Page 107 - Culture Society and the Media

MESSAGES AND MEANINGS 97

selection of and impartial comment on ‘reality’ as it unfolds and uses
photographs and films as evidence of reality ‘unfolding’. Yet a range of research
studies on the position of women, on race, on the treatment of industrial relations
and in particular on the role of the trade unions, would show quite clearly that
such subjects have rarely been treated ‘impartially’ in news-reporting in the press
or in broadcasting. A BBC survey conducted in 1962 showed that 58 per cent of
the population used television as their main source of news and, even more
significantly, that 68 per cent of the group interviewed believed that television
news was a trustworthy medium. For this reason alone it could be seen to be
important to establish that the claims of the news to ‘impartiality’ are dubious.
Semiotics, with its focus on the internal mechanisms through which meanings
are produced in texts appeared to offer in relation to news coverage and many
other areas, a way of engaging with the meaning of particular texts and of talking
about more general ways through which signifying systems operate. Yet at the
same time, if semiology was to be anything other than a set of formalist
techniques, it had to be used and articulated within a general theory of ideology.
I would suggest that semiology has been appropriated in a number of ways and
has thereby been elided into a series of theoretical positions with which it is not
altogether at one. I want to trace some of the problems of these theoretical
elisions in relation to three positions, three arguments which take as a point of
reference a semiological reading of a specific media message but which carry
with them more general arguments about the nature of ideology.
Fiske and Hartley’s recent introduction to reading television, for example,
purports to be a first attempt to combine a theory of the cultural role of television
with a ‘semiotic-based method of analysis whereby individual broadcast items
can be critically “read'” (Fiske and Hartley, 1978). Fiske and Hartley appear at
least initially to follow Barthes’s ideas quite closely. Their own text is littered
with concepts taken from Barthes although their argument about the role of
television is very different, suggesting that while television may present messages
with ‘preferred meanings’ and those preferred meanings ‘usually coincide with
the perceptions of the dominant sections of society’, the form of television, its
‘constraints’ and ‘internal contradictions’, is one which allows ‘freedom of
perception to all its viewers’. Essentially, Fiske and Hartley suggest that
television functions to ‘de-familiarize’ the viewer precisely because the viewer is
‘spontaneously and continuously confronted’ with the necessity to negotiate a
stance which will allow him to decode television programmes. Despite their
expressed faith in the techniques of semiotics, these are largely eschewed. Lip-
service is given to the terms but the authors proceed to analyse television
programmes in a rather different way. Hence, the analysis of ‘News at Ten’ (7
January 1976) appears at first glance to follow closely Barthes’s explanation of
second-order signification in relation to the now famous example of the black
soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of Paris-Match.