The Disney Store, is to be both entertainer and merchant’
(Gill, 1991). The stores include Disney characters in costume, videos,
animation, and other attractions, carefully coordinated with racks of mer-
chandise. By 1991, sales volume had doubled each year since the opening
of the first store in 1987.
These Consumer Services activities link with other Disney businesses to
provide the ultimate synergism for merchandising maximization. A recent
example is the wildly successful The Lion King. The promotional campaign
for the film represented the most ambitious marketing ever for the company
and was expected to generate more than $100 million worth of promotion
from only the tie-ins with other companies. More than 100 companies were
licensed to sell Lion King merchandise, and, of course, Lion King characters
and themes were introduced at the Disney parks.
‘With these intensive merchandising activities, it is not surprising that
Disney is known as one of the toughest enforcers of copyright laws. Not
only does the company pursue a large number of suits against infringers of
their products and characters, but several cases attest to the pettiness of the
Disney company in trying to maintain complete control over their properties
(see Grover, 1991).
It is difficult to include all of the Disney’s business ventures in this brief
overview, as the company is constantly adding new investments that cut
across corporate divisions. For instance, in 1992, Disney followed up on
 Understanding the Disney Universe 357
their successful film The Mighty Ducks by purchasing the rights to
a new
expansion hockey team in Southern California, to be called ... The Mighty
Ducks. The company has recently expanded its sports activities, with an
international sports arena planned for south Florida, plus numerous events
featuring track and field, golf, etc.
Disney has successfully rebuilt and expanded, especially internationally, to
the point that Fortune magazine claimed in 1989, ‘the company has become
the archetypal American corporation for the 1990s: a creative company that
can move with agility to exploit international opportunities in industries
where the US has a competitive advantage’ (Knowlton, 1989).

Reading the Classic Disney

We make the pictures and then let the professors tell us what they mean.
(Walt Disney)

Despite the claim by Disney and others at the studio, the products manufac-
tured by the Disney company are laden with meaning and values, some
deliberately encoded by the producers and other messages that may have
been unintended. A reading of the entire Disney output is certainly not
possible here, or, perhaps, anywhere else; but it is possible at least to suggest
some of the dominant themes and values that are continuously represented in
the Disney Universe, especially in the animated films and cartoons that have
been identified as the Classic Disney and generally represent Disney in the
public’s mind.
‘Remember, This all Started with a Mouse’
A good place to start is with the character that has come to represent the
Disney Empire. Mickey Mouse has evolved to mean something far beyond the
role that an animated mouse plays in cartoons produced by the Walt Disney
company. The Mouse is an immediately recognizable, and possibly THE most
widely recognized cultural icon in the world.
The Mouse (as he is sometimes referred to around the Disney studio)
represents a fascinating interweaving of culture, politics and economics: a
symbol of just about everything American, as is the Disney company. He is
part of the American popular culture package: Cadillacs, Elvis Presley,
Marilyn Monroe, and Mickey Mouse (Isozaki, 1993). Indeed, the term
‘Mickey Mouse’ itself has developed its own meaning: lightweight, unim-
portant, cheap and foolish. Nevertheless, The Mouse also represents fantasy,
pleasure and escape for audiences around the world. :
Mickey has been the subject of much analysis over the years. For instance,
Walter Benjamin used the ‘globe-orbiting’ Mouse as an example of ‘a figure
of the collective dream’ (cited in Hansen, 1993: 31). Others also have
interpreted Mickey in Jungian terms, as the circular symbol representing
ultimate wholeness (see Brockway, 1989: 31-32). Meanwhile, Erich Fromm
thought that audiences identified with Mickey because he was close to their
own lives as individuals pitted against the larger society (Fromm, 1941).
358 Janet Wasko

Other analysis has focused on the evolution of The Mouse: from a definite
rodent (long nose, small eyes, skinny limbs), to a more cuddly and juvenile
image, with big eyes and round features. Brockway has discussed the
neotenization process in Mickey and argues that the character represents a
constant youth state and incomplete development (Brockway, 1989; Laur-
ence, 1986).
While Mickey may carry his own set of meanings, the primary one today is
as the corporate logo for the company. The Mouse is a signifier of the entire
Disney Universe. Thus, it is not surprising to read Eisner’s interpretation of
the symbolic nature of The Mouse in the Disney’s 1993 Annual Report:
Mickey, like the rest of the classic Disney characters, does not live in the
temporal world of mortals. Instead, he and his Disney counterparts live in the
hearts, memories and minds of people everywhere. He is renewed with each
generation, which means that Mickey at 65... or 165... will remain eternally
young, eternally optimistic, eternally plucky.

The Classic Disney Formula

The Mouse is not the only ongoing Disney character, ‘living in the hearts and
minds of people everywhere’. Characters and themes are continuously
recycled, as Disney products are carefully and consistently reissued and
repackaged in other forms (films and characters become theme park rides,
etc.). Thus, the values represented are still introduced to new viewers and
reinforced with previous audiences. It also might be argued that even the
efforts to ‘update’ Disney only perpetuate the Disney formula and reinforce
values and themes in the Classic Disney.
The values represented in these works were initially influenced by Disney’s
own midwest, conservative values, but also his perception (and that of others
at the studio) of what the audience would accept, i.e. how they could entertain
and amuse. While they may have denied that they were doing anything but
creating entertainment, they also followed careful formulas in creating char-
acters and stories (see Thomas, 1981).
Certain characteristics are immediately recognized as the Disney model:
light entertainment, punctuated with music and lots of gags (Disney humour
most often revolves around physical gags and slapstick, especially those
possible through animation), relying heavily on anthropomorphized animal
characters, which engage in childlike behaviour. Indeed, animators were told
to “keep it cute’ when it came to creating characters, as the descriptions of
es Disney character reveals. (Coincidentally, this also helped sell merchan-
ise).
The following represent some of the consistent and unmistakable themes
found in the Classic Disney Universe. While some have been considered in
detail by Disney analysts and critics over the years, others certainly deserve
more attention, especially in light of new Disney stories and characters.

1 Escape and fantasy. Many of the Disney plots revolve around characters
wishing to escape from their current setting or situation, from Snow
White’s theme song (‘I’m Wishing’) and Gioppetto’s wish for Pinocchio
to be a real boy to The Little Mermaid’s yearning to be human and
 Understanding the Disney Universe 359
Aladdin’s theme song (‘A Whole New World’). Of course, the wish is
most often granted or made possible by an entity (a fairy or magical being)
other than by the actions of the character. Certainly, this is an attractive
fantasy, to be able to escape, without any effort, from one’s current life or
world, to another more appealing one. (Who does not want to escape many
of the unpleasant aspects of the worlds in which we live today?)
The fantasy and escapist theme is stressed in the emphasis on magic: the
magic kingdom, etc.; but it is not a world of fantasy or magic run amok.
Fantasy is carefully controlled and little is left to the imagination.
Innocence. The worlds created by the Disney Universe represent a
wholesomeness and innocence that somehow seems foreign from the
world in which we actually live. While many may argue that this quality
is healthy for children, the Disney world is not always aimed only at
children. Disney once explained: ‘I do not make films primarily for
children. Call the child innocence. The worst of us is not without inno-
cence, although buried deeply it might be. In my work, I try to reach and
speak to that innocence’ (cited in Elliot, 1993).
Romance and happiness. Leading Disney characters most often love at
first sight, and stories revolve around their quest for love. Disney is not
alone in stressing romantic aspects of life, but often concentrates on them
to the extreme. Most of the ‘problems’ which preoccupy Disney characters
are of a personal, very often, romantic variety. In addition, of course, there
are always happy endings. Optimism prevails, and dealing with defeat,
failure or injustice is seldom explored in the Disney world. Everything
always works out for the good guys.
Sexual stereotypes. Walt Disney was claimed to have said: ‘Girls bored
me. They still do’ (Schickel, 1986: 48). This may in part explain the
portrayal of women in the Classic Disney model, which provides a rich
text for feminist analysis. While Disney’s representation of women may
not differ so much from other popular cultural depictions, the stereotypes
are so strong that many would argue that there is little room for alternative
readings (Stone, 1975; Trites, 1991; Holmlund, 1979).
The typical Disney heroine is represented by the first one, Snow White,
who was innocent, naive, passive, beautiful, domestic and submissive.
While they may display far more intelligence and independence than
Snow White, Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, the more modern Disney
heroines (Ariel in Little Mermaid, Jasmine in Aladdin and Belle in Beauty
and the Beast), still live in male-dominated worlds, and ultimately find
fulfilment through their romantic relationships with Prince Charmings.
Disney heroines are always strikingly beautiful, shapely, and often sexu-
ally attractive, while female villains are typically ugly and either extre-
mely thin (Cruella) or grossly fat (Ursula), thus perpetuating norms of
physical beauty prevalent in mainstream culture.
Disney women also seem to be alienated from other female characters,
as represented, for instance, by the absence of any interaction between
Ariel and her sisters. Another recurring theme is the absence of mothers
(and sometimes parents in general) in Classic Disney stories. While
Dorfman and Mattelart presented an intriguing analysis of Disney’s
‘asexual, sexuated world’, the animated features since then have
perpetuated this tradition. Ariel, Jasmine, Belle and Pocohontas have
fathers, but no mothers.
360 Janet Wasko

