Page 226 - Culture Society and the Media

216 COMMUNICATIONS, POWER AND SOCIAL ORDER
That Protestantism was, in some respects the product of print is underlined by
the way in which Protestant churches sought quite deliberately to supplant
traditional, pre-literate modes of religious communication with a new system of
communication based on the printed word. Church murals were whitewashed
over, church sculptures were destroyed, stained glass was smashed and replaced
with pane glass, relics were destroyed, the images of saints were even given to
children as toys. Sacramental rites were also suppressed, church ritual was
simplified, and the sacred magical role of the priest was de-mystified with the
abandonment of celibacy. Bibliolatry took its place with the mass production of
the Bible, the training of pastors as biblical experts and a sustained literacy drive
aimed at enabling congregations to understand God’s teachings through the
printed word.
In contrast, the Counter-Reformation in the late sixteenth century resulted in a
determined counter-offensive in Catholic countries aimed at containing the
disruptive impact of print. The introduction of the Index, the proscription not
only of vernacular Bibles but also of many religious bestselling commentaries,
and the relative neglect of primary education in Catholic countries, all served to
reinforce the central role of ritual and iconography in the Catholic Church and to
reassert hierarchical control over religious knowledge by the ecclesiastical
authorities. The Catholic revival served also to entrench the authority of the
priest since, at its deepest psychological level, Tridentine Catholicism was an
image-based rather than a word-based experience in which the role of the priest
as the administrator of sacred rites was more important than the printed word of
God.
The Anglican Church established by the Elizabethan Settlement was, by
contrast, a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. Its doctrinal
evasions were designed to reconcile the sharp divisions over doctrine which a
long drawn-out war conducted in print had helped to exacerbate (Davies, 1976);
and its liturgy represented an accommodation between the traditional
iconography of Catholicism and the bibliolatry of Protestantism (Thomas, 1973).
It neither sought to entrench print at the centre of religion nor to exclude it, but
merely to contain its social dislocation (15) .

MEDIA AND CLASS CONFLICT

There is substantial agreement amongst sociologists writing from different
ideological perspectives that the mass media legitimize the social systems of
which they are a part (Lazarsfeld and Merton, 1948; Janowitz, 1952;
Breed, 1964; Miliband, 1973; Tuchman, 1978; etc.). This consensus is based
upon the study of the mass media during a period when control of the mass
media has been closely integrated into the power structure of most developed
industrial societies.
Control of the media has not always been so successfully integrated into the
power structure, as will be illustrated by the rise of the commercial press and