Page 122 - Culture Society and the Media

112 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
Having power in, or control over, the media must imply the capacity to
determine or significantly to influence the contents of media products and the
meanings carried by them. Any other form of control is secondary, because
ultimately whatever power the media may be said to have, either over their mass
audiences, or over the performance of various élites or over the ‘climate of
opinions’, this power resides in what they say and the way in which they say it.
This potential distinction between direct control over the contents of the
messages and all other forms of institutional control (e.g. financial, bureaucratic,
technological) lies at the root of the debate over the issue of ‘ownership and
control’ in the media. An exposition of the different positions and schools of
thought which take part in this debate opens the second section of the book, in
the chapter by Graham Murdock. The Marxist position, which takes as its text
Marx’s argument that ‘the class which has the means of material production at its
disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production’ and
hence regards ownership in the media (and more generally, economic control) as
the critical factor in determining control over media messages, is juxtaposed with
the ‘managerialist’ thesis, which argues that in analysing the structure of control
in media organizations a distinction should be made between control over long-
term policies and the allocation of resources (labelled ‘allocative control’) and
control over the day-to-day operation of the production of media products.
Murdock presents a four-fold classification of approaches to corporate control,
and illustrates his analysis with examples from contemporary work in Britain,
although the general arguments, he claims, are applicable to all advanced
capitalist economies.
The following chapter by Margaret Gallagher focuses on problems and issues
of control within media organizations. Different sources of external constraints
on the media (e.g. political, commercial and technical) are examined, and the
discussion illustrates how these constraints helped to shape the structure of
control in British broadcasting. The second half of the paper examines the ways
in which organizational pressures toward structuring and regulating the work of
media professionals are negotiated through the invocation of the notion of
professionalism, and the attendant claims for professional autonomy. The
implicit conclusion is that the very capacity of media organizations to perform in
a creative and innovative manner is dependent on the way in which, in the
author’s phrase, the ‘politics of accommodation’ in the mass media is played out.
Media audiences—the consumers of media products—must judge for themselves
the extent to which creativity, and indeed courage, are reflected in the products
disseminated by the media.
Finally, Oliver Boyd-Barrett widens the scope of the discussion and raises
some of the issues in the ‘media imperialism’ debate, i.e. ‘the role of the mass
media in relations of cultural dependency between nations’. This debate still
provides the site for one of the more lively controversies in discussions of
communication policies. On the one hand are arraigned the proponents of
a laissez-faire approach to the flow of communication between nations, and on