5 Individualism. Taxel (1982) describes the Disney value system as con-

sistent with the Basic American package: ‘individualism, advancement
through self-help, strict adherence to the work ethic, and the supreme
optimism in the possibility in the ultimate improvement of society through
the progressive improvement in humankind.’ :
Historically, certain Disney cartoons have contributed strong reinforce-
ment of these values. In the early 1930s, The Three Little Pigs was
claimed to have a strong impact on a depression-weary American pub-
lic, encouraging citizens to work hard and maintain an optimistic attitude.
This theme has been repeated, of course, in Snow White, as the dwarfs
dutifully sing and whistle as they work. Not only hard work, but individual
solutions are consistently represented as Mickey Mouse and other char-
acters confront evil characters and difficult situations. During the Second
World War, Disney’s characters represented examples of good citizens,
but patriotism has been reinforced by Disney characters in many other
situations.
While Disney may not have been alone in reinforcing these values in
the popular cultural sphere, the characters and stories represented in the
Disney Universe provide classic and unmistakable models for the domi-
nant all-American ideology. Again, this is not surprising, as Walt Disney,
who initially influenced the model, was himself unabashedly conservative
and patriotic. ;
6 Reinventing Folk Tales. Disney often used (and still relies quite heavily
on) classic folk and fairy tales. Indeed, Disney’s versions of some of these
stories are better known than the originals. Over the years, however, the
Disneyfication of folk tales has prompted harsh criticism from folklorists
and children’s literature experts, who argue that changes in the stories that
sanitize the original deny the essence and motivation of original folk tales,
which is to teach children about life. Some argue that the values in the
original tales have been sacrificed to the gimmicks of animation (May,
1981; Stone, 1988; Sayers, 1973; Zipes, 1979; Berland, 1982).
While strong morals, again, are not unusual in popular culture or
children’s literature, the Disney Universe is emphatic in its depiction of
good triumphing over evil (see Real, 1983). The explicit moralization and
strong values represented in Classic Disney products again points to the
control that is exercised by the company — this time, control over the
imaginations and fantasies of audiences, whether young or old.
Disney’s stories may be even more insidious, however. In their study,
Dorfman and Mattelart observed that: ‘Beneath all the charm of the sweet
little creatures of Disney . . . lurks the law of the jungle: envy, ruthless-
ness, cruelty, terror, blackmail, exploitation of the weak. Lacking vehicles
for their natural affection, children learn through Disney fear and hatred’
(p. 35).
While many of these themes are not unique to Disney, it might be argued that
the Classic Disney has consistently represented this package of mainstream
American values over the years, reinforcing dominant themes of the political
and cultural context in which they were created. In addition, there is strong
and effective reinforcement of this package through the successful synergistic
 Understanding the Disney Universe 361
activities of the company. To understand this point more fully, we might look
more Closely at the actual worlds created by the Disney company.

Interpreting Disney’s Worlds

‘!'m Going to Disneyland.’*
Quite a bit of attention recently has been given to the Disney theme parks, as
these locations extend the values of the Classic Disney into ‘real’ worlds. As
Alexander Wilson has noted, ‘Among Walt Disney’s many contributions to
American popular culture, his theme parks call for special attention, because
they form the landscape against which Disney’s visions met the historical and
political realities of America’ (Wilson, 1994: 118).
A Disney representative recently explained the rationale behind the theme
parks’ squeaky-clean environment: ‘The cleanliness of the park, the safety of
the park is far more a search for excellence and quality on our part in
entertaining people than some ivory-tower, ideological exercise’ (Arizona
Republic, 1994). However, despite the denial, the result of Disney’s efforts
is an ideologically laden environment.
Of course, Disney’s parks are not the first to promote explicit views of the
world. World fairs and other expositions have provided the precedents for the
Disney worlds, as well as a wide range of other theme parks and amusement
sites that carry on these traditions (see Barnet and Cavanaugh, 1994: Chapter 1).
Disney’s original intentions in building Disneyland have been interpreted in
both economic and ideological terms. As Stephen Mills observes:
Disney recognized a novel opportunity to create not just a profitable enterprise
but an heroic agency to promote US values far beyond the limitations inherent in
the movies. He saw a window of opportunity to create not a sterile monument to
American values but a dynamic agency by which he could promote them, helping
to resolve what he saw as a crisis in US society. Whereas the Depression had been
resolved by the collectivist activities of mass mobilization, Disney sought to write
both the cure and the disease out of the public memory by re-establishing popular
faith in both the individualist myths of the past and the technological possibilities
of the future.
(Mills, 1990: 71)

It is not surprising that the themes represented at the parks echo those
prevalent in other Classic Disney entertainment products, as the rides and
attractions draw on those stories and characters; but the parks also add another
dimension to these themes. This may explain why analysis of Disney’s worlds
has emerged from a wide variety of disciplines (for instance, see Fjellman,
1992; Foss and Gill, 1987; Harrison, 1980). Ignoring some of the mumbo-
jumbo postmodern debates (including Baudrillard’s description of Disney as
‘techno-luminous cinematic space of total spatio-dynamic theater’ (Baudril-
lard, 1994), some of the most interesting discussions have come from the field
of architecture. For instance, Isozaki (1993) notes that theme parks provide
some of the only possibilities left for community planning.
Meanwhile, others have dissected the Disney parks environment as one of
careful integration of entertainment and fun with commercialization. The
362 Janet Wasko

