Page 28 - Culture Society and the Media

18 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
A comparison of the field of media research, say, in the 1940s, with that of the
present day, is instructive, not only in terms of following the see sawing estimates
of media power referred to earlier but also in terms of the dominance of certain
theoretical views. As we have already suggested, a simple conflict of liberal-
pluralist versus Marxist approaches, conceived of in terms of the empiricism of
the former and the theoreticism of the latter, does not provide an entirely
adequate picture of the development of mass communications research, although
it may provide an illuminating route through certain moments in the history of
that research. One problem here is that the Marxism and liberal-pluralism of
yesterday are not the same as those of today. During the forties the mass society
theories of the Frankfurt School might have been said to represent a Marxist
general theory which ran counter to the empiricist studies of attitude-change
prevalent in contemporary American sociology and social psychology. The clash
between the critical theorists’ view of mass society and a pluralist-inspired
tradition focusing on the effects of the mass media involved a major theoretical
confrontation. However, the case is different now and not simply because
Marxists have moved beyond the monumental pessimism incorporated within the
Frankfurt School’s critique of mass society. To put it bluntly, the work of the
Frankfurt School was relatively marginal in developing and generating research
in mass communications, in providing a theoretical paradigm within which
media studies could proceed.
Recent developments in Marxist theory, in Britain for example through the
‘cultural’ traditions of Williams and Hall and through the importations of
European ‘structuralisms’ (the theories of Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan and
Gramsci), have meant that many of the important questions about the mass
media and about ‘culture’ more generally are now posed within Marxism rather
than between Marxism and other accounts (Johnson, 1979). Within
contemporary Marxist studies of the media there are a number of different
inflections in the conceptualization of the power of the media. Marxist theorists
vary in their accounts of the determination of the mass media and in their
accounts of the nature and power of mass media ideologies. Structuralism has
played an important part in producing and illuminating distinctive differences in
Marxist views of the media. The theoretical differences within Marxism have
been variously described as ‘three problematics’ (Johnson, 1979) or the ‘two
paradigms’ (Hall, 1980). The three different approaches which we identify here
not only characterize the power of the media in different and sometimes
contradictory ways but also, between them, provide the type of arena for
disagreement and debate, which in the past has been a consistent feature of the
differences between the pluralist and the Marxist tradition.

Structuralist studies of the media
Structuralist accounts of the media have incorporated many diverse contributions,
including Saussurean linguistics, the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, the