Page 179 - Culture Society and the Media

NEGOTIATION OF CONTROL IN THE MEDIA 169

‘brinkmanship’—they cannot be dismissed as subservient ‘tools of government’.
Rather, the general conclusion must be that mass communication is indeed bound
with, and bounded by, the interests of the dominant institutions in society, but
that these interests are continually redefined through a process to which the
media themselves contribute.
Tracey (1978, p. 242) concludes that ‘the external political and commercial
context locks the programme-making process into a cycle of dependency’. The
external context of programme making, he argues, functions as a latent
‘presence’. Thus, ‘broadcasting is always conducted with a certain degree of fear;
an error or misjudgement by a producer can by damaging the public image…
severely endanger its essential economic or political interests’ (Smith, 1972, p.
4). Consequently, the capacity to influence, if not control, rests on an
understanding of the powers and consequences which may for the most part
remain latent.
Yet the process is not wholly contained. For example, the ‘Yesterday’s Men’
episode, as both Burns (1977) and Tracey (1978) suggest, indicates the limits
within which both influence is possible and criticism tolerable. Burns contends
that the limits of criticism have, since the mid-1950s, actually been proven
extensible. His thesis that the broadcasters’ historical acceptance that the
‘national interest’ must be served is a price which they pay for their dedication to
professionalism is intriguing. Put the other way round, certain professional
stances—such as those of the investigative or adversary journalist, or the anti-
establishment tone of certain items of output—are a reaction against the
restraints imposed by the accommodation reached between professionalism and
the national interest: they gained acceptance as the ‘price’ which it has been
found possible to exact for that accommodation.
The politics of accommodation in the mass media is played out at different levels
—between the professionals and the management, between the organization and
the establishment. Within this accommodation, the limits of control are in
constant negotiation: from the trivial ‘You put in a “crap” to get two “hells” and
a “damn”’ (US programme producer, in Levine, 1975, p. 22) to the politically
resonant ‘At the time of the General Strike…the compromises [Reith] accepted
made it possible for his successors to be much more firm and uncompromising
when they faced the anger of governments about the BBC’s treatment of such
crises as Suez’ (Greene, 1972, p. 549). Through these negotiations and
accommodations different interests are served. The precise nature and the
implications of the controls expressed through those interests have, as yet, been
only very loosely defined and interpreted by media research. However, the
questions which such definitions and interpretations raise are as much political as
sociological.