Page 12 - Culture Society and the Media

Introduction

Few areas of inquiry have expanded as rapidly as the study of the media over the
last twenty years. Dominated in the late 1950s by the positivist canons of
American social science, the settled view of the media which then obtained has
since been profoundly challenged by a series of successive theoretical influences
derived, in the main, from deviance theory, linguistics, structuralism and
semiology, discourse theory (especially of late) and, perhaps most critically, from
the debates in and around the area of ideology that have taken place within
Marxism over the same period. Not all of these influences, however, have pulled
in the same direction so that, whilst many of the orthodoxies of earlier stages in
the history of mass communications research have been well and truly buried
(well, nearly), no clearly articulated new orthodoxy has taken their place. Whilst
some options may have been closed by means of both theoretical and empirical
critique, there none the less remains a sufficient diversity of contending
perspectives to guarantee a lively and productive climate of debate for some time
to come.
The readings collected in this section offer a series of different but related
overviews of these developments and are intended to give both students and
teachers a comprehensive grasp of the key controversies which currently
characterize media studies.
In Theories of the media: an introduction’, James Curran, Michael Gurevitch
and Janet Woollacott review the relationships between liberalpluralist and
Marxist approaches to the study of the media. In doing so, they dispute the
conventionally held view that the liberal-pluralist approach can be characterized
as theoretically cautious and empirically hard-nosed, in contrast to the
supposedly more speculative, ‘grand theoretical’ and assertive character of
Marxist approaches. Both approaches, they contend, are informed by theoretical
conceptions of society and of the role of the media within it, even if these
conceptions are more explicitly and selfconsciously theorized in the Marxist
tradition. Moreover, they argue, the empirical findings of the two traditions are
not so far opposed as is usually supposed; both agree about the nature and degree
of power that can be attributed to the media, albeit that they express this in
different terms. Having cleared the air in relation to what has been an important