Page 118 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION TO MEDIA STUDIES AT THE CENTRE 107

news’, some of which appeared as the ‘theme’ issue of WPCS 3, the first report of
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working research on this theme published by the Centre. To these can also be
related the discussions of the media and political deviance (in, for example,
essays by Stuart Hall in Deviance and Social Control, edited by Rock and
McIntosh, and The Manufacture of News, edited by Cohen and Young, and
related papers dealing with the issue of broadcasting and the state and the
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questions of balance, objectivity and neutrality. This early initiative in the
analysis of the news construction of events has since been taken up and has come
to provide a central stand in the revival of British mass-media work; for
example, the Glasgow Media Group, Hartman and Husband, Golding,
Schlessinger, Tracey, Chibnall. 12
Much Centre work which has been published or has appeared in thesis form
derived from this strong and sustained impetus: for example, the analysis of
current affairs TV, ‘The “Unity” of Current Affairs TV: Panorama’, in WPCS 9;
Centre theses on political communications (see the Connell extract below, pages
139–56) and on the handling of industrial relations in the media by Connell and
Morley; the work reported in the British Film Institute (BFI) monograph
Everyday Television: Nationwide by Dave Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon. 13
The latter marked a further advance from the ‘high’ political world and themes
of programmes like Panorama to the more popular, more ‘domestic’ current
affairs magazine programmes, like Nationwide, with more heterogeneous
audiences (in both class and gender terms). These publications have both
explored new methods of programme analysis and also put forward novel theses
on how the complex relations between the media, politics and society could be
conceptualized.
Two further developments should be noted here. The first concerns audiences.
Audience-based survey research, based on the large statistical sample using
fixed-choice questionnaires, has at last reached the terminal point it has long
deserved— at least as a serious sociological enterprise. This has created a space
in which new hypotheses may be tentatively advanced. The first, concerned with
a more differentiated approach to the audience, was outlined in an early paper by
Dave Morley, Reconceptualizing the Audience. This brought together a concern
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with a class-based analysis of the cultural orientations of different audience
groups to media materials and certain theoretical theses about how programmes
were ‘decoded’. The encoding/decoding propositions were first outlined in a very
general form by Stuart Hall in the Stencilled Paper ‘Encoding and Decoding in
the TV Discourse’. Both approaches have been pursued in a more disciplined
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framework in a project funded by the Higher Education Research Committee of
the BFI and undertaken by Dave Morley, whose results are shortly to be
published.
The second development has to do with the shift of interest from the encoding
of ‘high political themes’ in the headline news and current affairs programmes to
the area where television intersects more directly with, and plays a shaping and
formative role in relation to, the popular, ‘practical’ ideologies of the general