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2 Communication Theory & Research
protecting and meeting the needs of children and youth and the merits or
demerits of ‘mass culture’. Apart from this, a central and growing concern of
media industry and others was the measurement of audiences for the various
competing media.
From the later 1960s onwards, a new wind was blowing in European social
science, perhaps especially from Britain. The dominant paradigm of study of media
uses and effects was challenged by critical theory that interpreted the tendencies
of media content, especially in news, as a form of hidden ideology designed to
maintain hegemonic control on behalf of state bureaucracies or big business.
Attention also turned from messages, audiences and effects to include the polit-
ical economic supports for the media system. Another strand in the new move-
ment was the development, more or less simultaneous in North America and
Europe, of sociological enquiries into the media production process, especially of
news. The results shed light on the reasons for dominant tendencies of content
and supported the view that media tend to maintain rather than challenge the
status quo. In addition, a major change had occurred in the study of popular
and mass culture, involving a revaluation of the significance of popular forms
(particularly in music and fiction) and a rejection of what were perceived as
elitist and hierarchical perspectives. Along with this came a break with quantitative
methods of enquiry and a turn towards ethnography and qualitative methods in
general.
Although European media research has sometimes been claimed as distinc-
tively more ‘critical’ than American research, in line with Merton’s (1957) contrast
between American empiricism and European wissensociologie, by the time of
general upheaval post-1968, there was not much to choose between America and
Europe in this respect. The distinctiveness of the European field of media enquiry
was not clear at the end of the 1970s, except perhaps in the area of popular cul-
ture (in the UK at least), which has been mentioned, and also in a preference for
qualitative methodological alternatives to surveys, experiments and statistical
analysis. One form this preference took was in the greater use of ethnographic
methods, especially for studying audiences, or ‘interpretative communities’.
Another was to be found in the attraction exerted by semiological theory and
methods in the study of media content, largely following the guidance of French
theorists, especially Barthes and Grémas.

The institutionalization of teaching programmes

Until this time, the field of media and communication differed markedly from
the situation in the USA in that there were very few programmes of media study
at any level or for any purpose, whether academic or professional. The study of
media was mainly an individual research pursuit or organized in a handful of
under-funded research centres. Occasional courses were given within the frame-
work of study of politics, sociology, psychology or education. In some countries
there were separate institutions for the professional training of journalists, but
these were practical in orientation and made little contribution to research and