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share Herman and Chomsky's left-wing values (see, for instance,
The anti-Chomsky reader
, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz
(Collier and Horowitz, 2005).
Conclusions?
We can regard the long-running academic debates about the mass
media's 'agendas' and effects as one part of the broader discourse about
social power summarised in
Chapter 6.
As I've intimated previously, some
critics see the mass media as 'powerful' in a largely pejorative sense, while
others see its 'power over' as 'legitimate' but uneven demographically given
the sociocultural diversity of many modern societies. Still others point to the
new power (what some prefer to call 'resistance') that dissidents, sub-cultures
and 'outsiders' now have to get themselves heard in the mass mediated
mainstream by way of their media-savvy activities. My own view is that
the mass media, in its diverse forms, clearly possesses distinctive modal-
ities of representation (including a suite of habitual discourses). Though
its audience effects are difficult to measure robustly, it's undoubtedly visi-
ble in a social sense - as much, if not more, than ever before. Broadening
Bernard Cohen's famous observation about the press (Cohen, 1963), we
might say that the mass media doesn't necessarily tell people
what to think
or feel
, but it does tell them what to think and feel
about
. In addition, one
of its most distinctive, and important, functions is to package all manner
of information, argument, imagery, etc. that's generated
outside it
so as to
inform, entertain and instruct its sizeable audiences. It's at the heart of what
I called 'circulating and mutating representation' in
Chapter 3
. Geographer
Max Boykoff phrases it nicely:
Media representations are confluences of competing knowledge, framing [top-
ics and issues]
...
for policy, politics and the public, and drawing attention to
how to make sense of, as well as value, the changing world.
(Boykoff, 2011: 3)
As I asserted in this chapter's introduction, the
mainstream
mass media
remains the most important set of communicative channels and genres
that
non
-mass media (and alternative media) representations
must
be routed
through if they're to capture our collective attention. Paul Watson was
absolutely right.
The cognitive, ethical and aesthetic 'bandwidth' permitted by the main-
stream mass media is both a reflection of, and contributory to, the levels
of open-mindedness (or tolerance) of the societies it serves. Its consider-
able power to represent the world can be abused, certainly, but it remains
the case that the mass media can also serve to hold powerful institutions
and actors to account. While the fine details of how remain elusive after
