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Media power, challenges and alternatives 197
research on agenda-setting (McCombs 2004) and framing (Entman 2007) as well
as content (Glasgow Media Group, see Eldridge 1993; Berry and Theobald
2006: 109–24) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995). Access power
concerns whose voices, identities and interests get heard in the public media.
This includes addressing how particular interests or identities are articulated or
excluded in the media and how media institutions and systems are structured in
relation to access to communication. The third type of power is resource power,
which refers to the ways in which those who own and control the media can
affect the actions of state authorities.
In another useful formulation, Street distinguishes between two dimensions of
media power. The first is power over the media (what gets shown and reported),
the power of social actors to influence the discursive power of the media. The
second dimension is the power of the media to shape meanings and effect change
(what gets changed by the media). As Curran and Couldry (2003: 3) emphasise,
accounts that focus exclusively on power over the media can treat the media as
merely ‘the door through which the contestants for power pass en route for
battle’. Instead, they suggest the media are better understood as a processing
plant, that converts inputs rather than merely carrying them (like a waterfall
carries water). The media do not just mediate what lies outside them, they generate.
If we overemphasise the impact of external power on the media we risk losing sight
of what happens inside the so-called ‘black box’, how media process and create
meanings, and crucially too what difference they make in the world. The media
cannot be viewed merely as a watchdog against other forms of power, they need
to be scrutinised as central generators of power in contemporary societies.
My own preferred metaphoric concept for the media is that of apparatus. The
term apparatus is used in a variety of ways in media studies from production to
ideology critique (Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses). An apparatus
means both the technical resources required for particular activities or purposes,
and the complex structure of an organisation or system. An apparatus may be
used and occupied, but it is also actively shaped and constructed. Crucially, an
apparatus has affordances (qualities which enable and may also prompt the
performance of certain actions) but all the possible uses cannot be simply read
off from structure alone. Apparatuses are constraining frames but also enabling
of multiple uses and unpredictability. If this serves as a general term, there are
clearly also variations in the design, complexity and variability of uses, access
rights and control over apparatuses that CPE explores. Apparatus-as-object is
vulnerable to Foucault’s important critique that both Marxism and liberalism
regard power as a possession that is exercised repressively from a centralised
source. Yet accounts of the diffusion of media power, some influenced by Foucault,
can end up dissolving power altogether. To pursue the metaphor of apparatus,
there are indeed apparatuses of communication, institutionalised orderings of
power, but power arises from relationships with apparatuses, it does not merely
inhere in apparatuses themselves. Power is produced through interactions
(instrumental and structural) across various levels or domains of activity in