parks are skillfully designed to lead visitors constantly to gift shops and kiosks
featuring Disney merchandise. Wilson (1993) has labelled Disney's worlds
‘An Architecture of Merchandising. . . the fullest representation of commo-
dified space we have in North America... . [It] organizes public space
according to the market; it understands private space as an architectural
adjunct of individual consumption’.
Beyond the obvious commercial orientation, Disney’s worlds also fail to
provide any hope that the future will not be more of the past. Upon more
careful examination, Disney’s presentation of the future at EPCOT, Tomor-
rowland, etc., represent ‘a celebration of technology and enterprise’. As Jane
Kuenz observes: ‘.. .the future is simply presented; the social mechanisms
producing it and the social consequences thereof are not’ (Kuenz, 1993: 78).
Indeed, the future seems merely to reflect the past, or Disney’s version of the
past, as represented in a ‘conglomeration of exoticized, but also colonized,
locales’ (Kuenz, 1993: 81). Again, a familiar theme emerges in the Disney
Universe, as the Classic Disney model does not represent realism as much as
the idealization of real life (Maltin, 1973: 30).
A pilgrimage to one of the Disney lands, which at least to one analyst has
become a pseudo-religious experience (Moore, 1980), also has been inter-
preted as a reification of existing social relations. Kuenz concludes *. . . the
main source of pleasure at Disney World is a process of recognizing dominant
ideological structures and identifying with the role we’ve been assigned in
them’ (Keunz, 1993: 78).
Control at the parks is not limited to the patrons, however. Careful and
exacting training and management of employees is legendary at the Disney
worlds, as well as at the Disney studios (Allen and Denning, 1993; Smith and
Eisenberg, 1987). While the Chief Mouse, CEO Michael Eisner, topped the
world’s executive pay scale in 1993 with earnings of $203 million in salary
and stock options, the lowliest of Worker Mice at the Disney theme parks
typically receive minimum wages and must follow stringent rules and regula-
tions on the job.
For instance, the ‘Disney Look’ at the theme parks is not accidental. In
addition to wearing specific uniforms, Cast Members (Disney’s name. for
employees who meet the public) at the theme parks must adhere to a strict
grooming code. Some of the specifications of this code, drawn from a
company brochure entitled “The Disney Look’, include the following. For
hosts — neat, natural haircuts ‘tapered so that it does not extend beyond or
cover any part of your ears.’ (Illustrations in the ‘Disney Look’ manual
provide examples of acceptable and unacceptable haircuts.) No moustaches
or beards are allowed; however, deodorant is required. For hostesses — no
‘extremes’ in hairstyles; confinement of long hair by acceptable accessories,
‘... a plain barrette, comb or headband in gold, silver, or tortoise shell
without ornamentation of any kind including bows. No more than two
barrettes or combs’; only natural makeup is permitted, and only clear or
flesh-toned fingernail polish. ‘Polishes that are dark red, frosted, gold or
silver toned are not considered part of the ‘‘Disney Look.” . . . Finger nails
should not exceed one-fourth of an inch beyond the fingertip.’>
In light of these examples, it seems easy to agree with Wilson as he identifies
one of the prevalent characteristics of the Disney company and the Classic
 Understanding the Disney Universe 363
Disney value system: “The organizing principle of the Disney Universe is
control. ie. This sort of thematic and directed space is a common one in our
society [shopping malls, supermarkets], though seldom is it so systematically
applied’ (Wilson, 1993: 167).

Growing Up With The Mouse

Disney is a primary force in the expression and formation of American mass

consciousness.
(Schickel, 1986)

What do people think of the Disney Universe? After establishing Disney

products, parks, images and characters as value-laden commodities, we
must ask even more questions about their significance for audiences. What
do these products and the themes represented mean to consumers? Why are
Disney products and characters still popular? Why, however, do some of them
fail? What do the ideas and values represented by these products mean for an
entire culture, not just individuals within that culture?
We might first identify those intense Disney fans, who strongly announce
their allegiance to the ideology of The Mouse. Numerous examples of Disney
fanzines indicate that at least some audience members have fully accepted
Disney’s ideology in their hearts and minds. Examples include The Duckburg
Times, The “E” Ticket, Carl Barks & Co. (in Denmark), etc. Disney
enthusiasts are now represented on Internet (rec.arts.disney, for instance),
plus other commercial networks, where they share information about Disney
history, plus exchange stories and images of Disney characters.
Beyond these Disney addicts, however, who are those millions of otherwise
sane people walking around in T-shirts emblazoned with... a rodent. . . in
red shorts and white gloves? Those who wear The Mouse on their chest may
not be claiming to embrace the values represented by the image, but may only
be participating in a fashion trend. Yet that trend seems to have been in vogue
for many, many years.
Again, Disney’s reputation for ‘pure’ entertainment means that often values
are either assumed (and accepted), unrecognized, or denied. The pervasive
family image of the Disney company often places it in a sacred, untouchable
arena. Yet the reinforcement of dominant social values also influences the
reception of Disney ideology, in a culture in which there are seldom many
alternatives. As Kuenz observes, in relation to Disney World, in particular:
‘Identifying with a dominant ideology and the role it assigns us has long been
the source of a lot of happiness for many people. . . . Success or pleasure
becomes, then, playing it to the fullest. This, of course, is all very convenient
for Disney World since its attractions and shows combine to encourage the
kind of subject it needs to ensure its own success’ (Kuenz, 1993: 83). pi
The repetitive messages and themes are so blatant and obvious that it is
difficult to imagine that the Disney ideology could be interpreted in any way
other than it was intended. However, examples of resistance can be found, as
the Disney images have been taken over and given new meanings. One dated
364 Janet Wasko

g
example is the 1960s poster (first published in The Progressive) depictin
Disney characters in very unDisney -like positions (smoking dope, engaging in
sex, etc.) Willis reminds us, as well, of children’s appropriation of Disney
images (Willis, 1993), while others have provided examples of resistance to
Disney’s control of experiences and memories, especially at the theme parks
(Klugman, 1993). ; ;
There also seems to be a kind of backlash to Disney’s intense expansion
during the last decade, as some consumers have come to view the Disney
Company as behaving in an overtly greedy and overly materialistic manner.
Increases in theme park prices and intense marketing and merchandising
efforts have promoted some former fans to describe Disney as having gone
past the point of good corporate behavior.

Surveying Disney Audiences

While it is certain that the Disney company has conducted and continues to do
extensive marketing research, the audiences for Disney products and ideology
have been virtually neglected by the academic community. Other than
Michael Real’s survey in his study of Disney in 1973, there are few other
examples of audience research focusing on the impact of Disney.
A recent attempt to replicate Real’s audience survey revealed some inter-
esting results, although the conclusions in every way are quite preliminary.’
Much more research needs to be done to confirm any of the following points,
and to explore other issues.
Participants were asked to identify their exposure to Disney products, and
then, later in the survey, asked whether they had been exposed to specific
products. Comparing these prompted and unprompted answers revealed that
the respondents seriously underestimated their exposure to the Disney Uni-
verse, even the theme parks which one would expect to be particularly
memorable. Many were reluctant to admit that Disney currently had any
effect on them.
These findings are most likely related to the specific audience surveyed.
The respondents were university students, with a median age of 21. Within
this age range, Disney may be assumed to be childish, as indicated by one
respondent: ‘I’ve grown up and Disney is no longer appropriate.’ Interest-
ingly, while these young adults generally disavowed any influence that Disney
may have had on them, they were unanimous in their assessment that any
influence was positive. Similarly contradictory attitudes were revealed in
many respondent’s interpretations of the general effects of Disney. Indeed,
both positive and negative interpretations could be found even in the
responses of the same person.
Overall, the strongest results of this very preliminary survey relate to
exposure to Disney products. While respondents claim that current interac-
tions were low, responses indicated both that they currently have significant
exposure and plan on continuing exposure, both for themselves and for future
generations (their own children, nieces, nephews, etc.).
Another attempt to assess the audience for Disney products was an assign-
ment at the beginning of a university course devoted to Disney. Before
 Understanding the Disney Universe 365
reading any of the material for the course and without any prompting from the
_ professor’s lectures, students were asked to write a brief personal history of
ae interest, experiences and/or impressions of Disney and/or Disney pro-
ucts.
Again, these students represent a specific type of Disney audience. Many
are avid Disney fans; all of them have at least passing interest in Disney, as
_ the course was not required. Nevertheless, the comments provide further
insights into the reception of Disney products, as many of the accounts
echo and further elaborate some of the themes discussed previously.
Firstly, the accounts often recall experiences with Disney connected very
closely with their families.
My exposure to ‘Disney’ began when I was a small child. Disney has always been
a source of entertainment and fun to both myself and my family. I see Disney as a
world of fantasy that both children and adults can enjoy. The adventure and
excitement of Disney movies allows the viewer to escape into a world of
imagination and fulfillment.
The universal appeal referred to above is echoed in other accounts which
emphasize that Disney products and parks are appreciated by literally every-
one.
Disney. When I hear this word I think of fun. I think of everything that Disney is a
part of, and to me that means something that makes people happy. I don’t think I
have ever heard anyone say they hate Disneyland. How could you? It is a fun and
happy place which generates a good feeling inside of a person. This feeling is
what everything Disney is involved with is supposed to and does generate.
Very often, people’s memories of Disney experience as children are quite
vivid and strong. The following accounts represent some of these strong
remembrances, as well as echoing the themes of fantasy and escape in terms
drawn almost directly from the Classic Disney.
As a shy, only child growing up in a big city, watching Disney films gave me the
power and imagination to believe. By watching Disney’s animated feature-length
movies, Disney instilled in me a belief that I could do anything I wanted. I never
thought of Disney as anything more than that ‘magic’ that happened when I
watched a movie. I didn’t think about the products, or have very much desire to
go to the theme parks, because what I wanted were the fantasies. And I believed
with all my heart that I could have them. The bright lively characters on the
screen told me that I could be as happy as them if I could only dream as they do.
And through catchy sing-along songs, the characters made sure I knew to believe
in myself in order to make my dreams come true. Therefore, believing in myself,
I wished on a star every night, knowing that if I wished hard enough my wishes
would someday come true. Undoubtedly, Disney had cast its-spell on me.

