Page 205 - Culture Society and the Media

Introduction

As the preceding section showed, the view taken of the relationship between
media and society influences the way in which the power of the media is
perceived. Two of the essays in this section—those by James Curran and Tony
Bennett—see the media primarily in terms of a struggle for power between
competing social forces in which the media are both shaped by, and in turn
influence, the course of this struggle. The remaining two essays in this section,
by Peter Braham and Jay Blumler/Michael Gurevitch, analyse the influence of
the media in a more eclectic way in terms of their effectiveness in shaping
human behaviour and consciousness, viewed from a pluralist perspective.
The opening essay by James Curran considers schematically the impact of the
mass media over more than a millenium of history. He maintains that the
development of new techniques or institutions of communication has given rise
to new power centres, ranging from the medieval papacy to modern press
magnates. The emergence of these new power centres, he argues, has often
generated new tensions within the dominant power bloc. Thus, the priesthood
provoked dissension in the middle ages by seeking to transform the power
structure; the rise of the book undermined, in turn, the authority of the priesthood
in early modern Europe; and more recently professional communicators have
become, in some ways, rivals to professional politicians. More generally, he
examines the different social contexts in which mass media have amplified or
contained class conflicts. In early nineteenth-century Britain, he maintains,
conflicts between a substantial section of the press and the dominant class both
reflected and reinforced growing fissures within the social structure. More
recently, he argues, the media have come to occupy a central role in maintaining
support for the social system as a consequence of the close integration of control
of the media into the hierarchy of power in contemporary Britain.
Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch’s examination of the political effects of
the mass media draws upon a different research tradition—survey-based research
into media effects in western liberal democracies. Their essay challenges the
‘limited’ model of media influence advanced in the pioneering, highly influential
studies into media political effects. The development of television, they argue,
has resulted in political communications regularly reaching a segment of the