Page 20 - Culture Society and the Media

10 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
moral norms supported and maintained by a network of social relationships and
powerful institutions actively opposed to ‘antisocial behaviour’. That a ‘limited
effects’ model of media influence emerged from such studies should come as no
surprise: it was inherent in the way in which media influence was defined in the
first place.
The same pattern of difference can be illustrated in relation to the question of
voting. Some Marxist commentators have contended that media portrayals of
elections constitute dramatized rituals that legitimize the power structure in
liberal democracies; voting is seen as an ideological practice that helps to sustain
the myth of representative democracy, political equality and collective self-
determination. The impact of election coverage is thus conceived in terms of
reinforcing political values that are widely shared in Western democracies and
are actively endorsed by the education system, the principal political
organizations and the apparatus of the state. In contrast, pioneering studies into
the effects of the media on voting behaviour by Lazarsfeld et al. (1948), Berelson
et al. (1954) and Trenaman and McQuail (1961) concluded that the media had
only marginal influence in changing the way in which people voted. Their
negative conclusions were based on an analysis of media influence in a form that
was strongly opposed by powerful group norms, at a time when partisan
allegiances were stable. Significantly, their conclusions have been modified as
these contingent influences have weakened.
The alleged dichotomy between the ‘grand-theoretical’ and ‘atheoretical’
approaches to media study represented by the two opposed traditions of Marxism
and liberalism is also a little misleading. The liberal tradition in mass
communications research has been characterized by a greater attention to
empirical investigation. But it does not constitute an ‘atheoretical’ approach: on
the contrary, empirical communications research is based upon theoretical
models of society even if these are often unexamined and unstated.
Indeed, the conventional characterization of liberal and Marxist traditions in
mass communications research as constituting two opposed schools tends to
obscure both the internal differences within each of these traditions and the
reciprocal influence which each has exerted upon the other. The shift from a
perception of the media as a stupefying, totally subduing force expressed, for
example, by Marcuse (1972), to a more cautious assessment in which dominant
meaning systems are moulded and relayed by the media, are adapted by
audiences and integrated into classbased or ‘situated’ meaning systems
articulated by McCron (1976), is characteristic of a significant shift within
Marxist research that has been influenced, in part at least, by empirical
communications studies. This has been accompanied by increasing interest
within the Marxist tradition in empirical survey-based research into audience
adaptation of media-relayed ideologies, exemplified recently for instance by
Hartman (1979) and Morley (1980). At the same time, Marxist critiques have
contributed to a growing recognition within empirical communications research
that more attention needs to be paid to the influence of the media on the