Page 245 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 235
communication as a process in which informational and persuasive messages are
transmitted from the political institutions of society through the mass media to
the citizenry to whom they are ultimately accountable. They can thus postulate a
certain measure of autonomy for the different institutional domains of society,
allowing questions to be raised, then, about the influence of materials processed
in the media domain on the political and other sectors. They can happily look for
the impact of media materials on individual audience members, sampled in
surveys or recruited for participation in experiments. They can regard the
phenomenon of media power as turning very much on the influence of
communication on the outlook of such individuals. Above all, they can treat the
issue of media effects—their direction, strength and precise incidence—as
essentially constituting an empirical question, one, that is, that is not bound to be
settled in a certain way in advance.
To many Marxists, however, the conduct of effects research may seem a
dubious or unnecessary enterprise. In their eyes, election campaign rivalry is
merely a sort of sound and fury whipped up by Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
They are unhappy about the ‘methodological individualism’ of effects research,
believing that history is shaped by confrontations and shifting power relations
between opposed social classes. They are little interested in many of the fine-
grained informational and attitudinal media effects reported in the literature that
seem to them to ignore the predominantly ideological role of mass
communication in society. Thus, for Marxists the political communication
process is conceived largely in terms of the dissemination and reproduction of
hegemonic definitions of social relations, serving to maintain the interests and
position of dominant classes—a conceptualization which does not easily lend
itself to translation into the form of effects design that was sketched out in a
previous page. It also follows that for Marxists the ultimate source of media
power is to be located, not at the content/audience interface, but in how media
organizations are owned and controlled. Finally, although most Marxists do
assume that the mass media exert a significant influence on the political thinking
of audience members, for them the issue of its direction is a less open question,
requiring empirical probing and determination, than it is for pluralists. They are
more likely to take it for granted that mass media materials are typically designed
to support the prevailing status quo.
Historico-cultural differences between the United States, on the one hand, and
many Western European countries, on the other, may also help to explain the
much greater involvement in effects research of media academics in North
America (see Blumler, 1980). In many European societies, fundamentally
opposed ideological options have not only been canvassed in the writings of
intellectuals, but have also been organizationally translated into partisan
cleavages, involving radical challenges to prevailing distributions of wealth and
power, as in the case of Socialist and Communist movements. Yet, since the end
of World War II, the reality of socio-political advance towards greater equality in
many of these countries has appeared slight and negligible, leaving almost