Page 174 - Culture Society and the Media

164 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
mode of sensitivity born of the need of others to pass snap judgement upon
it. Professionalism is the technician’s bad faith. (Vaughan, 1976, p. 19)

The question of control of media operations and output is thus very much
broader and more complex than the attempt at a simple polarization of creativity
and industrial process. This can be pursued further by examining the extent and
nature of the autonomy enjoyed by the individual communicator within the
media organization, and by looking at the effect of this on the products which
ensue. The fundamental question here is: to what extent and in what ways can
media personnel exercise operational control over their institutionally transmitted
messages?

Communicator autonomy and organizational control
It has already been argued that organizational structure and policy both arise from
and confront the social and political contexts within which they are located. In
looking at the communicator within the organization, a similar iteration can be
found: the individual is drawn to, and recruited by, an organization with whose
operation and practices he generally feels some sympathy; at the same time, he
has some scope for making a personal impact and for shaping the product in a
particular way. Again, the extent of his potential impact will vary depending on
the type of organization and on the nature of his individual role within it.
Roles and goals Media organizations and the communicators who work within
them may have different goals. Three dominant sets of goals confront most
media organizations, all determining the shape of the media output. Audience
maximization, for instance, is a major economic goal whose attainment pushes
for the application of certain criteria (broadly associated with ‘entertainment’
values) to output. Organizational goals can derive from the relationship to the
controlling authority or the external legal, cultural, political and economic
demands: the organization coordinates its output within an overall policy or
strategy. Professional goals relate both to output—the use of inexplicit and
diffuse criteria to characterize ‘good television’ or ‘good journalism’—and to
personnel, in terms of career patterns and criteria of success and appraisal.
In his study of news-gathering journalists, Tunstall (1972) provides an
alternative categorization of the goals of news organizations: an audience goal,
an advertising goal, and a non-revenue goal, which refers to any other objective—
the pursuit of policy, political influence, prestige and so on. Through an
examination of the relationship of these goals to the prevailing work roles,
Tunstall explores the issue of autonomy and control in news journalism. His
study indicates that role/goal conflict is generally controlled by a somewhat
subtle process of negotiation, and rarely becomes overt: specialist journalists
tend to have the same views as their major sources—those who cover trade
unions vote Labour, those who cover the police vote Conservative, and so on.
Any specialist has a variety of defences he or she can use against the