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The study of the media: theoretical approaches

JAMES CURRAN, MICHAEL GUREVITCH AND JANET
WOOLLACOTT

In this chapter we do not attempt to chart systematically all the different
approaches to the study of the mass media, each set in their different intellectual,
social and historical contexts. Instead we have chosen to examine selectively the
way in which different researchers have perceived the power of the mass media
and to point to the different theoretical conceptions and empirical enquiries that
have informed some of those perceptions. In particular, we have focused on the
clashes and common ground between different accounts of the power of the
media in three areas; in the distinctions between liberal-pluralist and Marxist
approaches, often conceived of in terms of a distinction between empiricism and
theory; in different approaches to the analysis of media institutions and finally in
the different accounts of media power located in contemporary Marxist studies
of the media.

THE POWER OF THE MEDIA: THEORY AND
EMPIRICISM

To a remarkable extent, there was a broad consensus during the inter-war period
—to which many researchers, writing from a ‘right’ as well as a ‘left’
perspective subscribed—that the mass media exercised a powerful and
persuasive influence. Underlying this consensus was (1) the creation of mass
audiences on a scale that was unprecedented through the application of new
technology—the rotary press, film and radio—to the mass production of
communications; (2) a fashionable though not unchallenged view, that
urbanization and industrialization had created a society that was volatile,
unstable, rootless, alienated and inherently susceptible to manipulation; (3)
linked to a view of urbanized man as being relatively defenceless, an easy prey to
mass communication since he was no longer anchored in the network of social
relations and stable, inherited values that characterized settled, rural
communities; (4) anecdotal but seemingly persuasive evidence that the mass
media had brainwashed people during World War 1, and engineered the rise of
fascism in Europe between the wars.
This encouraged a relatively uncomplicated view of the media as all powerful
propaganda agencies brainwashing a susceptible and defenceless public. The