I think what is so intriguing and fascinating about Disney movies is that although
they may not be realistic, yet that is what makes them all the more interesting.
Few Disney movies are realistic, so they capture the desires everyone has to
escape the real world and visit a ‘fantasy’ or ‘magic’ land.

Still others note that they have grown out of Disney and its magic spell.
Many accounts also note the increased commercialization of the Disney
company, or say that they did not notice such intense commercial practices
when they were children.
366 Janet Wasko

I think I am too jaded to be fully touched by the Disney phenomenon. I’ve gone to
sleep too many times without being awakened and changed by a kiss, I’ve wished
on too many stars without my dreams coming true. Next to the biting satire of The
Simpsons, Disney cartoons seem like they are trying to pull a fast one on me and
make me believe in something that doesn’t exist. Not to say that I don’t believe in
magic. I do very much. I just doubt that magic can be created and sustained by a
corporate entity that insists on depicting life in terms of cuteness and perfection.

Living Happily Ever After

One would hope that the study of popular culture and the Disney Universe no
longer is considered a Mickey Mouse enterprise, but an important component
of our understanding of the world today, and the role communications
institutions play in it. It seems clear that the manufacture of fantasy by a
company like the Disney corporation has implications for the reinforcement
of societal norms and values. Despite the insistence by some creators and
audience members, it is not just merely entertainment.
Through this cursory look at the Disney Universe, it may be possible to
understand how the commodification of culture is intensifying. The careful
control of Disney’s empire is echoed in the themes and values represented in
Classic Disney products. Certainly, much more work is needed to assess how
these themes are received and reworked by audience members. It also seems
clear that the study of an enterprise such as the Disney Company offers the
opportunity to explore more fully these relations of consumption, and to
understand more fully the attractions and possible contradictions of consumer
culture.

Notes

1 Material for this section is taken primarily from the Walt Disney Company’s
annual reports to stockholders (1990-1994), Form 10Ks, and Grover (1991).
2 In their Form 10K for 1990, the company reported that their film library
included 194 full-length live action features, 29 full-length animated colour features
and 529 cartoon shorts.
3 Touchstone Pictures was formed in 1984 (before the management/ownership
shuffle) with the release of Splash.
4 A commonly heard exclamation made by athletes and teams during interviews
after winning championship games. Of course, arrangements are made for payment (as
high as $60,000) by the Disney company with the athletes before the game is played.
5 The grooming code for Euro Disney also included requirements specifying that
employees must keep their weight ‘in harmony with their height’, as well as wearing
appropriate undergarments’. It is unclear whether or not these requirements are part
of the codes for the other parks. Some potential Euro Disney workers apparently found
these limitations difficult to accept; trade unions called for the code to be abandoned
and the Labour Minister claimed that it infringed on French employment laws; but,
with millions of people out of work in France, and Disney offering 13,000 jobs,
many
accepted the low-paying jobs, agreeing to adhere to the Disney code. ‘French
“Cast
 Understanding the Disney Universe 367
ee Get Used to Rules in a Magic Kingdom of Jobs.’ Chicago Tribune, January

6 The Disney company also promotes its products directly on-line, especially
Disney Software, which maintains addresses on may of the commercial networks
_ plus Internet ([email protected]).
tThe Survey involved 45 students enrolled in a Journalism/Communication
course during October 1994. 82 per cent of the respondents were white, 25 female
and 20 male, and the media age was 21. Most of the questions duplicated those used in
Real’s survey, including those pertaining to respondent’s past and future experiences
with Disney products and their impressions of Disney’s influence. A mixture of
prompted and unprompted questions were used.

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 Index

ABC 184, 351 Avant-garde movement 53-4

Access principle, media performance 72-3, 74
Accountability see Performance norms
Advance Publications, media turnover 184 Baudrillard, J., postmodernism 53, 55-64
Advertising BBC
audience fragmentation 126
advertisers’ editorial influence 96-7, 109
commercialization 22-3
corporate domination of cultural life 16-17
communication system change 124
elite audiences 144
counter to commodification 17
by governments 23
media watchdog role and 84
secondary entertainment 169
mission of 22
Third World 195
political pressure on 17
Aestheticism, postmodernism and 59-60 BBC World 197, 198, 209, 213
Africa 182, 183, 196 Bedouin, global media effects 192-3
Arab States, media globalization 182, 192-4, Bertelsmann group 20, 93, 168, 184, 185
195, 197, 198, 209, 213 Brazil
- ARD, media turnover 184 censorship 150
Asia global media firms 190, 191
Asian Broadcasting Union 209 local production 188
Asiavision 213 media effects 192
media conglomerates 190, 191, 197, 198 television exports 180
media flows 186, 187, 188 television viewing 60
oligopolistic domination 93 Britain
TV ownership 182, 195 Channel 4 112
see also individual countries civil service model of broadcasting 107
Audiences consumer representation 91, 92, 94-5
activity 12-13, 25, 28 copyright law 166
autonomy 221 free expression 146
digital technology and 20-1 left-wing press 23-4
global television 219-21 material and cultural inequality 26-8
journalists’ knowledge of 152 media domination 92
market-driven journalism 254-5, 259 media watchdog 84-5, 88-9
media and social change 125-6, 130-1, 132, public sphere 19
133-4 Royal Commission on the Press 23-4, 98, 99
newspaper advertising 144 satellite television companies 197
passive subjects 41-2 see also BBC
representation 95, 271-4, 336 British Broadcasting Corporation see BBC
role in commodification 16-17 British Sky Broadcasting see BSkyB
sovereignty 25-9, 96 Broadcasting
taste formation 170-1 advertising 16-17, 96
transmission models 41-2, 46 communication system change 124
see also Effects research; Reception analysis democracy
Australia 20, 86-7, 92, 96, 185 civil service model 107
370 Index

