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Theories of Broadcast Media 35
it centres on the character of Gump, who, with humble means and simplistic
technique, is able to achieve an extraordinary range of things, from
marathon running, to heroic war service, to gridiron stardom. Whilst the
film is predominantly concerned with celebrating the culture of opportu-
nity said to underwrite the moral superiority of the United States, it is also
about how even the most ordinary person can, in a society of celebrities
and spectacle, be noticed and satisfied.

The discourse of ‘the system’

In this discourse anonymity is rejected in favour of a reflexive critique of
abstract domination. Just as ordinariness has replaced the specification
of ‘underclass’ or working class, something distinctively co-emergent with
the mass media, so too the specification of politicians and the ruling
classes has been replaced in populist discourse by a rebelliousness to
something called ‘the system’. A phrase which was taken up by the
counter-cultures since the 1960s, it has entered into popular discourses in
ways which denote everything from the suffocation of expression and
creativity, to the inevitability of domination, to a generalized cynicism of
power.

The discourse of ‘they’

‘They’ are building a new freeway. ‘They’ have discovered a cure for
cancer. ‘They’ are opening a new shopping centre. ‘They’ aren’t telling the
public the full story. Perhaps the most pervasive term to accompany the
rise of the mass media is that of ‘they’. Who, exactly, are ‘they’? The fact
that the mass which is constituted by broadcast media is indeterminate as
far as particular messages go implies that the individuals who are part of
this mass are also indeterminate to each other. In other words, broadcast
makes possible scales of association which are difficult to achieve by any
other means. On the one hand, we can talk about a high level of integra-
tion via the image and the celebrity, but, on the other, we see relatively
weak kinds of connection at the horizontal level of the division of labour.
In media societies, ‘otherness’ is completely concentrated in the fetish of
the spectacle or the celebrity, whilst at the level of the everyday, it is
radically diluted. But what kind of other are ‘they’?
There are many theses. ‘They’ is simply a shorthand for the institu-
tional nature of the entity being described – the roadbuilders, scientists
and doctors, developers, the government, etc. ‘They’ could also be a
default way of saying ‘I can’t elaborate on the detail’ or ‘It is more com-
plex than my description warrants.’ ‘They’ could also simply be an
absent-mindedness, a carelessness about ‘who’ it is that makes the daily
news. ‘They’ might be a polite way of saying also that we can’t know