Introduction

As the preceding section showed, the view taken of the relationship between media and society influences the way in which the power of the media is perceived. Two of the essays in this section—those by James Curran and Tony Bennett—see the media primarily in terms of a struggle for power between competing social forces in which the media are both shaped by, and in turn influence, the course of this struggle. The remaining two essays in this section, by Peter Braham and Jay Blumler/Michael Gurevitch, analyse the influence of the media in a more eclectic way in terms of their effectiveness in shaping human behaviour and consciousness, viewed from a pluralist perspective.

The opening essay by James Curran considers schematically the impact of the mass media over more than a millenium of history. He maintains that the development of new techniques or institutions of communication has given rise to new power centres, ranging from the medieval papacy to modern press magnates. The emergence of these new power centres, he argues, has often generated new tensions within the dominant power bloc. Thus, the priesthood provoked dissension in the middle ages by seeking to transform the power structure; the rise of the book undermined, in turn, the authority of the priesthood in early modern Europe; and more recently professional communicators have become, in some ways, rivals to professional politicians. More generally, he examines the different social contexts in which mass media have amplified or contained class conflicts. In early nineteenth-century Britain, he maintains, conflicts between a substantial section of the press and the dominant class both reflected and reinforced growing fissures within the social structure. More recently, he argues, the media have come to occupy a central role in maintaining support for the social system as a consequence of the close integration of control of the media into the hierarchy of power in contemporary Britain.

Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch's examination of the political effects of the mass media draws upon a different research tradition—survey-based research into media effects in western liberal democracies. Their essay challenges the ‘limited’ model of media influence advanced in the pioneering, highly influential studies into media political effects. The development of television, they argue, has resulted in political communications regularly reaching a segment of the mass audience that is particularly susceptible to political influence. A general decline in the strength and stability of political allegiances has also enabled the media to exercise a more effective influence. And new ways of conceptualizing media influence in terms of their impact on political cognitions rather than in terms of persuasion and behaviour change, they argue, have revealed significant media effects that once tended to be neglected. Their essay concludes with a discussion of convergences between recent pluralist and Marxist approaches to the study of media audiences.

Peter Braham's examination of how the media handle race illustrates two important aspects of the influence of the mass media referred to by Blumler and Gurevitch, namely the power of the media to influence the political agenda and to shape perceptions of reality. The massive media publicity given to Enoch Powell's notorious speech on immigration during the late 1960s helped to define race as a central issue on the political agenda—a place which it has held ever since. The concentration of the media on the manifestations of racial tension has also arguably influenced public perceptions of immigration by tacitly defining the presence of coloured immigrants as constituting a social problem or threat to the white majority. But Braham is at pains to emphasize the limitations of media influence. Enoch Powell, he argues, did not create (though he may have amplified) racial tension: his speech produced an ‘earthquake’ largely because it expressed anxieties and discontents about race and immigration which were already widespread, but which had received ‘insufficient attention in the mass media’. Braham also quarrels with the view that by focusing on the manifestations, rather than the causes of racism, the media are playing a central role in fanning racial hostility. What these causes of racial conflict are, Braham argues, is far from self-evident. But what is clear from historical evidence, according to Braham, is that ethnocentrism and hostility to foreigners are deep-rooted and widely diffused phenomena for which the media cannot be held responsible.

The last essay by Tony Bennett differs from the two preceding it in that it links media systems of representation to their political and social contexts, viewed from a Marxist perspective. He considers the ways in which the mass media—both communist and capitalist controlled—suppressed information about the revolutionary and socialist character of the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War for different propagandist reasons. This profoundly influenced, he argues, the response of the European working class to the Civil War, thereby ‘shaping the contours of the political map of prewar Europe’. He also examines the ways in which ‘outsiders’ such as youth gangs have been stereotyped and stigmatized in the mass media, arguing that their representations have served to strengthen commitment to dominant social norms. His analysis concludes with an examination of the different ways in which the media sustain the dominant political consensus, drawing upon examples of media coverage of industrial relations and the political process.

Bennett also explicitly contests a number of arguments advanced in the two preceding essays. Peter Braham's characterization of the media as ‘a searchlight illuminating some areas, while leaving others in shadow’ implies a differentiation between objective reality and the media as selective definers of that reality. Bennett argues, however, that ‘the “real” that is signified within the media is never some raw, semantically uncoded, “outthere” real. Signification always takes place on a terrain which is always already occupied and in relation to consciousnesses which are always already filled’. Indeed, it is precisely because the media's influence is greatest, according to Bennett, when people are least conscious of its influence—when the ideological categories projected by the media appear neutral and objective—that the measurement and assessment of media influence through survey techniques is so problematic. While these techniques do not generally rely on asking respondents to assess the influence of the media upon them, but rather seek to infer processes of influence by examining the statistical relationships between variables derived from respondents’ replies, the value of these techniques remains an outstanding issue of disagreement amongst researchers.

Yet despite these and other disagreements, all four essays in this section are unanimous in opposing the view that the media ‘mirror’ society, based on the media professionals’ claim that they ‘report the news as it is’. News does not exist as external reality that can be objectively portrayed on the basis of ascertainable fact: for facts have to be selected and then situated, whether explicitly or implicitly, within a framework of understanding before they ‘speak for themselves’. This process of selection and interpretation is culturally encoded and social determined. Yet such constructions largely define our knowledge of the external world of which we have no first-hand experience. This power of definition, all these essays argue, is the basis of ‘the power of the media’. All four essays are also at one in repudiating—though in different ways, and with different emphases—the once prevalent academic view that the media have only a marginal influence. They are thus symptomatic of the process of rethinking and reappraisal which has shaped this book, and which is now reshaping more generally the field of mass communications research.