Page 207 - Culture Society and the Media

INTRODUCTION 197
Bennett also explicitly contests a number of arguments advanced in the two
preceding essays. Peter Braham’s characterization of the media as ‘a searchlight
illuminating some areas, while leaving others in shadow’ implies a
differentiation between objective reality and the media as selective definers of
that reality. Bennett argues, however, that ‘the “real” that is signified within the
media is never some raw, semantically uncoded, “outthere” real. Signification
always takes place on a terrain which is always already occupied and in relation
to consciousnesses which are always already filled’. Indeed, it is precisely
because the media’s influence is greatest, according to Bennett, when people are
least conscious of its influence—when the ideological categories projected by the
media appear neutral and objective—that the measurement and assessment of
media influence through survey techniques is so problematic. While these
techniques do not generally rely on asking respondents to assess the influence of
the media upon them, but rather seek to infer processes of influence by
examining the statistical relationships between variables derived from
respondents’ replies, the value of these techniques remains an outstanding issue
of disagreement amongst researchers.
Yet despite these and other disagreements, all four essays in this section are
unanimous in opposing the view that the media ‘mirror’ society, based on the
media professionals’ claim that they ‘report the news as it is’. News does not
exist as external reality that can be objectively portrayed on the basis of
ascertainable fact: for facts have to be selected and then situated, whether
explicitly or implicitly, within a framework of understanding before they ‘speak
for themselves’. This process of selection and interpretation is culturally encoded
and social determined. Yet such constructions largely define our knowledge of
the external world of which we have no first-hand experience. This power of
definition, all these essays argue, is the basis of ‘the power of the media’. All four
essays are also at one in repudiating—though in different ways, and with
different emphases—the once prevalent academic view that the media have only
a marginal influence. They are thus symptomatic of the process of rethinking and
reappraisal which has shaped this book, and which is now reshaping more
generally the field of mass communications research.