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Mass media: cultural effects
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Mass media: cultural effects
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The Marxist approach to the mass media has not been without its critics. Particularly where it was seen as moving away from sociology and more in the direction of cultural studies, it came under attack from sociologists.
In a particularly virulent attack, Anderson and Sharrock put the boot into media studies in 1979 (Anderson and Sharrock (1979)). In their view, media studies practitioners had failed to show how the media sustain capitalist hegemony, media studies 'men' apparently being 'utterly indifferent to the particulars of their materials'. A related criticism which could be made is the overconcentration of cultural/media studies on textual analysis. Certainly, since the aim of cultural studies is essentially a politically emancipatory one, i.e. to enable people to see how textual processes construct meaning, how subject positions are constructed, how signification is negotiated etc. and thereby to cultivate critical reading, then it is not surprising that there should be a focus on textual semiotics. However, a criticism which this approach is open to is that insufficient attention is paid to the institutional conditions within which culture develops.
In Anderson's and Sharrock's view media studies practitioners merely show that an alternative account of reality is possible, they do not demonstrate that the media's account is biased: 'The mere availability of an imaginable alternative account does not invalidate that to which it is an alternative.' They point out, for example, that the authors of Bad News (see the Glasgow University Media Group) seek to show the bias in TV news by comparing its reports with those in Management Today and The Financial Times. In other words, the media researchers are just adopting the same piecemeal approach to the media as most ordinary readers and viewers do and the latter are just as aware of potential bias as the so-called media experts.
Ralph Negrine makes similar criticisms of the work of Hall et al on mugging, since the latter assume that the media ought to mirror some statistical reality. Negrine points out that in fact the media reproduce 'aspects of the world which stand out' (Negrine (1994)). In his view Hall et al., by criticising the media for creating a moral panic about mugging when there was no real evidence of an increase in the crime, miss the point. The point was that there was concern about the 'senselessness' of the crime and it was that concern that was conveyed by the media.
In this respect, as Negrine sees it, Golding's and Middleton's Images of
Welfare is more successful. Their work, whilst recognizing that the
media's 'moral panic' was indeed an attack on the welfare state, also
allows that it exploited existing ways of thinking. In Negrine's view,
then, although the media's reporting may well contain crude and inaccurate
exaggeration, it may still be the case that it arises from, and reflects,
public opinion.
This is a very important criticism, namely that the Marxist critics of the media base their conclusions on the analysis of texts, with virtually no reference to the readers of those texts:
'in what we estimate as some eleven thousand sentences making up Bad News we cannot find any that make the viewer the subject. It does not seem to occur to these theorists that the viewer may be no less capable than they, 'the experts' of exercising judgement, wit, scepticism, a sense of proportion, a different conceptual scheme, an appreciation that it's only a newspaper story, or a television item, or even a quasi-Marxist suspicion of capitalist institutions and organisations. If such capacities are extended to the otherwise witless and uncritical viewer, the media simply cannot fulfil their hegemonic task.'
This comes very close, as the authors do indeed hint, to saying that the Marxist media experts treat media audiences in the same way as the
National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, namely that 'we' are not corrupted by these media materials, but
'they' are. In the case of National VALA, because 'they' do not have the protection of 'our' religious and other moral values and, in the case of the Marxists, because 'they' are duped by the
hegemonic enterprise and we are not. This is what Thompson refers to as the fallacy of internalism, whereby cultural critics read off the ideological messages from the texts themselves:
It is a fallacy because it cannot be assumed that the characteristics which the analyst discerns in a particular cultural product will have a given effect when that product is received and appropriated by individuals in the course of their everyday lives. The reception and appropriation of cultural products is a complex social process which involves an ongoing activity of interpretation and the assimilation of meaningful content to the socially structured background characteristics of particular individuals and groups. To attempt to read off the consequences of cultural products from the products themselves is to neglect these ongoing activities of interpretation and assimilation.
(1990: 105)
Anderson and Sharrock do indeed appear to be pointing to an interesting and enduring paradox at the heart of the generally left-oriented 'liberal' vein of media studies, namely that on the one hand such commentators are inclined to reject calls for censorship of violence, sex and so on because there is no evidence that such materials lead people to commit acts of violence or rape; on the other hand they are prepared to claim that the capitalist media are generally powerful instruments in the struggle for bourgeois hegemony. This is a criticism which was recently echoed by Greg Philo, formerly of the Clasgow University Media Group. According to The Guardian of June 2 1996 a book was planned which was to consist of a variety of contributions from media studies experts. The general tenor was, according to The Guardian, intended to be that newspapers had vastly over-rated the supposed danger to society from violence on TV. Philo's contribution to the book was rejected, supposedly on the grounds that it did not subscribe to that view. Philo commented of his 'complacent' colleagues:
Liberals in cultural studies have allied themselves with the media corporations and the likes of Melvyn Bragg and Michael Winner. They seem to be saying that the fear about TV violence has been generated by the newspapers. But how can they believe that one medium, newspapers, can produce a moral panic while denying that another, television, can influence attitudes to violence?
