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Mass media: cultural effects
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Mass media: cultural effects
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Researchers investigated a series of 'moral panics', notably Stan Cohen, who coined the terms 'folk devils' and 'moral panics'. (Cohen (1972)). Cohen and others (especially Jock Young in his The Drugtakers (1971)) showed how agents of social control, particularly the police, 'amplified' deviance. They also demonstrated the media's rôle in this process and thus started to draw attention to the ideological rôle of the media in actively constructing meanings, rather than merely 'reflecting' some supposedly shared reality.
This approach was then developed by the Marxist critics of the media. Such studies were used to demonstrate how the media helped to avoid wider conflict in society by focusing our attention on the supposedly deviant behaviour of outsider groups, including youth 'gangs', 'welfare scroungers', trade union 'militants' and so on. By focusing attention in this way the media, it was claimed, contribute to creating and underpinning the social consensus on our society's core values. That view is well summarised below by Fowler:
Law and public opinion stipulate that there are many ideas and behaviours which are to be condemned as outside the pale of consensus: people who practise such behaviours are branded as 'subversives', 'perverts', 'dissidents', 'trouble-makers', etc. Such people are subjected to marginalization or repression; and the contradiction returns, because consensus decrees that there are some people outside the consensus. The 'we' of consensus narrows and hardens into a population which sees its interests as culturally and economically valid, but as threatened by a 'them' comprising a motley of antagonistic sectional groups: not only criminals but also trade unionists, homosexuals, teachers, blacks, foreigners, northerner, and so on.
Fowler (1991) p.53
Fowler comes close to suggesting that there is a deliberate conspiracy between media owners and journalists to construct reality in this way, a view of the media sometimes referred to as conspiracy theory. This is a not uncommon view held by critics of the media and there is evidence to support the view that newspaper owners are prepared to skew the news to favour their class interests. However, this is not a matter which is of primary concern to the hegemony theorists of cultural studies, who pay more attention to the ways in which cultural leadership is achieved and secured through the media. They tend to take the view that there does not need to be any deliberate conspiracy since journalists simply present reality from the standpoint of what is 'obvious' and 'natural' - and what is 'obvious' and 'natural' is what the dominant discourse signifies as such.
During the 1992 General Election campaign, for example, the main parties' economic plans were naturally high on the agenda. Following the rules of 'impartiality', TV would interview a spokesperson from each of the major parties, generally followed by independent comment. But who did they turn to for the 'independent' comment? Generally, some young man in the Stock Exchange, who, we were informed by a sub-title, was an 'independent City analyst'. If the Labour Party had made any socialist proposals for running the economy, just how impartial might the views of this 'independent' analyst have been? In the case of industrial action over pay, the newsreader informs us that management 'offered' a 3% pay increase, whilst union leaders 'demanded' 5%. Why are those words not used the other way around? If they were, that would imply a different understanding from the prevailing one of ownership of labour and the goods it produces.
Hall (1982) gives the example of the interviewer who takes it for granted that rising wage demands are the sole cause of inflation. The interviewer is, of course, as Hall says, '"freely formulating a question" on behalf of the public'. At the same time, however, he is 'establishing a logic which is compatible with the dominant interests in society'. 'Ideology,' Hall concludes, 'is a function of the discourse and of the logic of social processes, rather than an intention of the agent'.
It's worth considering as well the function served by 'terrorism' in current political debate. I don't want to suggest that terrorism is a problem invented by the media and politicians, nor do I wish to suggest that it is a problem we don't need to bother about; whilst recognizing that it is a real problem we have to deal with, I would also suggest that we have to look at the effects of the discourse of terrorism on our civil liberties, as well as on our understanding of what means might be legitimate in the state's counter-terrorist activity:
the language of antiterrorism is by now a well-established an rehearsed refrain, one frequently heard in the voices that make up American political culture. This should worry us since, to a certain extent, the penetration of that discourse into our ordinary language is a measure of the increasing militarization of our common life. The greater the ease with which we invoke the terrorist-as-enemy in our shock over the violence surrounding us, the more this refrain stands as witness to the internalisation that readies us for counterviolence. The more comfortable the language of antiterrorism is to us, the more familiar the terrorist figure who haunts us, the more entrenched that seizure of our political imagination becomes.
Angela McRobbie takes a somewhat different view of the moral panic. She still sees the moral panic as a means to social control, but sees the conservatives and the right nowadays as frantically creating moral panics, 'to the extent that the panics are no longer about social control butt rather about the fear of being out of control'. (McRobbie (1994) p.199)
Nowadays, she says, the notion of the moral panic has become such common currency that journalists readily put the question to politicians whether they are not deliberately whipping up a panic. Moral panics are also continually and often very effectively contested by the various pressure groups which have sprung up to fill the vacuum left by the absence of an effective political opposition.
It is the highly effective media manipulation by such pressure groups which is one factor leading McRobbie to argue that the moral panic model as presented by Cohen and Young needs updating. The pressure groups provide a constant stream of information and sound-bites and are always ready to wheel out experts to enter into TV and radio discussions. Greenpeace, for example, have become at least as effective in their production of video news releases as major international corporations. When protestors boarded BP's Brent Spar oil rig in the North Sea, it was Greenpeace's viewpoint which repeatedly made the TV news.
Another point she makes is that the old moral panic model assumed a clear distinction between the world of the media and he world of social reality. As she points out, 'we do not exist in social unreality while we watch television or read the newspaper, nor are we transported back to reality when we turn the TV off to wash the dishes or discard the paper to go to bed.' (McRobbie (1994) p. 217). It may not make sense to try to speak of any kind of social reality outside the world of representation. Social reality is always the product of communication and representation and is therefore always partial. Sociologists who call for an account of reality which is not sensationalised and exaggerated are also speaking from an account of reality which is partial and selective.
The point which McRobbie is making is, of course, an important one. There is naturally something faintly absurd about media researchers quoting, say, an article in The Financial Times to rebut a TV report on the same event. In doing so, they may be considered to be choosing from one establishment organ a representation of reality which suits their purposes when criticizing another establishment organ. Whilst cultural studies was about the struggle between different discursive practices for supremacy in their signification, there was often an underlying assumption that one set of discursive practices was 'wrong', in other words a view of ideology as a systematic distortion of the way things 'really' are. From within our present 'postmodern' condition, we are more likely to see all representations as simply that - representations, none more 'right' than any other.
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