Page 117 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

106 MEDIA STUDIES

first collective ‘practical research’ group (1968–9), which analysed a selection of
women’s magazines and the way women and ‘femininity’ were represented there.
The main focus was the large-circulation women’s magazines—Woman and
Woman’s Own—and the analysis of the fictional story ‘Cure for Marriage’. This
was the first analysis of such materials in the Centre which made use of Lévi-
Strauss’s studies of myth and the early work of Roland Barthes. This study exists
only in manuscript form, though it has had some influence on subsequent Centre
work in this important area and signals a very early interest in the question of
feminine representation. 6
At this time the preoccupation with the questions of cultural trivialization and
violence in mainstream research highlighted television as the privileged medium
and the entertainment materials provided by the media as the most relevant for
research. But, stimulated by the pioneering analysis of the treatment of the
Vietnam demonstrations of 1968 in press and TV published by a team from the
Leicester Centre, with its rich notion of ‘inferential structures’ (replacing the
simplifications of ‘bias’), Centre work took a lead in shifting the emphasis of
Media Studies away from entertainment to the heartland of ‘political
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communications’, especially in the news and current affairs areas. This was—as
Demonstrations and Communications itself had been—a response to the ‘crisis
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of the media’ which began to develop in the late 1960s. This crisis had to do
with three aspects of the media which now began to command much greater
attention: (a) questions of credibility, access, bias and distortion in the way
political and social events of a problematic nature were represented in the media
(a problem forced on to the agenda by the political movements and crises of the
period); (b) questions concerning the relation between broadcasting, politics and
the state, and the social role and position of the media institutions in the complex
of cultural power in advanced ‘electronic’ societies, (c) the difficult problems
arising both from attempting to understand how the media played an ideological
role in society and from conceptualizing their complex relationship to power, their
‘relative autonomy’ (setting aside the simpler notions of the media as the ‘voice
of a ruling class’, which were clearly inadequate).
Here one can find, already sketched out as a programme of study, new
conceptions of the position and practices of the broadcasting institutions as
‘apparatuses’; new approaches to the relation between how messages are
structured and their role in the circulation of dominant social definitions; and an
area of media production centrally focused on ‘political communications’—on
news, current affairs, the presentation of social problems and so on.
This reorientation of concerns was supported and reinforced by the
employment of semiotic methods of textual analysis. In the work of Roland
Barthes, for example (Elements of Semiology, Mythologies), which was highly
9
influential at the time, these concerns were brought together into what was in
effect a new problematic for media work in the Centre, and one which has been
developed with many continuities and some breaks since then. From this period
can be dated the work on news, news photographs and the ‘manufacture of