Page 270 - Culture Society and the Media

260 POLITICAL EFFECTS
of certain popular plots, story themes, character portrayals and situations with
which characters are obliged to cope, the media project certain images of what
society and reality are like. Audience members are seen as increasingly
dependent on the media for forming such impressions, since so much of the life
of society is beyond the reach of their first-hand experience. Consequently, the
media are seen as playing a pivotal part, not merely in conveying discrete
information to people about social and political events, but in shaping the
background canvas of meanings and preferred ways of seeing the socio-political
arena, within which such events will be placed. Here too some convergence
towards Marxist interpretations of media roles is noticeable. Not only do the
media perform an ideological function by cultivating certain ways of looking at
the world, but this function may also be traced back to their internal modes of
organization and working, and from there to their linkages to the surrounding
institutional order. For example, the study by Gerbner et al. (1979), with which
we earlier illustrated this strand of research, attributed the prevalence of violent
contents on American television to the goal of maximizing audience appeal,
which was rooted in turn in the commercial imperatives of American television
financing. As Gerbner and his colleagues have put it:

Violence plays a key role in television’s portrayal of the social order. It is
the simplest, cheapest, dramatic means to illustrate who wins in the game
of life and the rules by which the game is played…. It demonstrates who
has the power and who must acquiesce in that power. (Gerbner et al.,
1979, p. 180)

Thus, links are forged in that interpretation between a dominant genre on
American television, the messages embedded in it, and the economic rationale
that sustains the medium’s commercial viability.
As previously noted, the work of Gerbner et al. has not been immune to
criticism, but significantly the most searching criticism has focused not on
whether the media are involved in the ‘construction of reality’ but over whether
the constructions offered by the media are indeed internally consistent and hence
monolithic, or whether they should be regarded as essentially differentiated. Of
course the latter position is more in line with a pluralist philosophy. Nevertheless,
there appears to be a shared readiness, on both sides, at least to entertain the
possibility that the media play an important, perhaps in some cases even a
decisive , part in shaping audience members’ perceptions of social reality.
A third example of empirical research with similar characteristics can be found
in Michael Robinson’s examination of the role of television in eroding public
trust in American government. In this case influences on people’s views about
the underlying credibility and validity of institutions of political authority in the
United States were seen as deriving from persistent features of political coverage
on American television and especially from the tendency of the latter to
highlight political conflict and the failure of leaders to cope with major political