Overall, Sharrock and Anderson reach the conclusion that media studies, in constantly repeating that the media are socially produced, that the media do not simply mirror reality, that importance and interest are not properties inherent in events and so on, simply succeeds in stating the obvious.
Whilst reception studies and content analysis may have accumulated evidence to support the 'critical' approach to the media, they have also undermined any simplistic understanding of the way that the media operate. Jürgen Habermas summarizes the most significant findings which challenge any such simple view of monolithic culture industries influencing passive audiences:
Habermas (1981) Vol2. p.574
Some critics would argue that the working classes do not conform because they subscribe to the dominant ideology, nor do the ruling classes rule because they have succeeded in the struggle for hegemony. Rather, such critics argue, the working classes conform because they need to keep their jobs and the ruling classes rule because they are rich. From this point of view, wealth confers power and that's all there is to it. The ruling classes dominate, not because they succeed in establishing themselves in a position of ideological leadership, but because their wealth allows them, in all the various ways which are tediously familiar, to buy access to power. The subordinated classes are dominated, not because they are afflicted by some notional false consciousness, but because they need to survive and in order to survive they need to play by the rules set by those who run the game. This view is put quite convincingly by Abercrombie at al (1994), who point to various studies showing that the subordinate classes' values are often a contradictory mix of political positions, e.g. support for the welfare state together with support for New Right individualism and free market doctrines. That one can certainly not simply assume that the dominated classes' values are those of the dominant, nor indeed that they are a coherent set of 'resistive' values is quite evident from the range of ethnographic and similar studies which have been carried out in research since the eighties (see the section on recent developments). These studies generally tend to lend weight to de Certeau's claims of semiotic subversion amongst the dominated, the 'tactics of resistance' practised by the weak to undermine the strategies of dominance practised by the strong.
The criticisms referred to above are primarily criticisms of the application of the Marxist approach, rather than of Marxism per se. Naturally, Marxism, like any other political philosophy, has had its opponents ever since Marx first formulated it. Foremost amongst such critics is the philosopher Sir Karl Popper and any reader interested in an attack on the very fundamentals of Marxism is referred to his Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and its Enemies. Critics of Marxism have traditionally had little impact on Marxists, since, as Peter Medawar points out:
... just as any criticism of psychoanalysis is construed as an infirmity of the psyche which itself requires psychoanalytic treatment, so criticism of an essentially Marxist theory is thought to reveal its author as yet another victim and dupe of the very socio-economic forces he has presumed to question.
Medawar (1996)
I suppose, then, that if you want to make up your mind about the validity of Marxist approaches to the media, you probably need to make up your mind about Marxism itself. I wish you luck - that is certainly beyond the scope of this website!
You might also wish to question whether the Marxist approach has much in common with the method of the natural sciences and whether you think it should. I think we would expect of a hypothesis in the natural sciences that it
Whether those are requirements we might reasonably also apply not only to Marxism, but to the social sciences in general is also a matter for you to decide, as it is well beyond the scope of what we can discuss here. You might wish, though, to begin by asking yourself just what are the 'observed facts' with which Marxist claims of media influence might be consonant. That in 'bourgeois democracies' many voters continue to take elections seriously? That in capitalist societies people go shopping for goods they could do without? That many working people vote Conservative, apparently against their class interests? And how would you go about testing these - could you, for example, take a control group who are kept isolated from the capitalist media? Hardly likely. And what about 'internal consistency'? Isn't it odd that critics on the left claim such enormous long-term power for the capitalist media and yet are generally loath to countenance controls on sex and violence in the media because 'there is no evidence' that such content is harmful? Just what would such 'evidence' look like anyway?
Those are all questions which you will rarely have time to address in a media studies course, but it seems to me that they are pretty fundamental nevertheless.
Over the past fifteen years or so, there has been some change in the nature of 'radical' criticism of the media. To an extent, Marxism, because, it is argued, of the collapse of supposedly Communist states in Eastern Europe, has come in recent years to be seen by some critics as being as irrelevant as argument about the divine right of kings. Quite why the implosion of the eastern bloc is considered to invalidate Marxism is beyond me. If events in those Stalinist countries were considered to tell us anything about Marxism, then surely the massacre of the kulaks, the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the erection of the Berlin wall etc. should have invalidated Marxism long ago. The question of whether or not Marxism leads inevitably to such state terrorism is surely of more fundamental importance than the fact of the collapse of states supposedly based on Marx's doctrines. Even the simple question of whether Marx's predictions were right or wrong is surely more important than the collapse of communist states.
Be that as it may, there has been a shift away from Marxism. In part, the 'radical' media researchers have shifted towards reception analysis, as they have increasingly found Marxism an inadequate tool, partly as a result of the disintegration in post-modern times of totalizing metanarratives, of which Marxism is one. For various reasons, the 'radical' critics have moved towards the 'pluralist' position. In some cases, the pluralists have moved in the direction of the radicals. It is not at all clear at present where all of this will end up.
An overview of some recent developments is to be found under the section Recent Developments.
Hypodermic needle model
Empiricism
Uses and gratifications
Recent developments
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