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262 POLITICAL EFFECTS
But how are Marxist scholars actually looking at the audience in these terms?
Although no single way has yet firmly established itself, recent writings
highlight some key elements of a distinctive Marxist approach. First, it is
concerned more with audience interpretations of media materials than with their
effects—with, as Murdock (1980) has put it, ‘ways consumers negotiate media
meanings and…the limits to these negotiations’. This last phrase indicates a
second feature: the presumption that media fare tends to incorporate and project
certain ‘preferred’ or ‘dominant’ meanings, which correspond to ruling class
interests and set boundaries outside which few audience members would really
be free to stray. Third, however, there is scope for a diversity of response within
those limits, the mapping of which should be plotted against the varying social
backgrounds of audience members. Fourth, the material for such an examination
should be drawn from free-ranging discussions of selected passages of media
material, engaged in by socially homogeneous groups of people, whose
acceptance, modification or rejection of the dominant meanings can then be
noted by the investigator (Morley, 1980).
At this time of writing the unsolved problems of this methodology are still
formidable. There is no antidote to the well-known biases of group discussions,
which are notorious for concentrating on themes struck by their most vocal
participants and which often focus on what people feel most comfortable
conversing about—which may not necessarily reveal everything that they really
think about a given topic. There is no antidote to the inherent subjectivity of the
investigator, who must decide which passages in lengthy and sometimes
rambling group discussions are most significant and revealing. And even if a
group of audience members does appear to have accepted the supposedly
‘preferred’ meanings built into a passage of media material, there is no way of
empirically demonstrating that such an acceptance supports the institutional
status quo. The pressure on Marxist social scientists to face these issues is
therefore urgent, for the study of mass communication as a social process without
an adequately founded investigation of audience response is like a sexology that
ignores the orgasm!
NOTE: This chapter incorporates an edited version of part of the Open
University Course Unit on The Political Effects of Mass Communication’ by Jay
G. Blumler. The rest of the chapter represents the collaborative work of both
authors, based on an earlier version prepared by Michael Gurevitch. The authors’
names appear in alphabetical order.
REFERENCES
Becker, L., McCombs, M. and McLeod, J. (1975) ‘The development of political
cognitions’, in Chaffee, S. (ed.) Political Communication: Issues and Strategies for
Research, Beverly Hills, Calif. Sage Publications.