Page 13 - Culture Society and the Media

INTRODUCTION 3
source of misunderstanding in the history of media debate, Curran, Gurevitch
and Woollacott go on to argue that, in recent years, the most productive
controversies have been located within Marxism rather than between the Marxist
and liberal-pluralist approaches, and survey the contending paradigms—the
‘structuralist’, ‘political economy’ and ‘culturalist’ approaches—which currently
define the main theoretical orientations within Marxist media research.
In Theories of the media, theories of society’, Tony Bennett outlines the
relationships between the more important schools of media theory and the
broader concerns of the traditions of social theory on which they depend in a way
that makes clear the connections between particular empirical concerns and their
supporting theoretical foundations. Focusing on mass society theories, liberal-
pluralism, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and on more recent
developments within the Marxist theory of ideology, Bennett places each of
these in their political context and traces the historical connections between them.
Entirely dominated, in its early phases, by mass society theory—a pessimistic
philosophy which led to the development of the media being viewed
apprehensively—opposing theoretical approaches have been developed, at least
in part, by means of an engagement with and critique of the mass society
position. Bennett thus shows how, from the 1930s through to the 1950s, the
liberal-pluralist perspective was developed, in America, by means of a detailed
empirical refutation of the mass society supposition that media audiences could
be regarded as largely undifferentiated, passive and inert masses. Similarly, in
the case of the Frankfurt School—the first Marxist attempt to engage
theoretically with the media—he shows how the critique of the ‘culture industry’
contained in the writings of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse consisted of
an uneasy alliance of Marxist and mass society elements. His essay concludes
with a consideration of more recent developments in the Marxist theory of
ideology, particularly as represented by Louis Althusser, and outlines the way in
which contemporary Marxist debates about the social role and power of the
media connect with the broader problems involved in the analysis of the
reproduction processes of advanced capitalism.
In The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of the repressed in media studies’,
Stuart Hall’s central concern is with the diverse theoretical sources that have
contributed to the formation of the ‘critical paradigm’ in media studies since the
early 1960s. He prefaces this, however, with a synoptic survey of the
development of media theory prior to the 1960s and, in a swingeing critique of
the liberal-pluralist perspective, traces the connection between American
positivist and behaviourist social science and the ideology of American pluralism
in the late 1950s. To the extent that the media were viewed as reflecting an
achieved consensus and, thereby, as strengthening the core value system which
was alleged to hold American society together in spite of the diverse and plural
groups of which it was composed, American media sociology, Hall argues,
‘underwrote “pluralism”’. By contrast, during the last ten years or so, the media
have been viewed ‘no longer as the institutions which merely reflected and