Page 20 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Introduction 5
adaptable range of interpretations to the media content they con-
sume. Other typical features of cultural populism include an empha-
sis upon the performative (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998) and the
participatory (Livingstone and Lunt 1994) aspects of audiences. More
recently, while some recognition has been given to its underlying
commodity values, the notion of the ordinary in media content has
been presented as a site of potentially empowering interpretive
contestations for equally ordinary audiences (Brundson et al. 2001;
Giles 2002; Taylor 2002; Kompare 2004; Bonner 2003).
In recent years there have also been various critical accounts of
lifestyle and Reality TV programmes (brought together in this book
under the term Banality TV) that allude to the relationship between
media form and content but which mostly concentrate upon the
discursive and persuasive aspects of the latter. For example, Lorenzo-
Dus (2006) examines the manipulative aspects encoded within
British property shows, Dunn (2006) adopts a similar approach to
the personalized voyeurism of holiday programmes that concentrate
more upon presenters and particular participants than the destina-
tions themselves, and Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer (2006)
explore the ideological components of a new spate of make-over
shows (involving a range of targets from participants’ property to
their bodies). This book concentrates more upon those critical
thinkers who see the negative cultural effects of the media as an
innate part of their mode of operation. The fact that their theories
are consequently pessimistic about the possibilities for any media
content being significantly re-appropriated and reinterpreted in a
particularly empowering fashion, often results in the charge that
they are traditional conservatives or ‘elitists’.
This is a charge typically levelled at the Frankfurt School, who laid
much of the groundwork for contemporary critical theories. This is
an accusation misapplied to those who are actually criticizing the
ultimately conservative consequences of the pervasively and invasively
commodified nature of mass-mediated social life despite its often
superficial presentation as ‘edgy’ and counter-cultural. Ironically, a
paradox of conservatism arises from the fact that the real conservatives
are those cultural populists who act, either openly or inadvertently,
as apologists for the deeply alienating and reactionary qualities of
the mass media’s output. Critical theories of media do not so much
flatly deny the basic findings of cultural populism as argue that
specific evidence of audience interpretive activity needs to be judged
in terms of the deeper political significance of that activity. The
brief, illustrative, examples below suggest that the desire of cultural
populism to find evidence of audience empowerment risks, at best,
gilding the evidentiary lily and, at worst, actually producing its own
form of conservative and elitist values. A patronization of the masses

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