Page 148 - Culture Society and the Media

138 CONTROL OF THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRIES
problematic for their employing organizations. Here again, the intermeshing of
media and general corporate ownership has significantly increased the range of
potentially sensitive areas. As one recent American analysis of interlocks
concluded:

Because of the tremendous shared interests at the top coverage is limited
and certain questions never get asked. Reporters who think about delving
into institutional behaviour may think twice. They worry about the editing.
They worry about being removed from choice beats, or being fired. (Dreier
and Weinberg, 1979, p. 68)

Against this however, there are numerous instances of creative personnel
asserting their autonomy and producing material that criticizes or challenges the
interests of their parent conglomerates. Penguin Books provide a good example.
As we noted earlier, this is a subsidiary of S. Pearson and S.Pearson and Son, a
general conglomerate which owns Lazards, the prominent merchant bank, and
significant stakes in a range of important British and American industrial
corporations. Yet Penguin have regularly published books attacking the activities
and interests of large corporations, including those to which Pearson is
connected.
In an attempt to get around the contradictory evidence from particular cases
the other major variant of instrumentalism has raised the level of analysis from
the specific to the general, and focused on the coincidence between the values
and views promoted by the general run of media output and the overall interests
of the capitalist class.

Capital sociometrics: the contours of class cohesion
The general version of instrumentalism starts from the celebrated passage in
Marx’s German Ideology quoted earlier, and follows Ralph Miliband in arguing
that although the original formulation now needs

to be amended in certain respects…there is one respect in which the text
[still] points to one of the dominant features of life in advanced capitalist
societies, namely the fact that the largest part of what is produced in the
cultural domain is produced by capitalism; and is therefore quite naturally
intended to help in the defence of capitalism [by preventing] the
development of class-consciousness in the working class. (Miliband, 1977,
p. 50) [my italics]

Supporters of this view have tried to bolster this somewhat bald assertion with
two main sorts of evidence. Firstly, they have drawn on the results of content
studies to try to show how the routine media fare produced for mass audiences
legitimates the central values and interests of capitalism. At its simplest, this