Page 21 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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6 Critical Theories of Mass Media
in a theoretical form of noblesse oblige occurs if the content consumed
in mass culture tautologically becomes evidence of audience empow-
erment irrespective of its quality.
With due respect to O’Neil, only killjoys would object to cultural
pleasure in and of itself, but a failure of intellectual duty takes place
when theorists fail to point out when such pleasure becomes its own
justification and vulnerable to excessive manipulation for profit and
ideological ends – in the process excluding any other social consid-
erations. The critical aspect of this book’s account of various media
theories is repeatedly emphasized. It highlights and sympathetically
reassesses those theories that are conventionally labelled and
(unfairly) dismissed as somehow elitist for their stubborn insistence
that popularity does not prove culture’s ultimate worth. Less obvi-
ously critical authors are reread for their generally under-
acknowledged negative attributes. For example, Benjamin, Kracauer
and McLuhan have all been viewed as predominantly optimistic
interpreters of the positive cultural potential of mass-media technolo-
gies but there are strong reasons to re-evaluate this reputation.
The main difference between proponents of the culture industry
thesis and cultural populists is their contrasting view of the framing
function of the media. The Frankfurt School are accused of invest-
ing media with a malign agency, in other words, fetishizing the
frame into an oppressive monolithic structure. The weakness of
cultural populism, however, rests in the various theoretical over-
compensations it makes in order to find examples of audience
empowerment. These compensations take three main forms of
argument:
1 The media frame is at worst neutral, and at best, positive
2 Inadvertently counterproductive evidence
3 The content of the frame is open to radical reinterpretation.

1 The media frame is at worst neutral, and at best, positive

In contrast to the culture industry’s perspective of the media frame
as a negative circumscription of the public sphere, Scannell (1996)
sees it as a predominantly neutral or even positive constitutive part
of contemporary life. In a misleadingly selective reading of
Heidegger that ignores his specific analyses of technology, the
media’s pervasive and durable presence in the lives of the audience
is claimed to provide a ‘world-disclosing’ function. In a similar vein,
Couldry presents a neo-Durkheimian interpretation of media rituals
(2003) and an enthusiastic account of the role of visiting pilgrims that
soap fans adopt at the set of Coronation Street (2000). He non-
ironically states that the programme has over its nearly forty year life

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