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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.
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