Page 159 - Culture Society and the Media

NEGOTIATION OF CONTROL IN THE MEDIA 149
institutional support, of funding, not to mention the theoretical and
methodological influences of its contributory disciplines —it is clear that from
the outset the audience has been a much more accessible focus of enquiry than
the communicators themselves.
Paul Lazarsfeld was one of the first to note the problems for research in this
area:

If there is any one institutional disease to which the media of mass
communications seem particularly subject, it is a nervous reaction to
criticism. As a student of mass media I have been continually struck and
occasionally puzzled by this reaction, for it is the media themselves which
so vigorously defend principles guaranteeing the right to criticize.
(Lazarsfeld, 1972, p. 123)

In Britain, Tom Burns has documented the BBC’s refusal to permit publication of
his 1963 study of the organization (Burns, 1977). Burns is at pains to point out
the Corporation’s complete reversal, in 1972, of its initial decision—and indeed
its invitation to update the original study; and the very accumulation of a body of
serious work on the media has contributed to a climate of greater acceptance of
the role of research in this field. Nevertheless, access to media organizations
remains difficult—in some cases impossible—to negotiate in terms acceptable to
both researchers and communicators. Different levels of problems and different
attempts at their solution are evident in, for example, Elliott, 1972; Glasgow
University Media Group, 1976; Tracey, 1978.
If the relative inaccessibility of media organizations is in one sense a
testament to their power in controlling the communication channels of society,
the very fact of media sensitivity to external criticism, and the mechanisms
developed to deal with it, are also an acknowledgement that this power is by no
means absolute, and that the means and limits of control must be negotiated.
Study of these processes of negotiation—with agencies both external and
internal to the organizations themselves—is essential to an understanding of the
nature of control in the media. For while the question of who controls (see
Murdock, 1977) is fundamental, the significance of that control rests in the way
in which it is, or can be, exercised. In other words, ‘control’ in the media has
meaning primarily in terms of the extent to which communicators are able to
shape output. What is the interplay of factors which determines this ability? What
is the relative importance, for example, of external political, economic and social
factors against internal factors such as professional ideologies, ownership and
management structures, editorial polices, and technical and financial constraints?
How does the communicator preserve creative autonomy within the
organizational setting? How and why, finally, does media output come to be as it
is?
Research has so far provided only very partial answers to these questions. A
number of early American studies of the communicator (White, 1950; Breed,