Page 269 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 259
impact of the media on audiences is concerned, and hence also about the need to
study audience-level processes. Interestingly, the first main moves towards
convergence of this kind have been taken by those who are actively engaged in
empirical effects research. We shall try to illustrate these by briefly looking from
this point of view at three alreadydescribed lines of work being currently pursued
by effects researchers: studies of the agenda-setting function of the media;
studies of mass media constructions of social reality; and examinations of the
role of the media in influencing—and typically eroding—public trust in
government. We shall then conclude by giving our reading of the evidence of the
development of awareness among certain Marxist students of the media of a need
to examine the reception of mass-communicated messages by audience members.
In considering recent work in the effects tradition we wish to highlight two
emergent themes: (1) media effects are conceptualized primarily in terms of the
shaping of the categories and frameworks through which audience members
perceive socio-political reality; (2) the impact of the media in producing and
communicating these frameworks is treated as rooted in characteristics of media
organizations and of the professional practices which prevail in them, rather than
in features of the persuasion process. Taken together, these themes tend to cast
the media in an ideological role in form (though not necessarily in direction) not
unlike that proposed by Marxist analysts.
The main thrust of agenda-setting research assigns to the mass media an
ability to signal to their audiences what are the most important issues of the day,
and so to construct an ‘agenda for society’. Thus, according to this thesis, while
the media may not be able to tell people what to think, they may be effective in
telling them what to think about. Such a conceptualization reflects a shift from
preoccupation with attitude and opinion change in the earlier stages of media
effects research towards a concentration on the contributions of the media to the
formation of frameworks through which people regard political events and
debates. Furthermore, the mass media are seen to perform this role, not by
analysing and arguing the merits of different issues, but by the manner in which
they select, highlight and assign greater prominence to some issues rather than to
others. The setting of the political agenda is thus seen as an implicit outcome of
production practices in the media rather than as the deliberate attempt to
determine what the public should think. It is consequently at least partially
‘hidden’ from the audience and may even be ‘hidden’ from professionals
involved in news production themselves, who prefer to think of themselves as
passing news events on to the audience instead of shaping them up through the
application of value judgements and constructed frameworks of perception. Read
in this manner, agenda-setting research appears to converge towards the Marxist
view that the ideological role of the mass media has structural roots, embedded
in routines and practices of media production, which in turn may reflect
interpretative frameworks dominant in society at a given time.
The ‘construction of social reality’ vein of effects studies is based on a similar
conceptualization of the impact of the mass media. Through continual repetition