Page 271 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 261
problems. Thus, this line of research (which has attracted many other
contributions since Robinson’s piece first appeared) is also concerned with
media roles in the maintenance or undermining of legitimacy and depicts media
effects (in this case, an increasing political malaise) as originating in certain
production practices. Both themes are central to Marxist analyses of mass
communication, even though the latter never entertain the possbility that the media
may tend to subvert authority.
What about the other side of the convergence equation? Are all the moves
being taken by only one side of the philosophical divide? Or is there some
evidence of a convergence from within the Marxist camp itself towards the
traditional preoccupations of effects researchers? At this early stage our answer
to these questions is necessarily provisional and forms a mixed assessment.
Many Marxists are now undoubtedly concerned to pay more empirical attention
than in the past to the audience’s response to mass communication. But they
wish to develop different methodologies for studying it from those that have
hitherto dominated American effects research. In pursuing such approaches,
moreover, severe problems have arisen, the solutions to which are not yet clear.
And their present efforts still straddle a deeply embedded tension between their
new-found empirical commitments and their long-standing ideological
convictions.
The growing awareness among Marxists of a need to examine audience
reactions to mass-communicated messages stems from two distinct sources.
First, the centrality of the concept of codes in certain Marxist approaches to the
study of the media (see, for example, the discussions by Stuart Hall and Janet
Woollacott in this book) emphasizes the importance of analysing the encoding
and decoding poles of the mass communication process. Interest in the encoding
process has produced a number of recent studies of media organizations,
production practices and the meaning and significance of professionalism in the
media. Once the terminology of encoding and decoding is adopted, however, the
latter is conceptually distinguishable from the former and stands out as meriting
examination in its own right. Second, working from within the Marxist tradition,
studies of the audience may be regarded as essential in order to illuminate the
processes whereby the mass media facilitate the emergence of ‘active consent’ in
society, particularly in those classes whose supposedly objective interests run
counter to the proffering of such consent. As Golding and Murdock (1978) have
put it:

To say that the mass media are saturated with bourgeois ideology is simply
to pose a series of questions for investigation. To begin to answer them,
however, it is necessary to go on to show how this hegemony is actually
reproduced through the concrete activities of media personnel and the
interpretive procedures of consumers. This requires detailed and directed
analysis of the social contexts of production and reception [our italics].