Broadcasting — cont’d see also Ownership of media

consumer representation 92-4, 96-7, 101 Commercialism, American news media 243-60
core media concept 105, 106-8 Commodification 16-17, 162
professionalism 99 Communication equipment
state interference 106-7 digital technology 20-1
watchdogs 83-90, 110, 111 globalized media 132, 181-3
liberal corporatist model 106-7 material and cultural inequality 26-7, 28
mission 22 media and social change 125, 130-1, 132
political economy 16-18, 20; 21=3; 27, 145 news production 146-7, 155
political manipulation 86-7, 88-90, 129 see also Entertainment, technology
regulation/deregulation 21-2, 67-8, 83-4, Communication theory
87, 90, 108 entertainment 161-2
state intervention 21 feminism 32, 37-43
see also Television media and social change 120-34
Broadcasting Act 1990 84 Communication values, performance principles
BSkyB 20, 93, 108, 209 70-9
Bureaucratic theory, newswork 149 Computerization see Information technology
Conglomerization 16
Cable News Network see CNN see also Corporations
Cable technology Conspiracy theory, political economy and 145
Disney Channel 353 Consumer orientation, media and social change
greater view choice 94 126
market entry limitations 93 Consumer representation 91-7, 101, 103
media and social change, media abundance Consumer sovereignty 13, 25-9, 91, 96, 259
124-5 Copyright law 165-7, 356
news production 155 Core media, democracy 105, 106-8
take up of services 108, 155
Corporations
in United States 84, 94, 218
anti-monopoly measures 111, 112
Cagney and Lacey 44-5, 271-2
communication system change 124, 125
Canada 93, 185
entertainment
Capital Cities 184, 351
Disney company 348-67
Capitalism
feminist theory 36-7, 38, 40
globalization 171-3
‘late’ 178 hardware/software strategies 167-8
media globalization and 199-200 taste formation 170
political economy 14, 17, 18, 87, 144-7 globalization 183-6, 187, 190, 191, 199, 200
postmodern theory 58-60, 61-4 domesticating output 197
see also Market forces entertainment 171-3
CBS 184, 191, 249, 250 government resistance 198
Change processes, media and social change growth in 1990s 197
120-34 reverse flows 197, 198
Channel 4 112 trade barriers and piracy 186, 187
Children transnational competition 125
media effects research 305-21 market-driven journalism 250
media and social change 126, 130-1 media watchdog role and 86-8
China 145, 149-50, 181, 198, 216 oligopolistic domination 92-7, 111, 112
Cinema see Film political economy 16-17, 19-21, 144-5
Citizenship 18, 129 Cosby Show 60-1
Civic media sector, democracy 106, 108-9 Crimewatch UK 276, 277
Civil service model, broadcasting 107 Critical political economy see Political
Civil society, public service broadcasting 145 economy
Class conditions Critical theory, purpose of mass media 76
soap opera audiences 328-9, 330-2 Cultural accounts, newswork 151-5
socialist feminism 36-7 Cultural goods, political economy 19-24
Class domination, by privately owned media 15 Cultural imperialism 132, 178, 179, 180-1, 185,
CNN 94, 155, 185, 197, 209, 213, 214 186, 190, 206-7
Commercial broadcasting Cultural inequality 26-8
economics of 16-17 Cultural pluralism 178, 190, 206-7
regulation 21, 90, 92, 108 Cultural relativism, objectivity 230-1
role of advertising 16-17, 96 Cultural studies
 Index 371
approaches to entertainment 161 Economic determination, political economy 15
audience members 12-13 Effects research 305-21
consumer sovereignty 26 audience interpretations 317-18
feminism 32, 37, 43-6, 48, 49 change or reinforcement 307-8
regulating public discourse 24-5 classic experiment 308
Culture contradictory findings 314-15
corporate domination 16-17 control groups 311-13
performance principles 76-8 criticisms of research 310
Current affairs broadcasting duration of effects 309-10
see News effects tradition 306
future research 319-21
Dallas 40, 61, 272-3, 296-8 inconclusiveness 310-11, 319-21
Death on the Rock 89 interdisciplinary debates 316
Decoding see Encoding/decoding model laboratory and field studies compared 313-14
Democracy 81-115 linking interpretation and effect 318-19
civic media sector 106, 108-9 moral panics 315-16
consumer representation 91-7, 101, 103 policy and knowledge 316-17
core media 105, 106-8 prosocial effects 309, 310-11
entertainment 102 size of effects 309
information/representation 101 types of portrayal 309, 311
informational role of media 19, 97-103 Egypt 192-3, 216
news management 127 Elections, television and 100, 254
oligopolistic domination 92-7, 111-12 Electronic journalism, globalization 204-22
ownership debates 19-20, 83-90, 110, 111 Emergency shows 274-7
private enterprise sector 110-11 Empathy principle 77
professional media sector 106, 109-10 Encoding/decoding model 43-6, 132, 220-1,
professional responsibility model 98-100 282, 287, 288
the public sphere 19, 82-3 Entertainment 160-75
reception analysis 300-2 commodification 162
social market sector 106, 111-12 concept of ‘independence’ 171
‘talk show democracy’ 129-30, 254 copyright 165-7
watchdog role of media 83-90, 110, 111 democratic role of media and 102
Dependency paradigm, Third World entertainment/news ratios 95, 243-4, 250,
development 179, 208 252-3, 254-5
Dependency theory, audiences 133-4 globalization 171-4, 175
Developing nations see Third World hardware/software 167-8
Digital technology 20-1, 172-3 leisure 168-71
Disney company 348-67 marketing 169-70
‘business strategy 350-7 merchandising 165, 355-7, 362
consumer products 355-7 national culture 174-5
filmed entertainment 352-3 national industries 174
history 350 politics of 174-5
income and revenue 351, 355 primary and secondary 169
significance for audiences 363-6 promotion 169-70
theme parks and resorts 353-4, 361-3 stardom concept 164-5
themes and values 357-64 storage and retrieval technology 163-4
Diversity, consumer representation 94-5, talent 164-5
101-2, 103 taste formation 170-1
Diversity principle, communication 72, 73-4 technology 163-71
Documentary programmes, fiction and 275-6 see also Disney company
Dynasty 40, 330-1, 338 Equality
feminist theories 33, 38
Eastern Europe, television news 216 material and cultural 19, 25-9
Economic conditions as performance principle 70, 71, 73-5, 78-9
material and cultural inequality 26-7 Ethnography 192-3, 282, 325-6, 328, 339-41
postmodernist theory 58-60, 61-4 Europe
the public sphere 18, 82-3 broadcasting systems 106-8, 111, 145, 209,
reception analysis 299-302 219
socialist feminism 36-7 copyright law 166
372 Index

