Page 27 - Culture Society and the Media

THEORETICAL APPROACHES 17
may be separated from opinions and hence, that while comment is free, facts are
sacred. Ironically, in view of this obvious source for the ‘mirror of reality’ image
of the media, metaphors of reflection have been almost equally influential within
the Marxist tradition, if in an inverted form. Here images and definitions
provided by the media have been seen to be distorted or ‘false’ accounts of an
objective reality which are biased because they are moulded by ruling political
and economic groups. Media journalism is made to appear, in Connell’s phrase,
as a ‘kind of megaphone’ by which ruling-class ideas are amplified and
generalized across society (Connell, 1979).
Increasingly, however, the last decade has seen some basic shifts away from
this view of the media. Essentially classical Marxism conceived of the media in
terms of the metaphor of base and superstructure and little attention was paid to
the specific autonomy of the mass media and to the area of its effectivity. The
power of the media was simply the power of contemporary ruling classes
utilizing modern communications systems to pursue their interests in line with
the much quoted description of ruling-class ideology, taken from The German
Ideology.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the
class which is the ruling material force in society is at the same time its
ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material
production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of
mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those
who lack the means of mental production are subject to it’ (Marx and Engels,
1970, p. 64).

The effects of the mass media, in early forms of Marxist analysis were not seen
as discrete and measurable but were important in the dissemination of ideologies
opposed to the interests of working-class groups and the production of false
consciousness in such groups. Changes in this view of the media arose in part
because of internal developments in Marxism but also because of the influence
of other theoretical traditions.
One of the most important shifts generally in more recent mass
communications research, be it Marxist or pluralist, has been the redirection of
attention to the formal qualities of media discourse. The influence of semiology
and linguistics on the direction of mass communications research has been
important not simply as an addition to existing studies of political effects,
ownership and control and the internal workings of media organizations, but also
because of the re-thinking of existing and often recognizably unsatisfactory
accounts of media power which it brought about. It is worth examining the
impact of structuralism on Marxist accounts of the media because, in a sense, it
is around this area of theoretical convergence and contradiction that it is possible
to plot some of the distinctive changes which have characterized media studies in
the last few years.