Page 19 - Culture Society and the Media

THEORETICAL APPROACHES 9
highlighted in this debate. In fact, the classical empirical studies did not
demonstrate that the mass media had very little influence: on the contrary, they
revealed the central role of the media in consolidating and fortifying the values
and attitudes of audience members. This tended to be presented in a negative
way only because the preceding orthodoxy they were attacking had defined the
influence of omnipotent media in terms of changing attitudes and beliefs. The
absence of media conversion consequently tended to be equated with the absence
of influence.
Ironically, Marxist and critical commentators have also argued that the mass
media play a strategic role in reinforcing dominant social norms and values that
legitimize the social system. There is thus no inconsistency, at an empirical
level, in the two approaches. Indeed, as Marcuse has suggested, ‘the objection
that we overrate greatly the indoctrinating power of the “media”…misses the
point. The preconditioning does not start with the mass production of radio and
television and the centralization of their control. The people entered this stage as
preconditioned receptacles of long standing…’ (Marcuse, 1972). He could have
added with justification, that a generation of empirical research from a different
tradition had provided corroboration of the reinforcement ‘effect’ he was
attributing to the media.
Differences between the pluralist and critical schools about the power of the
mass media, at the level of effectiveness, are to a certain extent based on mutual
misunderstanding (notably, an over-literal acceptance by some Marxist
commentators of polemical generalizations about the lack of media influence
advanced by some empirical researchers). This misunderstanding has been
perpetuated by the tendency for researchers in the two different traditions to
examine the impact of the mass media in different contexts as a consequence of
their divergent ideological and theoretical preoccupations.
Consider, for instance, the vexed issue of media portrayals of violence. Most
researchers in the Marxist tradition in Britain have approached this question in
terms of whether media portrayals of violence have served to legitimize the
forces of law and order, build consent for the extension of coercive state
regulation and de-legitimize outsiders and dissidents (Hall, 1974; Cohen, 1973;
Murdock, 1973; Chibnall, 1977; Whannel, 1979). They have thus examined the
impact of the mass media in situations where mediated communications are
powerfully supported by other institutions such as the police, judiciary and
schools, and sustained by already widely diffused attitudes favourable towards
law enforcement agencies and generally unfavourable towards groups like youth
gangs, student radicals, trade union militants and football hooligans. The power
of the media is thus portrayed as that of renewing, amplifying and extending the
existing predispositions that constitute the dominant culture, not in creating them.
In contrast, empirical researchers in the liberal tradition have tended to examine
media portrayals of violence in terms of whether they promote and encourage
violence in everyday life. They have consequently defined the potential influence
of these portrayals of violence in a form that is opposed to deeply engrained