Europe — cont'd free expression 146

global media revolution and gender differences 39
consumption 196 Free market see Capitalism; Market forces
firms 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 197 Freedom, as performance principle 70-1, 72-3,
flows 197, 198 78-9
news exchange system 210, 211-12, 213 Friedan, B. 32
oligopolistic domination 92, 93, 111-12 Functionalist theory, purpose of mass media 76
television 86, 93, 182
as active participant 216
news presentation 100 Gannett, media turnover 184
European Broadcasting Union 209, 212, 213 Gatekeeping function, journalism 142, 212, 253
Gender 31-50, 325-43
articulations 337-8, 341
Facts class 328-9, 330-2, 337-8
objectivity 233-6 encoding/decoding meaning 43-6
sociology of news production 151 entertainment 161
Fairness doctrine, reporting 84 ethnography 325-6, 328, 339-41
False consciousness theory 55, 285 gender neutrality 338-9
Femininity gendered subjectivity 334-6
feminism and 38, 39, 40, 42 as given category 332-4
global media effects 193 global media effects 192, 193
representation and gender 272-3, 336 investment concept 335-6
see also Gender literacy patterns 195
Feminism 31-50 material and cultural inequality 28
academic project 32-3, 46-9 media politics 32-3, 39, 40, 46-9, 342-3
in communication theory 32, 37-43 news production 146, 253
cultural studies 32, 37, 43-6, 48, 49 postmodern theory 60-1, 341-3
Disney stereotypes 359 poststructuralism 334-5
encoding/decoding model 43-6 recursive production of social relations 335-6
liberal type 33-4, 38-40 representation and 271-4, 336
media politics 32-3, 39, 40, 46-9, 342-3 sameness-difference dilemma 38, 39
news and 46 sports programs 47, 325-6, 338-9, 341
passive audience 41-3 stereotypes 31, 33-4, 41, 47, 359
postmodern 58, 341-3 telephone use 28, 337
progressive models of representation 272-4 transmission models 46
radical type 35-6, 38-40 General Electric 86, 184
realism 41 Germany
relationship with women 329-30, 342 Bertelsmann group 93, 168, 184
socialist type 36-7, 40 broadcasting system 106-7
sociology of entertainment 161 free expression 146
see also Gender global media firms 184
Fiction oligopolistic media domination 93
documentary and 275-6 Globalization 177-200
romantic novels 40, 42, 47, 328, 336 access to media forms in 1990s 194-5
Film industry audience research 219-21
annual cinema visits 196 of communication 131-3
copyright law 165-7 communications and development model
global media firms 185, 187 178-80, 194, 199, 206-7
‘independents’ 171 consumer representation and 93
local production 188 cultural imperialism 178, 179, 180-1, 185,
mediation 169-70 190, 206-7
multimedia corporations 93 cultural pluralism 178, 181, 190, 206-7
stardom 164, 165 cultural products in global economy 189-90
taste formation 170-1 definition 176
Third World 180 effects and consequences 192, 214-15
see also Disney company electronic journalism 204-22
Film studies, feminist theory 36 entertainment 171-4, 175
Fourth Estate, media as 91 gatekeeping function of journalism 212
Fox Broadcasting 20, 93 global village concept 155, 206
France hegemonic models 181
 Index 373
indigenization 189, 197 performance principles 66-79
institutional structures 209-10, 218-19 public sphere 18, 19
live coverage 214-16 state production and dissemination 21, 23
localized production 187, 188-9, 197, 199 see also News
manipulation 211, 217 Information technology
media effects 190, 192-4, 195, 198-9, 207 corporate power 20-1
media firms 183-6, 190, 191, 197-8, 199 gendered use 46, 337
media flows 186-90, 197-8, 199 home computer ownership 26, 27
media forms 181-3 news product 146-7
news agencies 210-11, 212 take up of new services 108
news exchange systems 211-13 Instrumentalism, political economy 15, 144
news manipulation 211, 217 Intellectual property 21, 165-7, 235-6
news as narrative 208, 214-15, 220 International communications 125, 177-200,
news production 155 204-22
objectivity 210-11, 215 International Thomson Group 93, 185
piracy 186, 187 ‘Interpretative community’ 289-90
postmodernism 178, 198, 207 Intervision 209, 213
process of 205-8 Iran, global media 189, 193-4
public opinion forming 217-18 Israel, television 216
reverse flows 197, 198 ITV (Independent Television) 89
television as participant 215-19
trade barriers 186, 187
or western dominance 213 Japan 151, 168, 184, 185, 190, 191
see also Corporations Journalism
Government see State autonomy 99, 110
Gulf + Western 184 bias discussed 225-6
Gulf War 195, 214, 216-17, 228, 253 codes of practice 68
commercialism of US news media 243-60
fairness doctrine 84
Habermas, J., the public sphere 18, 82-3
female journalists 34, 37, 38-9, 150
Hachette group 185 gatekeeper function 142, 212, 253
Hegemony theories, reception analysis 285
globalization 204-22
Holland, global media firms 168, 185, 191 audience research 219-21
Homosexuality 35, 38, 151-2 effects and consequences 192, 214-15
Hutchins Commission 98, 99 gatekeeping 212
Hyperreality, postmodernist theory 56 institutional structures 209-10, 218-19
international crises 216-17
Idealists, objectivity debates 228-9 live coverage 214-16
Ideology manipulation 211, 217
false consciousness 55, 285 news agencies 210-11, 212
reception analysis and 281-3, 284-5 news exchange systems 211-13
socialist feminism 36-7 news as narrative 208, 214-15, 220
theories of 54, 55 objectivity 210-11, 215
Images process 207-8
modernism and postmodernism 54-62 public opinion forming 217-18
representation and gender 271-2 television as participant 215-19
saturation 56 or western dominance 213
semiotics 266-7, 272, 274-7 live coverage 214-16, 253
Imagined communities 132-3 media watchdog role 87-8, 110
Imperialism 179, 180 news management 127
see also Cultural imperialism newsroom diversity 38, 150, 253
Income differentials, inequality 26-8 objectivity 74, 210-11, 215, 223-40
see also Economic conditions political communication 127, 128-9, 130
Independent 96 professionalism 132
Independent Television (ITV) 89 American news media 244-60
India 180-1, 188, 197, 198 democracy 99-100, 109-10
Indigenization, global media 189, 197 media and social change 132
Indonesia, television ownership 195 sociology of production 149-50
Information sources 147-8, 238-9
democratic role of media 97-103 total newspapering 246-8
374 Index

