Page 233 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 223
The modern mass media in Britain now perform many of the integrative
functions of the Church in the middle ages. Like the medieval Church, the media
link together different groups and provide a shared experience that promotes
social solidarity. The media also emphasize collective values that bind people
closer together, in a way that is comparable to the influence of the medieval
Church: the communality of the Christian faith celebrated by Christian rites is
now replaced by the communalities of consumerism and nationalism celebrated
in media ‘rites’ such as international sporting contests (that affirm national
identities) and consumer features (that celebrate a collective identity as
consumers). Indeed, the two institutions have engaged in some ways in very
similar ideological ‘work’ despite the difference of time that separate them. The
monarchy is projected by the modern British media as a symbol of collective
identity just as it was by the medieval Church. The modern media have also
given, at different times, massive and disproportionate attention to a series of
‘outsiders’—youth gangs, muggers, squatters, drug addicts, student radicals,
trade-union militants—who have tended to be presented as powerful and
irrational threats to ‘decent’ society (Young, 1971; Cohen, 1973; Hall, 1974;
Morley, 1976; Hall et al. 1978; Whannel, 1979). The stigmatization of these
‘outsiders’ has had effects comparable to the hunting down and parading of
witches allegedly possessed of the devil by the medieval and early modern
Church. Moral panics have been created that have strengthened adherence to
dominant social norms and encouraged a sense of beleaguered unity,
transcending class differences, in the face of a dangerous, external threat.
The mass media have now assumed the role of the Church, in a more secular
age, of interpreting and making sense of the world to the mass public. Like their
priestly predecessors, professional communicators amplify systems of
representation that legitimize the social system. The priesthood told their
congregations that the power structure was divinely sanctioned; their successors
inform their audiences that the power structure is democratically sanctioned
through the ballot box. Dissidents were frequently de-legitimized by churchmen
as ‘infidels’ intent upon resisting God’s will; dissidents in contemporary Britain
are frequently stigmatized as ‘extremists’ who reject democracy (Murdock,
1973). The medieval Church taught that the only legitimate way of securing
redress for injustice was to appeal to the oppressor’s conscience and, failing that,
to a higher secular authority; the modern mass media similarly sanction only
constitutional and lawful procedures as legitimate methods of protest (Hall, 1974).
The medieval Church masked the sources of inequality by ascribing
social injustice to the sin of the individual; the modern mass media tend, in more
complex and sophisticated ways, to misdirect their audiences by the ways in
which they define and explain structural inequalities (Hall, 1979). By stressing
the randomness of God’s unseen hand, the medieval Church encouraged passive
acceptance of a subordinate status in society: the randomness of fate is a
recurrent theme in much modern media entertainment (Curran, Douglas and
Whannel, 1980). The Church none the less offered the chiliastic consolation of