Page 154 - Culture Society and the Media

144 CONTROL OF THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRIES
relationship between domestic demand and domestic production assumed by the
idea of ‘consumer sovereignty’.

SELECTIVE INCORPORATIONS
Nevertheless, historical and action-adventure series do command large domestic
audiences and regularly feature in the ten most popular programmes. Similarly,
the formula of crime, sex, sport and scandal employed by the Sun does attract a
mass readership. Does this mean then that these products are an accurate
reflection of popular consciousness and popular culture? The answer is ‘no’, not
entirely. As Raymond Williams (1979) has pointed out, the popular media work
by incorporation rather than imposition. They pick up particular elements within
working-class culture, transform them into pleasurable products and offer them
back to workingclass audiences. This process of selection works unevenly,
however. Recent studies have convincingly shown that popular consciousness is
both complex and contradictory (see, for example, Nichols and Armstrong, 1976
and Davis, 1979). There is ample evidence that British working-class culture is
saturated with sexism, fatalism, admiration and affection for royalty and the
aristocracy, and a deep-seated distrust of politicians, intellectuals and foreigners.
At the same time it also contains a powerful critique of capitalism organized
around a grass-roots socialist tradition. However, the need to attract and keep
large, politically heterogeneous audiences means that the popular media tend to
play safe and pick up the conservative rather than the radical strands in popular
culture. Hence the structural opposition between Capital and Labour is regularly
transformed into a series of political opposition between ‘them’ and ‘us’; citizens
versus bureaucrats; the moderate majority versus the militant minority; the law
abiding versus the deviant; Britain versus its enemies. As a result, critique is
incorporated into a diffuse kind of populism that can be easily mobilized in
defence of the status quo. The relationship between popular ideologies and
popular media output is therefore more usefully viewed as partial and incomplete
rather than distorted.

CONCLUSION
This chapter has set out to review the major approaches to the location of control
over the mass communications systems of the advanced western societies and to
highlight some of the problems with their organizing concepts and supporting
evidence. In particular, I have tried to show how the central divisions in the
literature are rooted in broader and more fundamental divisions between
‘theories of capitalism’ and ‘theories of industrial society’ and between models of
action and power and models of structure and determination. I have also tried to
suggest that the central issues raised by these conflicts remain open both
theoretically and empiricially. Consequently, I have been more concerned to