Journalism — cont’d masculinity 38, 47, 336

truth-seeking strategies 100, 109-10 Middle East 182, 192-4, 195, 197, 198, 209, 213
see also News; Performance norms Mimetic theories, TV 54, 56, 59
Journals, feminist activism 32 Modernism 53-4
Monopolies 92-7, 111-12
Moral panics, media effects 315-16
Kant, I., idealist critique 228-9
Morocco, global media effects 193
Knowledge, objectivity 226, 228-9
Multimedia companies 19-21, 93-4
see also Corporations
Labour movement, newspaper for 23-4 Multinational companies see Corporations
Language systems 266-7, 272, 274-7, 282, 287, Murdoch, R.
288 digital technology 20-1
Latin America media domination 92, 93, 95-6
censorship 150 News Corporation 93, 184, 185
global media firms 190, 191 News International 19-20, 168
local production 188, 189 public service broadcasting 84
media effects 192 STAR TV 197, 198
television exports 180 Music industry
television viewing 60 copyright 165-6
Left-wing newspapers 23-4 Disney 356
Leisure globalization 171-4, 175
entertainment 168-71 history of 168
material and cultural inequality 26-8 ignored by sociology 161
Lesbianism, feminist theory 35, 38 ‘independents’ 171
Liberal corporatism, broadcasting 106-7 mediation 169-70
Liberal feminism 33-4, 38-40 stardom 164-5
Libya, news reporting 217 storage and retrieval technology 163-4
Linguistics 266-7, 272, 274-7, 282, 287, 288 taste formation 170-1
Literacy, patterns of 195
Lonrho, editorial independence 88
National culture 174-5, 187
Magazine shows 250-1, 252, 253, 256 National policy-making, globalized media
Magazines 40, 42-3, 47, 92, 93 199-200
Market forces Nations, imagined communities 132-3
active audiences 13 Nationwide 46, 282, 283, 289
consumer representation 91-7 NBC 86, 249, 250
Habermas’ public sphere 18, 82-3 New York Times 155, 243-4, 246
information 97-8 News
media watchdog role 83-90, 110, 111 ambiguity of ‘professionalism’ 100
political economy 16-24, 27 credibility 72
private enterprise 110-11 encoding/decoding model 46, 132
professionalism in US news media 243-60 as entertainment 164
social market sector 111-12 entertainment/news ratios 95, 243-4, 250,
Marxism 15, 55, 281, 285 252-3, 254-5
Masculinity 38, 47, 336 fairness principle 84
see also Gender globalization 132-3
Matsushita 86, 168, 185, 191 local channels 249-50
Maxwell Communications 185 management techniques 127-8
MCA 86, 184, 185 manipulation 211, 217, 258
Meaning media watchdogs 85
audience production 12-13 objectivity 74-5, 210-11, 215, 223-40
encoding/decoding model 43-6, 132, 220-1, political communication 128-30
282, 287, 288 political diversity 94
feminist theory 43-6 political economy 15, 143-7
political economy 12-13, 19-24, 28-9 political pressure on 86-7
political meaning-systems 289 postmodern characteristics 57
reception analysis case studies 292-8 propaganda model 15, 145
representation 268-71, 274-7 reception analysis 292-5, 300-2
Men sociology of production 141-56
gender identity 325-6, 334-41 comparative research 156
 Index 375
cultural approaches 151-5 metaphysical questions 227-9
gatekeeping 142 neutrality contrasted 239-40
images and stereotypes 151-2 as performance principle 74-5
journalists’ cultural image 155 politics of 237-40
judging newsworthiness 152-4 reality 226, 229-30, 231-3
literary tradition 154—5 shift to subjectivity 251-2
personal values 150 social construction of reality 230, 231-3
political economy 143-7 sources 238-9
potential for change 155-6 television as active participant 215
professionalism 149-50 transcultural communication 230-1
Treporter-editor relations 148-9, 258 truth 227-8, 235-7
reporter-official relations 147-8 value judgements 236-7, 239-40
reverse inverted pyramid 148-9 worldviews 230-1
satellite technology 150-1 Observer, editorial independence 88
social organization 147-51, 154-5 Oligopolistic domination 92-7, 111-12
sources 147-8 Orality, global media effects 194
technical sophistication 125, 128 ORBIT 197, 198
see also Journalism Order principle, media performance 70, 71,
News agencies 209, 210-11, 213 75-9
News Corporation 93, 184, 185 Organizational approaches, newswork 147-51,
News exchange systems 211-13 154-5
News International 19-20, 168 Ownership of media
News at Ten, reception analysis 292-5 communication system change 124
Newspapers consumer representation 91-7
access 195 market-driven journalism 247-8
advertising 96, 109, 144 media as watchdog 83-90, 110, 111
civic sector 108-9 political economy 15, 16-24, 132
conglomerization 86 social market sector 111-12
consumer representation 92-6
entertainment/news ratios 95, 252-3, 254-5
as Fourth Estate 91 Parody 57
freedom of expression 146, 149-50 Pastiche 57-8
globalization of media firms 185 Patriarchy 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 60-1, 336
informational role 98 Performance norms 66-79
left-wing 23-4 empathy principle 77
market entry limitations 93 enduring public interest concept 68-9
ownership debates 19-20, 83-90, 92-6 equality/justice values 70, 71, 73-5, 78-9
performance norms see Performance norms failures of 66—7
political partisanship 87, 88-9, 95, 96 foundations of principle 69-70
readership figures 196, 247, 248 freedom 70-1, 72-3, 78-9
representation 265-6, 267-71 movement towards performance principles
technological change 146-7 67-8
total newspapering 246-8 order/solidarity values 70, 71, 75-9
watchdog 83-90 public interest defined 69
watchdog role 83-90 Philips 168, 185, 190
see also Journalism Photographs, semiotic focus on 266, 267-71
NHK, media turnover 184 Piracy 186, 187
NYPD 275, 277 Police Stop! 276, 277
Political change, commercialism of US news
media and 251-3
Objectivity 223-40 Political economy 11-29, 143-7
accusations summarized 226-7 consumption 25-9
bias 225-6, 238, 240 cultural studies compared 12-13
dangers of belief in 237-8, 240 definition 14-18
existence and meaning of facts 233-5 globalization of communication 132
extent of fact 235-6 historicity 13, 15-16
global and local doubts 229-30 meaning as exercise of power 19-24
idealist/realist debates 228-9 media watchdog role 86-7
international news agencies 210-11 of news 15, 143-7
meaning construction 234-5 tasks 13, 15, 19-29
376 Index

Political economy — cont’d Public relations 16, 23, 127-8

textual analysis 24-5 Public service broadcasting
Politicians and parties communication system change 124
civic media 109 core media concept 105, 106-8
consumer representation in media 95, 96, 101 impact of new TV industries 94
left-wing press 23-4 manipulation 89-90
manipulation by 86-7, 88-90, 127, 129 media watchdog role 83-5, 88-90, 110
media and social change 127, 128-30 political economy debates 17-18, 22-3, 145
Polysemy 26, 41, 45, 288 professionalism 99
Pornography 35, 333 state interference 106-7
Postmodernism 53-64 Public sphere 18, 19, 82-3, 93-4, 102-3
aestheticism compared 59-60 Publishing industry
categorical boundaries 56, 58 access 195
feminism and 58, 341-3 copyright 165-7
fragmented nature 56-7, 63-4 Disney 355-6
generic categorization 58-9 global statistics 196
globalization 178, 198, 207
globalization 185, 195
hardware/software strategies 168
hyperreality 56
images and reality in 55-6 mediation 169-70
media and social change 122-3, 133-4 ‘star’ concept 165
objectivity 226 taste formation 170-1
organizing structures 57, 58, 64
see also Newspapers
pastiche 57-8
radical politics 63-4
Racial conflict, media coverage 151
refusal of ideology 62
Radical feminism 35-6, 38-40
sign systems 63-4
Radio 93, 109, 129, 195, 196
signifiers 57-8, 62
Readership theory, total newspapering 247, 24
the simulacrum 55-6, 57
‘Reading formation’ 289, 290
Poststructuralism, gender identity 334-5
Reality
Poverty, postmodern theory of TV and 61
images of women 41, 272-3, 274
see also Economic conditions newswork 147
Power
objectivity 226, 228, 229-30, 231-3
equality as public interest 73 postmodernism 54-6
feminist theory 37 semiotics of representation 266-7, 272, 274—
media as watchdog 83-90 Reality-based programming, television 250
political economy 19-24 Reception analysis 280-302
‘Preferred reading’ concept 288 aims 283-7
Press see Newspapers
complexity 284, 286-7
Pressure groups, news management 127 dominant values 284-5
Privately owned media see Corporaticns; immunity 284, 286-7
Ownership of media popular culture project 283, 284
Privatization 14, 21, 93
public information project 283-4
Professionalism
resistance 284, 285-6
American news media 244-60 concepts 287-90
democratic role of media 98-100, 106, economy study 299-302
109-10 ethnography 282, 340-1
globalized television 132 focus groups 283
sociology of news production 149-50 future for 298-302
Promotional culture 127-8 media and social change 132, 134
Propaganda model, news 15, 145 methods 290-2
Psychoanalytic theory 36, 39, 55 origins 281-3
Public affairs see News soap opera case study 296-8
Public interest
television news case study 292-5
journalistic professionalism 98-100, 245,
textual analysis with 328-9
247-8
Record industry see Music industry
market-driven journalism 249-50, 258-9 Regulation, of media see State regulation
media accountability 66-79 Reith, Sir John 17, 22
media as watchdog 72, 83-90 Reporters see Journalism
Public ownership see Ownership of media Representation 265-78
 Index 377
democratic role of media 91-7, 101, 102, 103 Sovereign consumer 13, 25-9, 91, 96, 259
emergency shows 274-7 Sovereign nation, imagined community 133
gender and 271-4, 336 Soviet Union 152, 153, 154, 156
media as agency of 77 Spain, newspaper industry 146
a photograph analysed 267-71 Sports programs 47, 325-6, 338-9, 341
postmodernism 54-5, 56, 59 STAR TV 93, 197, 198, 209
semiotics 266-7, 272, 274-7 Stardom, concept of 164
Rescue 911 275, 277 State
- Reuters (formerly Visnews) 209, 210 as communicator 21, 23
Romantic novels 40, 42, 47, 328, 336 entertainment industry support 174-5
Rowland, T. 88 interference/influence 17, 21, 84, 88-90,
Royal Commission on the Press 23-4, 98, 99 106-7
news management 127
Satellite technology news manipulation 211, 217
global effects and coverage 197-8 news sources 144, 145-6, 147-8
government resistance 198 ownership debates 15, 16-24, 83-90
internationalized communication 125 resistance to conglomerates 198
market entry limitations 93 State regulation
media abundance 124-5 market-driven journalism 249
news globalization 195, 209-10, 211, media globalization 218-19
215-16, 218-19 media as watchdog 83-4, 87, 90
ownership debates 20 performance principles 67-8
take up 108, 195 political economy 21-2
see also named services Stockholder theory, total newspapering 247-8
Self-government, democracy 98, 102-3 Structuralism 15, 281
_ Semiotics 266-7, 272, 274-7, 282, 287, 288 Subjectivity 54-5, 251-2, 334-6
Sex role stereotypes 31, 33-4, 41, 47, 359 Sun 95, 96
see also Gender Sunday Times 89, 96
Sexuality 38, 151-2 Sweden 111, 146
Signifiers 57-8, 62, 272-3
Simulacrum, postmodernist theory 55-6, 57 Tabloidization, television 256-8, 259
Soap operas Talent, entertainment industry 164-5
class differences 328-9, 330-2 Telenovelas 188-9
feminist theory 40, 47, 272-4 Telephones 27, 28, 129, 195, 196, 337
cult of femininity 42 Television
encoding/decoding model 46 commercialization 22-3, 27, 243-60
gender identities 33, 336 democratic role of media
pleasure from 33 advertising 96-7
textual analysis 327-9 ambiguity of ‘professionalism’ 100
global media effects 193 consumer representation 92-4, 96-7
global media flows 188 core sector 105, 106-8
postmodern theory 58, 60-1, 62 market entry limitations 93
reception analysis case study 296-8 media watchdog role 83-5, 86-7, 88-90
representation and gender 271-4 professional sector 110
Social change 120-34 social market sector 112
children 126, 130-1 effects research 305-21
communication system changes 124-6 election programmes 100, 254
conceptualizing linkages with media change emergency shows 274-7
123-4 gender and/in see Gender
globalized communication 131-3 globalization
political communication 127, 128-30 access in 1990s 195
postmodernism 122-3, 133-4 international coproductions 187
publicity and promotional culture 127-8 media effects 190, 192-3, 195
social trends 126—7 media and social change 132-3
Social organization, newswork 147-51, process 207-8
154-5 set ownership 181-3, 195, 196
Social responsibility theory 244 Third World production 180-1, 188
Socialist feminism 36-7, 40 trade barriers 187
Solidarity principle, performance 70, 71, 76-8 see also News, globalization
Sony 20, 93, 167, 168, 184, 185 international coproductions 25, 187
378 Index

