Preface
The writers of the Open University course on ‘Mass Communication and Society’, from which this book is substantially derived, saw the understanding of various differences and conflicts between theoretical perspectives on the mass media as an important and desirable object of study for students taking the course. Rather than aiming to show ‘how the media work’, the course attempted to indicate that there were a number of alternative and sometimes competing theoretical accounts of how the media work. In particular, the course focused on the division and opposition between liberal-pluralist and Marxist views of the media. As part of the pedagogic strategy of the course, students were actively encouraged to follow the history of debates between Marxists and liberal pluralists over the media and to question the assumptions of both sides. This opposition was set up and, to a certain extent, simplified for students as in the following comparison of pluralist and Marxist views.
The pluralists see society as a complex of competing groups and interests, none of them predominant all of the time. Media organisations are seen as bounded organisational systems, enjoying an important degree of autonomy from the state, political parties and institutionalised pressure groups. Control of the media is said to be in the hands of an autonomous managerial elite who allow a considerable degree of flexibility to media professionals. A basic symmetry is seen to exist between media institutions and their audiences, since in McQuail's words the ‘relationship is generally entered into voluntarily and on apparently equal terms’ (McQuail, 1977, p. 91): and audiences are seen as capable of manipulating the media in an infinite variety of ways according to their prior needs and dispositions, and as having access to what Halloran calls ‘the plural values of society’ enabling them to ‘conform, accommodate, challenge or reject’. Marxists view capitalist society as being one of class domination; the media are seen as part of an ideological arena in which various class views are fought out, although within the context of the dominance of certain classes; ultimate control is increasingly concentrated in monopoly capital; media professionals, while enjoying the illusion of autonomy, are socialised into and internalise the norms of the dominant culture; the media taken as a whole, relay interpretive frameworks consonant with the interests of the dominant classes, and media audiences, while sometimes negotiating and contesting these frameworks, lack ready access to alternative meaning systems that would enable them to reject the definitions offered by the media in favour of consistently oppositional definitions. (Mass Communication and Society, Block 3, Introduction, p. 5)
The articulation of this kind of meta-theoretical conflict had the positive advantage of allowing students to construct and order quite disparate contributions to the field of mass communications.
However, it was not the intention of the course team to produce a course formed by the credo of news broadcasting of ‘balance, neutrality and objectivity’. As reviews of the course have pointed out, the liberal pluralist/Marxist divisions make their present felt in an unequal manner.
The course is throughout an exercise in radical analysis with the liberal pluralist view serving largely as a counter-point. It counterpoints by toning the more extreme claims of the opposition and by allowing the introduction of aspects of the subject that fit awkwardly if at all into a marxist framework. By my estimate, the division of labour is about 80–20 between these orientations but drinking the course as a whole is to imbibe pretty strictly of certain versions of modern Marxism. (Carey, 1979, p. 314)
The ‘unequal’ weighting of Marxist and liberal pluralist views within the course stemmed largely from the task undertaken. On the one hand, we attempted a critical assessment of past developments in the field of mass communications research. On the other hand, we also sought to indicate central and pertinent contemporary theoretical developments. Increasingly, important issues and conflicts in the analysis of the mass media have been generated within and in relation to a Marxist framework.
In revising and changing the contents of the course for this reader, we have attempted to maintain the contrast between pluralist and Marxist views of the media because this contrast has been important to the history and development of mass media studies and because it remains a source of distinctive differences in the conceptualization of the media and of society generally. At the same time, the reader also makes clear significant differences within the Marxist tradition of media analysis, between, for example, those approaches which take as a starting point the base/superstructure metaphor and emphasize, as a result, the economic infra-structure of the media industries, and those approaches which are concerned to re-think a Marxist theory of ideology outside the parameters of a hierarchy of determinations, dependent always in the last analysis upon the economic. The presence of structuralism, of a linguistic paradigm, in contemporary mass communications research, with its consequent focus on the specificity and autonomy of media systems of signification and representation and the impact it has had on both Marxist and pluralist perspectives is also registered.
The reader is organized in three sections. The first, ‘Class, ideology and the media, presents a series of accounts of the major theoretical traditions which have influenced the development of media theory in the past and in the present, and indicates the different foci of interest and the crucial issues around which disagreements and debates about the media could be said to be organized. The second section examines the role of media institutions: their ownership and control; the internal organization of media industries and media professionals; and the role of media institutions in the Third World. The final section of the reader focuses on the power of the media in different areas: in terms of control of communications systems within society; in the political effects of mass communications; in the signification and reporting of race. It also reviews the theoretical issues raised by the media's apparent representation—rather than signification—of reality.
Although we have attempted to identify different theoretical perspectives on the media and the key areas in which they clash or mark strategic absences, we would not wish to suggest that the articles here provide an ‘objective’ map of recent mass communications research, but rather that they seek to select ‘shared’ theoretical problems within the field of media research and to suggest ways, albeit different ones, of thinking through those problems.
We would like to express our gratitude to all members of the ‘Mass Communication and Society’ course team, whose work in creating the course, and then adapting and updating it, made this book possible. We would also like to acknowledge the sterling efforts of Valerie Byrne and Deirdre Smith in helping prepare the typescript. Finally, we would like to thank the Open University for allowing us to adapt and re-use Open University course material.
REFERENCES
Carey, J. (1979) ‘Mass communication and society’, book review, Media, Culture and Society, 1 (3).
McQuail, D. (1977) ‘The influence and effects of the mass media’, in Curran, J., Gurevitch, M. and Woollacott, J. (eds) Mass Communication and Society, London, Edward Arnold.
Mass Communication and Society (1977) Milton Keynes, The Open University Press.