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INTRODUCTION TO MEDIA STUDIES AT THE CENTRE 105

Second, we challenged the notions of media texts as ‘transparent’ bearers of
meaning—as the ‘message’ in some undifferentiated way—and gave much
greater attention than had been the case in traditional forms of content analysis to
their linguistic and ideological structuration. These two concerns—the general
ideological nature of mass communications and the complexity of the linguistic
structuration of its forms—has been the basis of all our subsequent work; and
they were drawn together within the framework of early models of semiotic
analysis which had a formative impact on our work.
Third, we broke with the passive and undifferentiated conceptions of the
‘audience’ as it has largely appeared in traditional research—influenced, as these
had been, by the surveying needs of broadcasting organizations and advertising
agencies. We began to replace these too-simple notions with a more active
conception of the ‘audience’, of ‘reading’ and of the relation between how media
messages were encoded, the ‘moment’ of the encoded text and the variation of
audience ‘decodings’.
Fourth, the question of the media and ideologies returned to the agenda a
concern with the role which the media play in the circulation and securing of
dominant ideological definitions and representations. This more classical set of
concerns contrasted sharply with the ‘mass-culture’ models which underpinned
much early American research and the resounding absence in that whole body of
work of the question of ideology.
Early media work in the Centre rehearsed many of these emergent themes and
concerns, albeit in a still provisional and unfinished form. The relation of the
media to broader historical movements of social change formed the basis for the
first funded media project, supported by the Rowntree Trust. This was an
analysis of the popular press and social change from the mid 1930s to the mid
1960s. It was undertaken by a team of researchers (Anthony Smith, Trevor
Blackwell, Liz Immirzi) and subsequently published under the title Paper Voices. 3
(Reference to how this project was conceived and conducted is to be found in the
Introduction to this volume.) The second funded project was a study of television
crime drama, undertaken by Alan Shuttleworth, Angela Lloyd and Marina
Camargo Heck. This arose from the initial programme of research into television
and violence which formed the basis for the foundation of the Centre for Mass
Communication Research at Leicester—still the largest and most productive of
the mass-communications research institutes in Britain—and was specifically
designed to test some of the alternative hypotheses to those substantively derived
from American research. This project concentrated on the analysis of a range of
TV crime drama texts and was subsequently published by the Centre in its report
4
form. Two other projects deriving from this period deserve mention here. The
first was the Ph.D on the representations of women in visual advertising
undertaken by Trevor Millum and later published as Images of Woman. This
5
was one of the very first analyses of its kind on this subject in England, and one
of the first to take visual discourse as its central point of reference. The second was
a collective research project, undertaken by a large Centre group in what was the