Page 18 - Culture Society and the Media

8 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
During the late 1960s and the 1970s, the new orthodoxy was challenged from
two quite different, indeed opposed, directions. Those working within the
empirical effects tradition initiated what Jay Blumler has called the ‘new look’ in
mass communications research. This has consisted partly of looking again at the
small print of the pioneering studies into media effects obscured by the often
polemically worded dismissals of media influence that are regularly cited in
summary overviews of the literature. For although leading researchers like Katz,
Lazarsfeld and Klapper reacted strongly against the conventional view of the
omnipotent media in sometimes extravagantly worded generalizations, they were
careful to qualify what they said by allowing a number of cases when the media
may be or has been persuasive: when audience attention is casual, when
information rather than attitude or opinion is involved, when the media source is
prestigious, trusted or liked, when monopoly conditions are more complete,
when the issue at stake is remote from the receiver’s experience or concern,
when personal contacts are not opposed to the direction of the message or when
the recipient of the message is cross-pressured. More recently a number of
scholars have also re-examined the empirical data presented in the early classic
‘effects’ studies and argued that they do not fully support the negative
conclusions about media influence that were derived from them (Becker,
McCombs and McLeod, 1975; Gitlin, 1978). Furthermore, it has been argued,
social changes such as the decline of stable political allegiances and the
development of a new mass medium in television require the conclusions derived
from older empirical studies to be reassessed. A succinct statement of this ‘new
look’ is presented by Michael Gurevitch and Jay Blumler later in this book.
The limited model of media influence was also attacked by scholars in the
Marxist and neo-Marxist critical tradition that became a growing influence on
mass communication research during the 1970s. The initial response of many
Marxist and critical writers was to dismiss out of hand empirical
communications research as being uniformly uninteresting. The media, they
argued, were ideological agencies that played a central role in maintaining class
domination: research studies that denied media influence were so disabled in
their theoretical approach as to be scarcely worth confronting (or indeed, even
reading).
Some empirical researchers responded with evident exasperation to this
sweeping dismissal by arguing that disciplined, rigorous empirical research had
revealed the inadequacy of unsubstantiated theorizing about the mass media (e.g.
Blumler, 1977). Indeed, a casual reader of exchanges between these two
traditions might be forgiven for thinking that a new engagement had developed
in which a view of the mass media as having only limited influence, grounded in
empirical research within a liberal tradition, was pitted against an alternative
conception of the mass media as powerful agencies, informed by an exclusively
theoretical Marxist/critical perspective.
But while the two research traditions are, in some ways, fundamentally and
irreconcilably opposed, they are not divided primarily by the differences