Page 169 - Culture Society and the Media

NEGOTIATION OF CONTROL IN THE MEDIA 159
in Northern Ireland. The IBA told us that they had to consider under the
IBA Act whether a programme was likely to encourage or incite to crime or
to lead to disorder, and they also took into account what the public
believed might be the effect of such a programme. They did not consider
the right course was to hive Northern Ireland off from the rest of the
network while programmes on Northern Ireland affairs were being shown
to the rest of the UK. The IBA’s policy has been criticized as unduly
restrictive. Journalists at Thames Television and London Weekend
Television have both protested to us about IBA decisions to stop the
transmission of material. (Annan, 1977, p. 269–70)

It must also be clear, however, that the degree of reinforcement and the nature of
the controls within which it operates will vary enormously with differing
historical and social circumstances. Tracey (1978) illustrates this through a
chronological series of case studies of political broadcasting. The complexity of
the relationship between the media and dominant social institutions, he contends,
is highlighted by ‘alternate moments of apparent autonomy and real subjection’.
Tracey argues convincingly that external controls or constraints on the mass media
have functioned indirectly through ‘the defining of impartiality, the underpinning
of conventional forms and a commitment to the productive and consumptive
practices of a commercial process’, rather than through the exercise of any direct
authority. Instead there operates, according to Burns (1977) a ‘politics of
accommodation’, in which the relationship between communication organizations
and the central social authority is mediated by, for example, organizational
conceptions of audience interests and the professional or occupational ideologies
of the communicators themselves.

THE COMMUNICATOR IN THE ORGANIZATION:
SOURCES OF INTERNAL TENSION
The fact that the structure and organization of mass media institutions can be
shown—at least in a partial sense—to arise from and be shaped by extrinsic
factors has implications for the individuals who work within the media
organizations. Mass communicators must operate within the context of
institutionalized values and criteria of success, which are not simply the
particular values of their peers or reference groups but are to some extent the
central values of normative order in society. Moreover, it can be argued that
structural constraints are implicit in the social organization of mass
communicators and the ways the organization helps or precludes the
achievement of occupational goals. The structural organization of production is
important primarily because of the way in which individual roles are defined: for
example, television organizations have found it useful to leave the position of
creative roles, such as the producer, structurally imprecise. At the same time, the
existence of creative, ambiguous roles within organizations of bureaucratic