Page 158 - Culture Society and the Media

6
Negotiation of control in media organizations

and occupations

MARGARET GALLAGHER

THE MEANING OF CONTROL IN THE MEDIA
Media organizations and occupations lie right at the heart of any study of mass
communication, for they embody the processes through which the output of the
media comes into being. The assumption that media messages and images
constitute a powerful social, cultural and political force dominates both public
debate and perspectives of research in the field of mass communication. Whether
expressed in terms of a search for ‘measurable effects’ or formulated as a more
macro-analysis of the ‘agenda-setting’ or ‘reality-defining’ function of the media,
this assumption underlies practically all questions concerned with the link
between media output and social consciousness.
In the decade since Jeremy Tunstall suggested that:

a more organization-oriented view of the media in general seems essential
if we are not to perpetuate the predominant view in which the media
messages sometimes appear to be reaching the audience members’ eyes
and ears as if from heaven above or (in some perspectives) hell below
(Tunstall, 1970, p. 15)

an increasing number of British and American studies have begun to redress a
longstanding imbalance in media research, which has historically tended to be
preoccupied with mass media ‘effects’, rather than with how and why media
output comes to be as it is. More recent research, however (for example,
Halloran et al, 1970; Cantor, 1971; Elliott, 1972; Epstein, 1973; Tuchman, 1974;
Burns, 1977; Tracey, 1978; Steen, 1979), examining the interaction of
organizational, production, professional and personal factors and their influence
on the output of the media, has broken new ground in opening up the previously
obscure contexts within which mass communicators operate.
Reasons for the concentration of media research on the end, rather than on the
beginning, of the mass communication process are not hard to find (see Blumler
and Gurevitch). Quite apart from the particular origins and development of
research into the media—its sources of question and problem formulation, of