Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Unlike the pluralist-cum-voluntarist ethos of the research inspired by
Lazarsfeld, the Birmingham School highlighted the structural inequalities
that conditioned whether and how any given audience would accept
encoded meanings uncritically. Mass mediated messages, they contended,
were sent and received in conditions of 'hegemonic rule', in which there
was give-and-take between the dominant and subordinate sections of any
given society. This allowed room for sub- and counter-cultures to form
at the grassroots whose signs, symbols and practices consciously departed
from dominant habits of thought and action. Sometimes, as with punk rock
in the United Kingdom, these became highly visible in the sociocultural
mainstream.
Some four decades on and the debates about the role and power of the
mass media remain unresolved. Though there's broad agreement that it
rarely propagandises - with the exception of autocratic states, and notwith-
standing Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's trenchant claims in 1988 to
the contrary (see
Box 7.1
) - there remains a fault line between those analysts
disposed to look for evidence of how the media sets the cognitive, moral and
aesthetic agenda for a society, and those disposed to look for evidence of
audience independence. Some focus on the effects of resurgent oligopolis-
tic tendencies in media ownership (the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Silvio
Berlusconi being metonymic here), while others focus on alternative media,
'cyber-democracy' and the blurring of the producer-user distinction. Some
point to the 'dumbing down' of the mass media (e.g. the rise of 'info-
tainment', 'glossy magazines' and 'lifestyle shows' - all 'weapons of mass
distraction'), while others point to the enhanced diversity of media content
now available at the click of a button.
In significant measure, the analytical differences resolve to ontological
ones: what is evidence of 'audience freedom' from 'media effects' for one
investigator is seen by another as evidence of 'audience control' based on
a skewed menu of media offerings. This said, there's some consensus that
the mass (and alternative) media must be analysed contextually: their oper-
ations and influences do not occur in a vacuum, but reflect and shape a
wider and increasingly dynamic set of economic, political, cultural and bio-
physical arenas. The resulting challenge for research is as follows: how can
one isolate - in the short, medium and long term - the distinctive con-
tent of mass mediated communications and their effects in highly complex,
'over-determined' situations?
5
BOX 7.1
Focussing on the news (in both its broadcast and paper formats),
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky provocatively suggested that it's
not only autocratic states that, today, channel propaganda through the
