Page 206 - Culture Society and the Media

196 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
mass audience that is particularly susceptible to political influence. A general
decline in the strength and stability of political allegiances has also enabled the
media to exercise a more effective influence. And new ways of conceptualizing
media influence in terms of their impact on political cognitions rather than in
terms of persuasion and behaviour change, they argue, have revealed significant
media effects that once tended to be neglected. Their essay concludes with a
discussion of convergences between recent pluralist and Marxist approaches to
the study of media audiences.
Peter Braham’s examination of how the media handle race illustrates two
important aspects of the influence of the mass media referred to by Blumler and
Gurevitch, namely the power of the media to influence the political agenda and
to shape perceptions of reality. The massive media publicity given to Enoch
Powell’s notorious speech on immigration during the late 1960s helped to define
race as a central issue on the political agenda—a place which it has held ever
since. The concentration of the media on the manifestations of racial tension has
also arguably influenced public perceptions of immigration by tacitly defining
the presence of coloured immigrants as constituting a social problem or threat to
the white majority. But Braham is at pains to emphasize the limitations of media
influence. Enoch Powell, he argues, did not create (though he may have
amplified) racial tension: his speech produced an ‘earthquake’ largely because it
expressed anxieties and discontents about race and immigration which were
already widespread, but which had received ‘insufficient attention in the mass
media’. Braham also quarrels with the view that by focusing on the
manifestations, rather than the causes of racism, the media are playing a central
role in fanning racial hostility. What these causes of racial conflict are, Braham
argues, is far from self-evident. But what is clear from historical evidence,
according to Braham, is that ethnocentrism and hostility to foreigners are deep-
rooted and widely diffused phenomena for which the media cannot be held
responsible.
The last essay by Tony Bennett differs from the two preceding it in that it
links media systems of representation to their political and social contexts,
viewed from a Marxist perspective. He considers the ways in which the mass
media—both communist and capitalist controlled—suppressed information
about the revolutionary and socialist character of the Republican side during the
Spanish Civil War for different propagandist reasons. This profoundly
influenced, he argues, the response of the European working class to the Civil
War, thereby ‘shaping the contours of the political map of prewar Europe’. He
also examines the ways in which ‘outsiders’ such as youth gangs have been
stereotyped and stigmatized in the mass media, arguing that their representations
have served to strengthen commitment to dominant social norms. His analysis
concludes with an examination of the different ways in which the media sustain
the dominant political consensus, drawing upon examples of media coverage of
industrial relations and the political process.