Television — cont’d audience fragmentation 126

live coverage 214-16, 253 audience knowledge 152
local stations 249-50, 255, 258 channel increases 94
magazine shows 250-1, 252, 253, 256 control of media in 86, 92, 96
material and cultural inequality 26-7, 28 copyright law 166
media and social change 124-5, 131, 132-3 core values of journalism 154
modernist theories 54 deregulation of broadcasting 84, 218-19, 249
as participant 215-19 female journalists 34, 38-9, 150
performance norms see Performance norms free expression 146
postmodernism 53-64 global media firms 184, 185-6, 190, 191
private/public ownership debates 16-17, 20, journalistic autonomy 99
21-3, 27 journalists’ cultural image 155
consumer representation 92-4, 96-7 media consumption 196
media watchdog role 83-5, 86-7, 88-90 media domination 92
professionalism 100, 248-9 media as watchdog 83-5
reality-based programming 250 news media commercialism and
reception analysis case studies 292-8 professionalism 243-60
regulation/deregulation 21-2, 67-8, 83-4, news outlet proliferation 218-19
86, 111 pack journalism 150-1
representation 265-6, 271-7, 336 postmodern theory of TV viewing 60-1
space/time settings for viewing 28 propaganda model of news 145
state intervention 21 ‘talk show democracy’ 129-30, 254
tabloidization 256-8, 259 total newspapering 246-8
take up of new services 108 TV news 100
time spent watching 26, 27
women’s relationship with 60-1, 336 Value judgements, objectivity 236-7
see also Cable technology; News; Satellite Videos ‘
technology copyright law 166
Textual analysis 12, 24-5 Disney company 352
feminism 44-5, 48, 49, 327-9 global media effects 192, 193, 194
political economy 24-5 ownership 26, 27, 195
The Bill 275, 277 piracy 187
Third World Visnews see Reuters
communications and development model
178-80, 194, 199, 206-7 Walt Disney company see Disney company
consumption 196 Washington Post 155
dependency paradigm 179, 208 Watchdog functions 72, 83-90, 110, 111
economy 190, 191 Watergate scandal 85, 87
film and TV production 180-1 Women
local production 188-9 class and economic conditions 36-7, 328-9,
media effects 192-4 330-2
media piracy 186, 187 Disney portrayal 359
trade barriers 187 gender identity 33, 272-4, 332-3, 334-9
TV ownership 181, 182, 183, 195, 196 gendered use of telephone 28
Time-Warner 93, 168, 172, 183-4, 185, 187 information technology 46, 337
Times 96 magazines 40, 42-3
Times Mirror, media turnover 184 market categorization 333
Total newspapering 246-8 material and cultural inequalities 28
Trade barriers, global media 186, 187 patriarchal treatment 35-6, 37, 39, 40, 42, 336
Transmission models, gender constructs 41-2, postmodern theory of TV 60-1
realistic images 41
Transnational companies see Corporations relationship with feminism 329-30, 342
Truth, objectivity and 227-8, 235-7 representation 271-4, 336
Truth-seeking strategies, journalists 100, soap operas 33, 40, 42, 60-1, 271-4, 327-8
109-10 women’s movement 32
see also Gender
UK see Britain WTN (Worldwide Television News) 209, 211
UNESCO, global media 184-5, 186, 189-90
USA Yomiuri Group, media turnover 184
 Reviews of the first edition:

‘An original contribution to media studies. Beautifully

organized, well-writte MASTE r

Graduate School of

Professor Elihu Katz, Annenberg School for

Communications, University of Pennsylvania and the
Israel Institute of Applied Social Research

The first edition of Mass Media and Society rapidly established itself as required
reading for many communication and media studies courses in Europe, the USA
and Australasia. It brought together an unrivalled team of international scholars
who offered a survey of the field that was contemporary, stimulating and
immensely useful for students.

This new edition updates the debate between pluralist, neo-marxist, feminist
and postmodernist approaches to the media, and shows how revisionist analysis
is challenging traditional assumptions in mass communications research. Seven
new articles have been commissioned to reflect changing emphases in the study
of mass communication and popular culture.

CONTRIBUTORS: Ien Ang ¢ Jay G. Blumler ¢ John Corner ® James Curran e

John Fiske ¢ Simon Frith-e Christine Geraghty * Peter Golding
Michael Gurevitch ® Daniel C. Hallin ¢ Joke Hermes * Judith Lichtenberg ¢
Sonia Livingstone * Denis McQuail ¢ Graham Murdock ¢ Michael Schudson
Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi ® Liesbet van Zoonen ® Janet Wasko

JAMES CURRAN is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths’ College,

University of London and MICHAEL GUREVITCH is a Professor at the
College of Journalism, University of Maryland.

ALSO OF INTEREST
Cultural Studies and Communications
Edited by James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walkerdine
A companion volume to the best selling Mass Media and Society, Cultural Studies and
Communications offers a critical guide to the key debates raised by feminism, postmodernism,
the politics of identity and theories of ideclogy.
ISBN 0 340 65268 3 (hb)/ISBN 0 340 61417 X (pb)
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Cover illustration. by Julian Page (with apologies to L. Sshnwro
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